_nedR

I am going to leave this quote from reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4mhwyk/muhammad_ali...) here. Make of it what you will :

"People saying this is racist are misunderstanding that the problem with racism is not just some words, it's the power balance dynamic that backs them. A black man saying white people are the devil, has no power to actually do much damage, even in 2016. A white man saying that black man is the devil, has during our history been able to: imprison the person on trumped up charges, have their family bought and sold, beaten often to death, hung them, tar and feather, run them out of town, and refuse them housing. To pretend that there is an equality between two statements from people of different skin colors in current and past american society is to be willfully blind to the difference between them."

JetBrains IDE seems much more productive than Visual studio while at the same time being lightweight. So much so, lot of people find it worthwhile paying 300usd per year for Resharper, to get the same tools on Visual studio.

My first thought was a pop singer\model from the Tutsi ethnic group but that didn't sound right, so i googled it.

Yeah. You are right. When i think about it, Even in case of old governments, the cia was motivated by maintaining some status quo which the government was trying to change.

Yet another free book on assembly and computers is The art of assembly language : http://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.c...

This one is quite expansive in coverage of topics.

Not really. They have repeatedly sought overthrow of numerous governments in the past (including democratic, communist and dictatorial). Not really maintaining the status quo.

Maybe we should redo all the text books to accurately reflect the fact (by the definition you have given) that George Washington and the founding fathers of the US were terrorists.

The way i see it, artificial intelligence, automation, an the internet will drive a lot of changes in the coming 50 years

Right now almost every existing industry is being reborn online. Amazon did it with retail. Uber is currently doing it with tranaportation. This interconnectivity is leading to increasing centralization in the quest of efficiency. Trillion dollar corporations might not be far off.

The internet coupled with AI and automation. will further transform entire industries. Low hanging fruit include banking, finance, accounting and legal indsutries. Will a bank branch exist in your city 50 years from now? Add robotics to the mix and then we are looking at serious improvements in quality of life. Machines could perform tasks requiring high dexterity and may match or exceed humans in this regard. When self-driving comes, it will transform how cities look and our relationship with transportation. Millions of lives could be saved. This wave of automation will put millions out of work - IIRC the trucking industry is the largest employer in the US. Since the invention of the loom people have predicted that machines would put the population out of work. So far, people have found ways to stay employable in the service of machines (making, operating and repairing them). But we may have peaked in that regard. People will find it increasingly hard to make themselves useful in this new economy. How will society respond? Will we adopt a basic income ? Will we achieve an Athens without the slaves? What will capitalism look like in 50 years?

Other stuff i cant even begin to imagine. How will medicine look like in the next 50 years? Our quality of life as measured by life expectancy may improve, but what about the quality of those final years? Will we still just live long enough to be killed by cancer? What will combat look like? War? The current drone wars seem to hint at the direction we are going. In the future, advanced nations might fight entire wars in far away lands without a single citzen being physically deployed. Will global deaths from conflict increase or decrease as a result? How will the enemy respond? What will our energy infrastructure look like in 50 years? Will we have free energy? Or at least close to 100% renewable? Or will battery technology or some other issue still stand in our way?

China somehow makes it work though.

Yeah, i agree. Definitely good for the indian consumer at least in the short term. Amazon and uber are winning out largely because they offer better service at competitive prices.

But in long term i dont know. I am no econmist but If all your stuff is made abroad and little is made locally how will consumers find money to pay for the imported goods?

Being from india, i have come to the opposite conclusion.

Chinese protectionism (aided by the language barrier) has served chinese entrepreneurs quite well.

They have their own google. Their own fb. Their own twitter. Basically all services that India doesnt have. The list goes on. These services may or may not be inferior to the original but from an economic standpoint, its good since the money and data flows within the economy instead of going abroad.

India has its own taxi service but they are getting severe competition from uber (with rumours floating of a possible buyout by uber). We have flipkart but they are getting pummelled by amazon (which just walked in late to the indian ecommerce market after flipkart laid all the groundwork) and was recently down-valued by investors.

