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| | Sad Situation | | | Tuesday, June 2, 2009 (3:44 PM)
(I'm feeling disappointed) | | So last night on my way home I encountered a car catching fire by the side of the road. There was only one other vehicle there with hazard lights on, so I rolled my window down and asked if they'd already called for help. They said they had, but no sirens could be heard and there were no other vehicles in sight. I pulled well off the road to a gravel area nearby to keep the road completely clear. I didn't have any fire extinguisher (yes, pretty shameful for me) and no shovel or other implement I could use to throw dirt on the fire. I ran up to the people parked nearby and asked if they had any shovels or extinguishers, and they did not either. I asked if it was their car, and it was not - they had just happened upon it much as I had. The car had just barely started showing flames by this point, and I asked if they'd tried to open the hood. They said they did not. (If a car's engine is trying to catch fire, opening the hood when it is still minor let's the heat escape and dissipate, reducing the chance of spread and availing you of the chance to even hand toss dirt onto the fire - which will arrest most engine fires fairly easily.) It became obvious no more could be done to deal with the fire by us, so I got a flashlight to help direct traffic clear of the car.
The fire department arrived, and quickly started to deal with the matter. before the whole care was involved, they managed to put the car out. When the first equipment had arrived, one firefighter put out some cones and lit a flare, handed me more to light and set out to help direct traffic clear of the scene. When the third response vehicle came, they dropped someone off to direct traffic with a light and signage. This is where I was surprised...
The man asked if the car was mine. I said no. He looked a bit puzzled. He said "So you're uh..." and I responded "Just a good Samaritan." He seemed absolutely confounded at the idea that someone who didn't have any personal stake or gain in the situation could stop and help. What does this say about the average citizen today?
What makes it a little worse is whilst directing the traffic around the scene, I often had to prompt people to get moving as they came alongside the burning car. They didn't care that they were placing themselves and others at greatest risk by exposing themselves most closely to a burning car and obstructing the passage of other vehicles - especially the possibility of more emergency vehicles. One car actually turned around to make another pass - to which I shouted "DON'T SPECTATE! GO HOME!".
Sad situation indeed. | | | 78 Views | 0  Thumbs Up | 0 Comments |  |
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| | Fill in the blank game. | | | Saturday, August 16, 2008 (1:37 AM)
(I'm feeling amused) | | Have you heard about that new video site ( )?
It's brand new and the people running it really listen to you.
Hey wow, I got featured on ( )!
Well, there's only about ( ) hundred users over there, but I'm sure it'll get bigger.
Hey, I put up a new video on ( ) that's only over there. Come on over and sign up and subscribe and watch some videos.
Well, ( ) shut down. I guess they ran out of money or there wasn't enough interest or something. Oh well, I guess I'll just go back to making videos here on ( ). | | | | 184 Views | 0 Thumbs Up | 0 Comments | |
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| | Titillation vs Pornography | | | Tuesday, April 8, 2008 (12:34 PM)
(I'm feeling contemplative) | | For a great while, people have been accusing LiveVideo of supporting 'porn' by apparently partnering and featuring a lot of scantily clad women on the site. The history of the domain name itself has caused some people to have greater suspicions, and some of the incidents arising as a result of the introduction of live video streaming to the site have also increased people's curiousity about the nature of it all.
I think the main thing connecting those dots is not LiveVideo, but just the people using it - and to a great degree those complaining the most.
First off, there is a confusion about calling much of what is seen on LiveVideo 'porn'. Look up the word pornography (from which the truncation 'porn' is derived) and you'll find that it specifies the graphic depiction of of sexual acts or erotic behaviors to incite a sexual response from the viewer. Basically it has to appear in some form that someone is 'getting off' and makes you want to as well. This is not what has been featured by LiveVideo and is not coming from those they appear to be partnering with. What we do see is titillation - a stimulation meant to arouse pleasure. Therein lies the truth here and begs another question:
What are you thinking?
When you see a young, athletic woman in a tight fitting outfit of some sort, are you thinking are you thinking it's beautiful because it's a body well kept with the shape of it's natural design - or are you just lusting after it?
That's the catch here.
Human nature for most is to go to the basest form of themselves when seeing the titillation. Instead of seeing someone who cares about themselves or is still undamaged by time, humans tend to go to the base instinct that such a being is a good reproductive candidate. Marketing people know that the more ingrained the reaction, the stronger response you'll get from your potential target. Basically, sex sells. They rely upon people to not use their higher brain to keep themselves from just following their lower regions.
So who's fault is it if you see these things that are not directly connected and put them together to form some grand scheme of drawing you in through sex? Being aware of something is one matter, being so agitated as to complain about it loudly is another.
