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Privacy advocates are not a subset of libertarians. Libertarians may be privacy advocates, but there are many privacy advocates that are not libertarians.

Privacy advocacy is popular among the upper classes, because they really don't want anyone from the lower classes sticking their noses into their business.

Libertarians are unpopular because some of their policies are deeply unpopular. For example, many libertarians oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because they feel it violates their first amendment rights.

Even before I looked up your profile information, I knew that you were over 35, because "weenie" hasn't really been a popular pejorative in a long time.

You were around in the Usenet days (or at least are old enough to have been), haven't you heard of kill files?

The NSA stopped caring about your privacy after 9/11 — just read about the demise of project ThinThread [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread

Besides the fact that most commercial monitors have pitiful ppi, the fact that monitor manufacturers are selling mostly widescreen monitors with a poverty of vertical room drives me crazy. It's hard to read a pdf of a book when its resolution makes it hard to fit a single page onto your screen. There is something about continuous scrolling that makes it harder for me to remember the text that I'm reading.

So a large screen e-reader (that won't have any backlight issues) could be a great gadget to have. I tried a Kindle DX in 2010, but I found panning around in PDFs to be too slow for enjoyment. If and when the technology improves enough, there could be a big student market for a large screen e-ink reader that can display PDFs (or saner formats, like DJVU).

There's an excellent add-on for Firefox called "No Color" that I use whenever I come across sites like these. One click makes it readable again.

I'm not affiliated with the developer in any way.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-color/

Nijk, you've been hellbanned, but you're question is valid so I'll respond to it (I can't respond directly to a hellbanned user).

Brin and Zuckerberg are members of the (upper) middle class. Class is a broad term; the people who think that there is "a growing division between the classes" are usually using income as the sole indicator for determining class. The definition of class that I'm using takes into account social factors as well.

The members of the upper class like archaic customs, dress, and design. They have little use for technology, because they have servants to perform the tasks that members of the middle class use technology to do.

Privacy is also very important to uppers, because they hate when middle class people attempt to pry into their business. That's why they have half mile long driveways and tall shrubbery around their houses to keep prying eyes away. Zuckerberg and Brin give themselves away as members of the upper middle class because they sell (selling is vulgar to the upper class) services that do not respect the user's privacy.

I strongly recommend that you read Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell. Although it was written in 1983, it is still the best description of the American class system that I have ever read. It's less than 200 pages, so you can read it within a day. It primarily deals with the social factors of class,which makes me think that it makes it a good choice for you because it will complement your existing knowledge of corporate culture.

http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/d...

> Corporate America is a nation of social climbers

Well, yes, but you can only climb up to a certain point on the social ladder. In fact, adapting to corporate culture guarantees that you will never be a member of the highest class. You may reach the upper middle class, but you will never become a member of the upper class because the upper class not only does not work (they don't need to), but they look disdainfully upon people who have to work, especially people who sell things, because they consider selling things for a living to be vulgar. People who come from the corporate world will almost always, even if they aren't conscious of it, have middle class tastes, and middle class speech mannerisms. For example, Corporate America loves modern design (because it is boring, and thus cannot be offensive) and uses lots of euphemisms. Members of the upper class hate euphemisms, and consider saying "Fudge!" to be much worse than saying "Fuck!". This goes against everything a Corporate America drone has been taught. Social norms in the upper class are much different than social norms in the upper middle, and other classes. The obfuscatory circumlocutions known as "HR speak" or "BS" are reviled, and so are foolish compliments. If you are at an upper's house and praise their furniture, you could be ejected from the premises. Why? Because it is a given that an upper will have good furniture, and compliments about it suggest that this may not be the case, which is offensive.

Because the things we do, say, and the values we have are often subconscious, it takes a concerted effort to change them and it is almost impossible to do so. The things that determine your class cannot all be written down into a book. Even if you do pretend to be an upper, at some point you will commit a faux paus that gives you away.