China is also successfully exporting to india- chinese smartphones are doing very well, much better than Apple.

America believes in free trade as long as they are able to crush the competition like a bug even before it gets started off the ground. If you can have local producers that have 8% market share, then they might actually have a sliver of a chance to survive and compete in the market place, and thats unacceptable. Yep, free and fair.

Firefox doesn't expose its browser history to other apps whereas both Chrome and the vanilla 'Internet' browser on Android does.

This is one reason why i use Firefox on Android (another being the read-it-later feature, and option to add other search engines easily).

The amazing part was how it could render huge landscapes, with literally 100s of monsters on crappy hardware without skipping a beat\frame.

As an outsider, It doeesn't look to me like a left vs right issue.

>We, the left, strive for social liberalism, civil equality, freedom of speech,

This seems to hint at the problem. You (the left) conflate freedom and equality, as though they are similar goals that can be achieved through similar means. But often these goals conflict with each other; Trying to achieve one often works against the other. Since we need decent amount of both in a society, maybe we should strive for a balance between the two using a common-sense approach?

When did they tell you this? Just trying to get an accurate time-frame.

To address some of your arguments (the others are quite orthogonal to my original point) :-

>I find it rather ironic and rather reckless really from the developer perspective too that you seem to totally eschew all the risk considerations that Apple takes into account, just ignoring the business decisions they make.

I am not advocating for the abandonment of all security in favour of freedom. And I think there a better balance of security, convinience and freedom is possible than that currently provided by Apple. Still there is a certain trade-off involved between freedom and security. We have to compromise on one to gain the other. Given the choice, I would rather sacrifice a bit of security for greater freedom than vice-versa. (which is ultimately why i chose the android ecosystem over Apple's)

>It is unarguable that the Apple ecosystem is not astronomically more secure and safe and a better user experience than Android for 99.999% of users.

I will agree that from a security and privacy perspective iOS is miles ahead of Android. But i can argue that the iOS doesn't provide a better user experience for 99.99% of users. I will give just one example from my country India (there are many more). Here we are undergoing a explosive growth of smartphone usage driven by low-cost android devices. A lot of this growth is driven by poorer users from rural areas. The thing is even if they could afford Apple devices, they would get a sub-par experience to that provided by Android. Why? Because they often lack the necessary literacy, connectivity or bankability needed to utilize the Apple ecosystem (Or even the Play store for that matter). Instead they use apps like Xender and bluetooth to share music, apps, videos, etc. It is an entirely decentralised, p2p, shadow ecosystem operating in parallel to the playstore-ecosystem. Sure, it is rife with piracy (one of the main considerations behind Apple's locked-down model) and is riddled with insecurity. But i would argue that benefits far outweigh the risks. And isn't bringing the benefits of technology to the poor, one of the professed goals of Silicon Valley?

Which brings me back to my original point- Android's lenient security model allows for new and novel uses of technology that wouldn't have otherwise been possible.

Being from India, Let me say that it will take huge advancements in AI before self-driving cars could drive on the streets here!

These advances would need to include :-

-Being able to decide what can be considered a road and what cannot.

-Knowledge of Human psychology which additionally needs to cover areas of suicide , homicide, etc.

-Knowledge of Animal psychology

-Understanding of different cultural norms both for humans and animals (I have found that the cows in Bangalore are much less likely to yield way than the cows in Kerala)

Both as a user and a developer, I would prefer a lenient, lazy approach over an over-zealous over-pedantic approach.

Wow. To add on top of the stigma of being gay in a homophobic culture, now they're going to be targeted as potential traitors/informants too. That's just... wow.

Just the other day i found 2 useful apps on the android play-store :

One was a Personal finance tracker and manager, that claimed to provide useful insights with minimal input. I ended up thinking that they would harvest my data to sell to credit-rating agencies and I decided not to install it.