The more realistic take on what's going on here is that LiveUniverse wanted a domain name that made good marketing sense relative to its content, and in this case matched well with it's own brand. The marketing folks thought it wise to use the ancient and constantly successful plan "sex sells" via titillation, and if they realized how the past use of the domain name might be seen to have a halo effect - so much the better. This is bound to attract some people who are prime targets for "sex sells" and are obsessed with sex, and because of the reactive nature of moderation in the LiveShows they have a chance to excite themselves by shocking others.
If you want to make the porn freaks go away, and want to get the titillation to fail, support the things you do want to see. Try to convince others to support things other than the titillation. You might change things, but humans are humans - so I doubt it. | | | | 336 Views | 0 Thumbs Up | 0 Comments | |
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| | Things people say... | | | | Thursday, February 28, 2008 (9:01 AM) | | OK, so people can deceive about who they are on the internet.
People often use devious means to attract attention.
If you've been looking at the LiveShow list of who's live, you may have seen a user "Peaches-N-Cream" with the panty shot for a channel icon - which LV thankfully took down this morning - with a profile that says she's 17. Can't say I find this tasteful at all. The real laugh though is when some people post things they clearly made up. Take note: I suck at math, but even for me the simple numbers don't lie. From her profile's "Who is Peaches-N-Cream":
"i drove in 3 days 4900 miles yea im that far way from home"
Let's do some math.
4900 / 3 = 1633.3 (repeating)
Round that to 1633.
1633 / 24 = 68 (rounded off)
So she drove nonstop, 24 hrs a day for 3 days @ an average speed of 68 mph?
Now come on.
In case the info gets changed mysteriously:
| | | | 375 Views | 4 Thumbs Up | 2 Comments | |
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| | Cyber Accountability - A Double-Edged Sword | | | | Friday, February 22, 2008 (9:22 AM) | | Cyberspace seems like a wild untamed territory, but in truth it is merely an extension of our own world.
The part of our world that it extends is what makes it unique, and makes the concept of responsibility for what's done there a bit more challenging than it may initially seem.
The idea of ethics in any human behavior is not purely fixed, although there are a few very basic ideas that the vast majority of the population can agree on. The foremost of these is that one's actions should not willfully and without cause be of any harm to another. Sounds simple, right? It is - when you can see the results of your actions. This has long been the quandry of applying accountability for actions - you have to prove that these actions had any results.
Let me first say that legal accountability in some form has always existed for one's actions on the internet. It has been pursued as a crime by wire, because much as crime over the phone is a crime unto itself, commission of any crime over another means does not 'sanitize' those actions. The act of trying to conceal or detach oneself from a crime via such means is made a crime in itself merely to connect and compound accountability, not establish it.
Whether or not you've violated a standard of ethics is fairly conditional, one being what your expectations are of the other party you are dealing with. This is where cyberspace becomes difficult to navigate. As I have touched upon in a video I posted, the internet is full of fabircations based on the truth and fictions so well fabricated that they bear the weight of facts. Becuase of this, it's difficult to validate what is said and done on the internet, and thus whether ethical standards have been transgressed. Can you prove that who you are and what you say about yourself is true? Can you prove that someone did what you claim, or even what they claim? Can you prove that harm resulted, or even if that was what was intended?
Our expectations of truth and reality are the basis of our actions. If something is perceived as unreal, we don't expect our actions toward that thing to be of any real consequence. As an example, I play video games. I've kiled thousands of people in those games. Because my expectations are that the people in the game are not real, I do not feel I've done any damage to anyone and thus not committed any violation of ethics. This seems simple and acceptable because society in general has a consensus that I should expect those people in the game to be unreal. If I took those same actions in the tangible world, would i be a criminal? It seems clear enough to say yes, because the consensus of society is that we should expect our actions to have negative results because those results are tangible. Now, let's take this idea to the internet.
On the internet, verification of what exists there is often difficult. Fabrication, misrepresentation, and obfuscation are as easy to perpetrate on the internet as presenting anything real. Because of this, our expectations are different. The problem is we base our actions on it, and thus the chance of negative results we did not intend or expect are commonplace. Our expectation of consequence is also changed by this, because we feel that when what we see is not considered real, our own actions and intentions should not be real either.
An example of this in my own experience is a person that was sending me instant messages in rapid succession. It led to my computer freezing, and that in turn caused a read/write cycle loop that effectively damaged my hard drive. Did that person commit a violation of ethics against me?
My answer to you is no. Why? Because their expectation was not to cause harm, and my expectation is that they didn't mean to. My hard drive was going through it's 8th year of virtually 24/7 usage, and was thus weakened. It had experienced much more minor glitches before. The person's pattern of behavior was to send such stream of consciousness, fragmented messages. If I had been able to tell them to let up because of the potential of damage, I could feel they should be fully accountable - but such was not the case. Did they do harm? Yes. I spent 2 days recovering data and setting up my system again. So if they had done this intentionally, would it be a crime? Yes. Interesting how the same actions and results can be a violation of ethics or not, based on the expectations of the person carrying out those actions, isn't it?