Animals do not have language in the same way that humans do. Yes, the may have a way to communicate with each other by sounding their voices in different pitches, and yes, some apes can learn sign language, but that does not mean that they understand language in the way humans do. Human language has grammar, syntax, and recursion in a way that animals do not.

I love the postscript of this:

"It is nonetheless supremely ironic that the demise of Lisp at JPL was ultimately due in no small measure to the unreliability of a C program."

The article is extremely poorly translated, and many of the sentences don't make sense. This makes it hard for me to figure out if something was lost in translation or if the author is as ignorant as the translation makes him out to be.

I won't go through the post line by line; I think this paragraph sufficiently establishes that the author is ignorant.

> The virtue of Unix convention of making a big thing by combining small things is inherited in Emacs. This virtue itself is the reason why I am using Emacs. However, this may be becoming history. What is the meaning of the world without the virtue or philosophy, but with only benefit? I’d be disappointed if Emacs become so.

The precursors of Emacs were written at the AI lab at MIT, which at the time ran the ITS operating system. ITS had values that were pretty much orthogonal to Unix, which makes the statement especially ignorant. GNU Emacs's first public release in the 80s had to be ported to Unix to make it work.

Emacs is famous for being very extensible and can be used as a web browser, newsreader, spreadsheet, etc. You can do almost anything and never leave the Emacs environment. This is the opposite of combining many small programs to create something big.

Emacs also has a clear and logical design, and allows you redefine almost anything you don't like. Unix is famous for having a horrendous, incoherent design that is so poor that many of its commands are digestive noises (nroff, fsck, awk, grep). Its other commands are cryptically named and for years and years the documentation was nonexistent or terrible.

The "Retina" display is just a marketing term which means that a person with 20/20 vision cannot distinguish individual pixels at a certain distance. Movie screens do not need to have a high ppi ratio because you view the screen from a greater distance. If you have better than 20/20 vision, or press your face up against the screen, you will be able to resolve individual pixels quite easily.

> It's insane how powerful CSS has gotten, can you imagine building something like this 10 years ago?

Yes, but not in CSS. Actually, the fact that CSS has evolved to do this is really an indication of what a failure CSS is. Or rather, a failure of the idea that a separate language should exist for text markup. If you're going to use CSS for this kind of thing, why not use a real, powerful language that has years of experience solving problems and has lots of libraries? Why should we ignore the past and waste time rediscovering old problems and, so we can add slower, buggier kludges?

>Calibrated Brain wave readers and eye cameras in the corners of your room can see what elements on the screen you're looking at and can execute commands based on certain thoughts.

Brain waves (produced by changes in electrical current in your brain) are weak to begin with, and decrease in power in proportion to the square of the distance (1/r^2). That's why anything that reads your brain waves needs a helmet to work.

No, I don't think that. I also don't think that HFT is necessary for an intermediary to create wealth.

Local governments are also involved in the stock market. High frequency traders make money by acting as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, and thus not creating actual wealth. Instead their supposed value is the "liquidity" they add. That means that the price of "adding liquidity" is a lower return on a stock or bond invested by a local government. Which in turn means that the local government might have to cut funding services for the poor. Even if you give away the money you earn, you are still robbing the poor so you can give to the poor people that you like.

> Waking Up and Sleep go together: Neural implants... Neural Implants‽‽ Brain surgery is a still a big deal, and is usually done as a last result to fix a life threatening condition or debilitating injury or condition.

The idea of unnecessary surgery for some perceived health benefit is not a new one. In the late 19th and early 20th century, many people had their tonsils and appendicies even when they were perfectly functional. Some people on HN commented that their grandmothers had all of their teeth removed before they were married so that their future husband would not have to pay for dental work.

> Work: Since we are moving to post-scarcity, I easily see us having automated transportation of goods, automated farming (or even better, molecular printing that fabricates food from carbon and friends), automated mining - and we should be able to easily automate construction to just taking an input design and having a machine crew do the work. Robots that can maintain their peers and themselves, communicating their defects so they can be serviced. No human involvement. People could then commit themselves to either constant leisure, artistic pursuits, or the sciences, and only if they want to, since they would no longer have to.