Another app would analyze my call records, including duration, costs (by reading SMS,) - basically my complete messaging and communicating behaviour, and it would suggest plans and providers that would be the most cost-effective for me. Again i ended up turning down.

Everyday, I end up turning down these requests. It doesn't help that the Android ecosystem is so eager to pimp out my personal info at every opportunity (the only reason i would prefer an Apple device). Most of my peers don't care in the least and just agree to every intrusion.

My experience in the startup ecosystem in India (which probably doesn't have the basic data privacy laws other countries might have) only serves to heighten my unease. Not too long ago we were in talks with people about developing an app for the healthcare space. We had trouble seeing how the app could bring much value to the end-users, but they didn't seem to care much about that side of things. The impression I walked away with was that they were looking for any excuse to harvest health-related info to sell to insurance companies.

People are calling data the new oil. And we are living in the new oil rush. All startups (and also companies like Facebook and Google) talk about how their mission is to make the world a better place, but really we are all ultimately contributing to an Orwellian future, where every action we take is captured, stored, analysed and used to control, manipulate, and exploit us.

I don't know whether drilling down the message that "she is not gifted, she is just normal" is the right way to go. Maybe she will the get idea that she is not talented enough to try something so why bother. Alternatively you could reframe the message as "You are as gifted as anybody, hardwork is what matters".

A book won't change a person's life, but https://books.google.is/books/about/The_Adventures_of_Johnny... is a short manga (might not be suitable for the 4-year old but maybe the university student). Lesson 4 is "Persistence trumps talent.".

A summary of the lessons in the book : http://www.danpink.com/2013/05/the-6-essential-lessons-of-a-...

Me too. Also because the default Chrome was good enough.

But i came back to firefox recently and now it is my default. The "Reading list" feature is so good productivity-wise.

And using firefox again made me realize that features like Reading-list, Tracking-protection, or even offline-mode would never be implemented in Chrome because of the fundamental conflict of interest between its users and Google

Maybe their algorithms is trying to any nostalgia you might be having for some old topic? In your case they figured wrong, but I can see how it could work for old games, movies, music, tv shows, etc.

Wow. That is one of the most insanely good manifestos I have read.

Its still a much harder journey to Australia than Europe.

My point is that the difficulty in making the journey is a major factor. So its not clear cut in deciding how much credit should be assigned to Australia's policy of overseas processing centers.

>The government must exist solely to protect human interests.

I mostly agree with you about the meat consumption thing, but this?

Are you saying govt. shouldn't be in the business of wildlife conservation, prevention of animal cruelty or abuse, or preservation of natural habitats (beyond considering their impact on humanity) ?

I agree with you. If the majority choose to adhere to a particular cultural norm or taboo, that is their choice.

But there are also people (and it is not a small minority) trying to impose their culture and taboos on other people. Just look at all the pressure and calls for action against Chinese and Koreans over their consumption of dog-meat. Here is an example of a petition that gathered over 4 million votes (https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-yulin-dog-meat-eating-fest...)

This article seems to cover the ethical and moral points, nicely : http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/22/eat-cat...

Calling attention the differences is not particularly insightful (Who in their right mind would compare startups to dictatorships to imply that they are one and the same).

But Seiji's calling attention to the similarities provides good insights.

Also the difference you list is not actually that much of a difference. Sure, politics is about control of coercive power, but so are businesses (especially the most succesful ones). Politics is also about negotiations, deals, showmanship, exchanges for mutual benefit(unless you are naive about how politics really works) - aka sales. Furthermore both radical movements and startups need to fund-raise and rally volunteers during their early days, and both do so on little more than the promise of dreams.

They are both equally unlikely to succeed. But when they do, their impact is profound (often one is profoundly good and the other is profoundly bad). I could think of more going down the tangent created by the parent.

>80% of Syrian population lives in Syrian government controlled territory.

Citation, please.