The real problem becomes apparent now. Unlike other parts of our world, separating fact from fiction becomes the greatest challenge of cyberspace. To try to base judgements on a sequence of events where none have been established as fact is as much a breach of ethics as what is being judged as such. You have to ask yourself if you are really fixing a problem, or creating another. | | | | 313 Views | 4 Thumbs Up | 2 Comments | |
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| | Meta Morphosis | | | Wednesday, February 13, 2008 (11:38 PM)
(I'm feeling contemplative) | | So yet another day of tinkering and poking at the new features of LV. I've noticed a few things that seem to have come of it all...
On a techical side, some CSS elements that don't seem to have ever been used in the profiles before are now coming into play - and showing their flaws. Groups seem to use only one class - profilePod1 - for basically all their fields. This is fine if you define things in solid colors or repeatable patterns, but many of the LV templates are not made like that. Some of the new dialogs are vastly wider, so it's a little hard to make the old template content work at all. Other matters, like the profilePod4 class' tendency to be misshapen relative to it's header are also becoming more obvious, because the players for Music, Slideshows, and your profile's Default Video all use them. That's most of your channel pages impacted. There's a huge void at the moment in documentation of features, and despite the many very effective videos offered there are still matters that are left without answers.
In the LiveTV rooms and Chat rooms, there's still issues of connectivity and lag. If you've been in a LiveTV room that's remotely busy you've seen "waiting for resync" or "waiting for video" or seen an automatic playlist convulse wildly. You know how Picasso would paint you. It's been an adventure. Things are showing improvement though, and we've been seeing admins in rooms asking us for feedback and answering questions. (It took a long time before Stickam's staff ever appeared in their rooms to deal with issues far worse than just software bugs.)
We all knew when things launched there would probably be hitches. There would be bugs. If not, LiveVideo would be no less than stunning in the world of websites. In perspective there's actually not that many bugs considering how many features just went live at once. This is what led me to another thought though...
If you've noticed, many people aren't putting up as many videos. The overall level of activity doesn't seem as high as it has been - but I think the reason is that with all those new features, people are getting lost trying to assymilate it all. There's a lot to learn, and I think everyone is still just coping. I would bet for every admin you've seen in a room there's 3 people working on fixing things. For every video you see go up, there's 3 people editing their profiles, creating and configuring a group, etc. This is also about the same time things were dying down at LV and other such sites last year, and that's probably why this time was chosen for launch. In a month, how many bugs will be a memory? How many of us will have mastered all the new things? How many new faces will arrive to see LiveVideo in this new iteration?
Are you ready for the real changes? | | | | 303 Views | 0 Thumbs Up | 0 Comments | |
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| | Strange Bedfellows | | | Friday, February 22, 2008 (11:51 AM)
(I'm feeling curious) | | So with the changes to LiveVideo, you may have noticed that scripted items and embeds you attempt to edit in fields like your header tend to get discarded or overwritten. We have however been given this dandy little Widgets section we can add to any given page...
Basically this allows LiveVideo to 'sandbox' widgets to prevent certain potential exploits. I find it interesting, as it would seem those that have not touched their headers have embeds that still work. One particular thing I've noticed is that Bigoo widgets that were there (or in other fields which could be 'tricked' into accepting embeds) remain. Other widgets vanished without evidence of cause. Seems like 'widget favoritism', and one would suspect a cloak-and-daggerish secrecy about some relationship LiveVideo has with Bigoo or some other sites. I wish they would just come out and delcare such things to the world. It's not like they are Stickam, with it's ties to adult sites... Oh wait, uh... Never mind.
At any rate, I decided to test something. I grabbed the clock widget code from the site I used for the one I had in my header - WorldTimeServer.com - and a clock widget from Bigoo. Both are styled in a color scheme and simplicity that I feel suit my profile's design best. I'd like to see what my visitors prefer. There are differences other than merely the superficial, and I'm curious how other people notice and perceive them. Please leave a comment and tell me which you prefer. The key difference and how it relates to my post title is a wee bit subtle, and I'm curious if anyone else notices it. | | | | 244 Views | 2 Thumbs Up | 2 Comments | |
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| | Patience pays off... | | | Saturday, February 9, 2008 (3:02 AM)
(I'm feeling excited) | | Well here we are, looking at a whole new development of LiveVideo. I can't say enough about how excited I am to see the whole personal portal that this site has now become. No more must one have a blog on one site, live chats on another, their images, videos, and music on others. You have a whole social network here if you want it too. Heaps of tools to make it all your own.
Thing of beauty, isn't it? | | | | 254 Views | 2 Thumbs Up | 1 Comment | |
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