Google Wave!

Google Wave is yet another example of what you get by taking advantage of the internet in the information age. It combines functions of Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, Photobucket, and Email - doing it all collaboratively.

Conversations or documents are started by adding one or more people to a wave, where each person may edit text [with their edits displayed by highlights], comment on any part of the text [rather than a single response at the very end a la email], chat in an instant message format, and add and edit pictures - all simultaneously.

Changes to any waves that you have been added to appear in the center wave inbox, in a constant feed not unlike a real-time version of the Facebook wall feed. The difference is that only information directly relevant to you is displayed.

When looking at a wave, and wanting to see who had edited or added what parts of that wave, you might take advantage of the playback function, which allows you to view, from beginning to end, the evolution of that particular wave in the order and ways that it was altered.

Similar functionality for all of this will exist in spreadsheets, presentations, and the like.

Lastly, a unique spellchecker had been developed for Google Wave, that can automatically correct words based on context and comparison against usage over the internet. [In the presentation, Lars typed "Icland is an icland." It was correctly, automatically changed to "Iceland is an islan"]

It is to be released later this year! Looking forward to it.

Demo video:

Adorable Couple & Fantastic Song

Equality or Independence?

Equality or Independence?

The more I reflect upon my political preference as of late, the more I come to realize that I feel a startling comfort with two extremes of one political spectrum; namely the level of community control. On the one hand, I regard myself as a Democratic Socialist. Here, it seems best for the great masses of the people to collectively agree on equality, mutual support, and the removal of political and societal inequity. On the other hand, I find myself increasingly less begrudging of extreme Libertarianism. Essentially, this represents the removal of all influence on individual action by the community, where it does not harm another member thereof.

Perhaps the discrepancy comes from the conflict between the desire to right the wrongs in society, group, and individual treatment and the desire to be left to my own designs. It might also be described as the conflict between the desire to influence society towards my view of ethics, and the desire to avoid being influenced by the morality of others who might do the same.

Who is to say that my view of ethics is more or less valid than the views of others? It can be easily said that it holds more water than the religion-based morals of the majority of the population, as it is based on reason rather than ancient mythic texts, but who is then to say that humans lack the right, regardless of personal beliefs, to set their own personal rules of conduct, or if they so choose, the agreed-upon rules of conduct of their community?

Take, for example, public nudity. I would much prefer that I don’t see unattractive people in the nude while walking around in public, as I would find it to be an unpleasant experience. The catch is, though, that unpleasantness is the only real effect on me. I could see nudity without psychological damage; I’ve seen worse just puttering around on the internet. Would it then be within my rights to restrict what people must or must not wear, when such distinctions have no real effect on me? Certainly not, one side of me says, but the other would endorse such restrictions nonetheless.

Where can one find the subtle line between conduct that indirectly leads to problems in society, like the poverty gap, and conduct that affects nobody but the person that practices it? If such a line could be correctly identified, perhaps I would not need to choose.