drrotmos

You do have a point, especially in your first paragraph, but I think it's important to separate the goals of the business from the goals of it's founders, management and employees. The latter probably have goals of at least making a decent living, and that of course impacts the profit-making goal of the business.

However, I also think you're confusing profits with wages. Non-profit organization employees can have quite high wages, but that doesn't impact whether the goal of the organization is to turn a profit.

That makes no sense (unless perhaps they've already achieved their primary goal). If your primary goal is to improve the world in some way, you'd put all of your surplus revenue towards that goal (and by that I of course include accumulating capital in the organization for later use). There'd be nothing left for profits.

A non-profit organization. And yes, that's totally fine.

To you, yes, but to the law and perhaps more importantly – to the relevant tax agency, a business is meant for turning a profit.

If the founders aren't interested in turning a profit, a charity will serve them better.

Do people actually say that "A startup's purpose should be to change the world for the better in a meaningful way"?

That's ridiculous, and symbolizes what's wrong with the current startup culture. Fine, go ahead and change the world for the better, but a startup is a business and the primary goal of a business is to turn a profit. If you can combine profit and world-changing, that's great, but don't forget the priorities. If that doesn't fit you, start a charity instead.

It would be very bad if they do, since that would open the existing exFAT projects up to legal action.

Anyone who has read the Samsung code is "tainted" with the knowledge of Samsung's proprietary techniques which may be copyrighted, so those people may well introduce copyright violations into the code.

In clean-room reverse engineering projects, the people who are examining the system to be reverse engineered are never the same people that actually write the new clean code, thus avoiding the taint of proprietary knowledge.

It's only for now.

Yes, you're in great company there, with well-respected allies like Iran, Uganda and Afghanistan. Congratulations.

While not exception tracking per se, we use New Relic and we also log exceptions to a special Graylog2 stream. It's working very well actually.

> Well, no actually. I'm not willing to spend a dollar on those services until I know those getting more value out of them (i.e. the rich) are paying their fair share. In reality, they'll probably be paying nothing so I will join them.

Okay. That would be your right. Just don't start complaining once the underfunded justice system won't have the resources to handle burglaries in homes which cannot afford private security.

> So you want the gold standard again? Hasn't being in the EU shown you the dangers of having a currency you can't adjust to respond to international conditions?

Being in the EU has shown me the dangers of government meddling in the market.

> Donations? Seriously, donations? The police, military and so on will be at the mercy of what people decide to give of their own free will? Why am I not surprised to see such a position from a self proclaimed Libertarian.

Yes, because it's far better to steal the money instead of it being given freely. I'm more than willing to pay a decent amount money for everyone to have access to those services. Aren't you?

> You think taxes are unethical? Then how does the government pay for itself? Would you rather they just printed the money they need? That would also be a tax; a flat tax.

> And if you don't believe the government should exist then that's anarchist, not libertarian. Though if you want anarchism then you can't have a barter system.

Well, since I'm also an opponent of fiat currency, the government couldn't very well print any money :)

I'd prefer a night-watchman state, with the government handling police, courts, the military and possibly other services relating to emergency rescue, the justice system or government administration.

I would prefer the following for funding the (very small) government in ranking order: 1. Donations, 2. Fees, 3. A small flat tax levied either as an income tax or a corporate tax.

And yes, the third option isn't a very good option.

> By "very small" you mean "fringe". Like the BNP in the UK no doubt.

Indeed. I can't speak about the BNP, since I don't know anything about it, but the classic liberal party of Sweden only got a few hundred votes last election.

> If you truly have "US Libertarian" parties in Sweden, then how about instead of ruining your country you just move the US so you can enjoy what a Libertarian paradise is actually like.

I'll do that once the US stops being a collectivist surveillance state corrupted by cronyism, and actually starts respecting the principles set forth in its constitution again. (Not to mention when it actually starts allowing immigrants again.)

Until such a time, I'll try to make the situation better where I happen to reside.

> Then you should abstain from voting in the present US system because that's not how it works nor how it was designed to work. It's a combative system where compromise is achieved by basically averaging the desires of the interested parties.