There are a lot of advances that need to be made before anything like this can happen. Even if it does, goods will not become free and people will still need to work to make a living. Some people need the structure of work to keep them happy.

>Eat: Soylent and its ilk are even right now aiming to change this, and if the above considerations happen, you don't need to work to feed yourself, and can print any food you want. Though it will be some time before humans start replacing their digestive tract with 3d fabricators so they just plug themselves in to electricity to "eat".

The chemical reactions that occur when cooking food are far more complex than you realize. Even if 3D printing of food become widespread, you will still need to prepare it. Putting a 3d fab in your digestive tract does not make much sense. A current 3d fab needs raw material (various plastics, etc), not just electricity. So you would still have the problem of getting the food inside your body in the first place.

> Church: Already dying in the newer generations, due to the pervasiveness of knowledge and freely available information. If anything is the death knell for religion, it is the Internet and its ability to distribute knowledge anywhere instantly. It makes rationalizing the unknown less about guesswork and superstition and more about googling it.

This is a common misunderstanding of why religion is successful. Science and religion are not incompatible, because they don't answer the same questions, and shouldn't. You don't need to take Scripture literally to be religious.

Information has become easier to obtain thanks to the Internet, but only because governments have allowed this to happen. The structure of the Internet allows central authorities to control the flow of information very easily.

>Seek Mates: I think this will be around because human beings are stubborn and set in their ways, but beyond 50 years I expect us to transition away from sexually partnered couples with children to a system where everyone is sterilized and children are grown (with perfect genetics) as needed and raised in public institutions where (through rigorous study) we (collectively) have figured out how to best promote creativity and open minds. It is one of the greatest weaknesses in modern society that because everyone is in their developmental years bound to the behavior of their parents they can have vastly different advantages and disadvantages throughout life.

Sterilization is not a logical consequent of selective genetics. There is no way a truly democratic government will ever have sterilization as a social policy. Even countries like China that limit the amount of children that you can have have exceptions for the rich.

>In the absence of the superficial need to spawn being bound to romantic relationships, I expect people to be more fluid and have sex with various acquaintances

This already happened. That's what the "Sexual Revolution" was all about, which evolved into today's "hookup culture". The AIDS epidemic totally changed the way people thought about casual sex. Before AIDS, casual sex had a risk of VD (and pregnancy, although "the pill" is what really accelerated the sexual revolution). After AIDS, you could DIE from having unprotected sex.

Stable relationships aren't as glamorous as young romances, but nevertheless have enormous benefits. There are many people who marry and don't have children.

> It is one of the greatest weaknesses in modern society that because everyone is in their developmental years bound to the behavior of their parents they can have vastly different advantages and disadvantages throughout life.

Having parents love and care for you (whether they are your biological parents or not) provides tremendous benefits to children's emotion growth. Taking this away because some children are unfortunate enough not to have it is the wrong solution.

One of the reasons that NYC and its suburbs have a higher cost of living than upstate New York is because they have higher county taxes. They have higher county taxes because each county has to pay for it's own Medicaid. The larger counties have more poor people in them. New York State is notorious for having horribly inefficient Medicaid system.

Also, just because the U.S birth rate is declining doesn't mean that it will eventually have a negative growth rate. The U.S population is still growing, but just not as rapidly.

There are countries that are experiencing negative growth rates right now; Russia is one of them.

Fascinating! This reminds me of William J. Beal's seed germination experiment that started in 1879 [1]. Beal buried seeds in several glass jars, and then dug a glass jar every five years and planted it to see if it would grow. To extend the experiment, the period between planting was extended to once a decade, and then once every two decades to lengthen the experiment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Beal#Germination...

Standing desks can hurt you if you don't wear proper shoes and/or use some kind of standing mat; regular desks can hurt you if your chair is unergonomic (there was an article on HN about this two weeks ago.) In a similar vein, you can develop RSI if you use an poorly designed keyboard, but that doesn't mean typing will eventually give you RSI.