Well, I'm not an american, so I don't vote in the US, but if I could I would vote for Libertarian Party candidates.

> Fine, consider what ever you like. But when you vote you should vote for what directly helps you personally. Giving billionaires tax breaks can't possibly help you in any manner.

No, but it's not about helping myself, it's about having a system which I consider ethical.

> I look forward to the day when the US reaches the level of political enlightenment that having an uncle who is a libertarian is as embarrassing a revelation as having an uncle in the KKK is today. There is a reason that this party exists only inside the US and probably couldn't even be sensibly articulated to anyone from another country.

I'm from Sweden. I understand very well why the Libertarian Party exists. We do have (very small) parties in Sweden which correspond quite well to the libertarian party.

I strongly disagree.

In my mind, the only way to vote is to vote your conscience, not what happens to give me the greatest personal gain. "The God Delusion" by Dawkins includes a great (and somewhat Rawlsian) rule, 'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.'

E.g., as a libertarian, I consider taxes to be unethical regardless of whether I gain a net profit from them or not.

HK has nothing to fear with regards to economic sanctions. One can be reasonably sure that even under "One country, two systems", China wouldn't take kindly to economic sanctions against HK, and in the end, the US needs China more than China needs the US.

Because one is a greek letter, and the other is a unit of resistance. The fact that they're represented by the same symbol is irrelevant.

Hence the classification "TOP SECRET STRAP 1" at the bottom of the slide.

I know this isn't an opinion shared by the current US administration, but having a fair trial for one's crimes is a human right. It's a right guaranteed by articles 10 and 11 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Part of having a fair trial includes having legal representation, and the ability to communicate with your legal council in confidence.

Eavesdropping on privileged lawyer-client conversations, regardless of legality is outrageously indecent and should be illegal. Revoking a lawyer's visa because he is representing a particular client is equally outrageous, especially due to the chilling effects it causes upon the legal community making it much more difficult for suspects of serious crimes to find good legal representation.

Quite a few of us probably DO have an active NDA with Apple (e.g. from being a Registered Apple Developer). Though IANAL ,from my reading of the terms viewing the materials shouldn't constitute a breach of the NDA either.

'What have we come to where I can't sit with a friend and shoot the shit about dongles?'

Well, it sounds to me like you've come to a professional environment, such as a workplace, or a technical conference.

I don't know. I took a random pick of one of the US Patents and took a look at it.

Take US6735249 as an example. "Apparatus, and associated method, for forming a compressed motion vector field utilizing predictive motion coding".

I'm by no means an expert in video codecs, but to me it seems at least plausible that this patent would cover parts of VP8.

I'm a bit intrigued. As the main developer of a Git library[1] myself (in pure PHP, not depending on the git binary or esoteric extensions), I have no doubt that the actual parsing of the git objects and packfiles will be very much possible to achieve in a browser environment.

[1]: https://github.com/e-butik/Gittern/

However, there are technical considerations. For example, pack files can get pretty large (indeed version 2 packfiles supports files > 4 GB), and I doubt browsers are optimized for random access to large files (so you wouldn't have to load the entire file in memory). Another potential problem would be pushing and pulling. The dumb HTTP transport is obviously possible to use (but rarely supported anymore), and the smart HTTP transport should be able to get working, but for implementing the git protocol, or git+ssh you'd need regular sockets, which AFAIK browsers don't provide.

I do however wish the author the best of luck with this project, and since I see that he's here, I will leave with links to a few resources I found useful:

* http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals

* http://opensource.apple.com/source/Git/Git-26/src/git-htmldo...

* http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/Git/Git-17/src/git-ht...

* http://git.rsbx.net/Documents/Git_Data_Formats.txt

As a Swede, I concur.

While this incident is terrible, there's one thing Dr. Mann doesn't make entirely clear in the article.

The contact information for McDonald's France is quite easily found at http://www.mcdonalds.fr/contacts. It's not an e-mail address, but rather a phone number, but the way the article is written it's not at all clear if he's tried to contact them by their publicly available phone number?

Sure, but it's uncommon and traceable, which means that if it becomes widely used by dissidents, that would be an excellent way of tracking them.