Hn discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5719891

You need about two quarts of water a day, but you can get this by consuming fruits and vegetables that range from 84% (apple) to 96% (iceberg lettuce) water by weight [see link below]. Drinking eight glasses of pure water a day is ridiculous unless you consume no food at all.

http://www.ca.uky.edu/enri/pubs/enri129.pdf

This is the greatest innovation since Virtudyne's "The Digital Donkey" [1] — which is a parody of SimIndiana [2]. There really have been donkey cart driven libraries. [3]

Of course, there really have been projects that used balloons in the upper atmosphere. It is actually difficult to maintain a balloon at a constant altitude in the upper atmosphere because you have to account for daily temperature variation and changing wind patterns. The most famous project of this sort was Project Mogul[4], which attempted to put a balloon in the atmosphere's analogue of the SOFAR channel to listen for anything that sounded like a nuclear test in the Soviet Union. One of the Project Mogul balloons crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The government's cover story was that it was a "weather balloon", which of course, it wasn't. But it wasn't an alien spaceship, either.

[1]: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Virtudyne_0x3a__The_Digital_...

[2]: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2004/040707b.html

[3]: http://archive.ifla.org/V/press/pr0225-02.htm

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul

The site displays a list of the least number of blocks needed to achieve an integral multiple "overhangs" (ie. Floor (x) > y, where y is an integer). What the site doesn't mention is that after the first iteration, the harmonic series will never be an integer again.

You're right. The FBI did have a warrant to monitor her email accounts [ǣ] (it's too late to edit my previous comment). The troubling thing about the Broadwell story was the FBI's preferential treatment of Kelley because she knew members of the agency. It shows how easy it is to get the FBI to investigate your enemies if you have connections; otherwise it is difficult to get the FBI to care about your case, especially if no one was physically hurt and no monetary damage was caused.

[ǣ] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732407350457811...

> Most large public services you use (Skype, Exchange, likely Gmail, etc) have backdoors.

Google gave up Paula Broadwell's joint Gmail account with David Petraeus to the FBI after receiving a subpoena. Gmail isn't secure unless you log in through Tor, compose your message on a separate editor (to avoid autosaving of plaintext) and then copy and paste a PGP encrypted message before you send it.

Now, you might think that this is a ridiculous and impractical thing to do, especially if you are not guilty of any crimes. But Paula Broadwell wasn't guilty of any crimes (or at least wasn't charged with any crimes) before Google happily violated her privacy by giving away her information without a warrant.

Trhtrsh, you have been hellbanned as of this [‡] comment. I'm not really sure why; HN might have changed their algorithm for banning, or you might have been banned for a bad submission.

[‡]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687245

I remember when Harvard, which had a $25.6 billion endowment at the time, stopped offering free breakfasts for upperclassmen (this was 2009, I don't know if they have reinstated it). It was a big deal at the time; it even made the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/education/09harvard.html?r...

The elephant in the room is that many languages have adopted or have been influenced by the C language's miserable practices of ending a statement with a semicolon, and using the equals sign as an assignment operator. Both of these practices break with conventional usages to no discernible advantage.

Another impediment to readability is the insistence upon representing code by using hideous, low contrast colors on a dark background, especially when the code snippets are mixed with the conventional representation of black text on a white background.

My favorite quote about C's synatx was written by Erik Naggum: "If you care to know my opinion, I think semicolon-and-braces-oriented syntaxes suck and that it is a very, very bad idea to use them at all. It is far easier to write a parser for a syntax with the Lisp nature in any language than it is to write a parser for thet stupid semiconcoction. Whoever decided to use the semicolon to _end_ something should just be taken out and have his colon semified. (At least COBOL and SQL managed to use a period.)"

There's a funny cartoon (from 1996, no less) about the downside of posting on the internet.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GhostOfUsenetPostingsPast

Here's a basic explanation of the fractional reserve system prepared by the Federal Reserve

http://archive.org/details/ModernMoneyMechanics