rpgmaker

> 50 million years is a very long time. In not much more time than that, Hawaii will be part of Japan.

And in another 50 million Japan will be part of China! Isn't it easy to make stuff up?

> but it is nonetheless true that modern science has found the Élan vital (vital impetus) that naturalistic writers often claim doesn't exist.

Source?

> But that might just be because I "grew up", digitally speaking, in the era of self-hosted websites and blogs, of FTP and local development pushed remotely.

That's because you're technically proficient, hardly the case for most people. For example, the blog in question seemed to be art oriented. I think that today it's very easy for anyone to host and setup a blog for a couple of bucks a month but few things can beat the convenience of just signing up on blogspot.

>* Hard to believe this is something more than 'wannabe business PR' plus movie PR.*

By the way what is that movie's actual name? I haven't been able to find it on imdb, rotten tomatoes, etc.

There's no reason why you can't do both: worry that another country could influence the electoral process via hacking and see the value in having this information exposed. The media and the Democrats only want people to focus on the former.

Are we supposed to ignore that the media is 100% unified in stopping Trump from becoming president? I'm against Trump (who I believe to be a fascist and psychologically unstable) but I'm not going to pretend that it is honest to say that Trump literally asked Russia to hack Hillary's emails. I watched the entire press conference btw. If the election pitted Sanders against Bush the media would not hesitate to be this dishonest when attacking Sanders, it just so happens that by far the biggest outsider this year happens to be the biggest asshole too.

Not to mention that the US has a particularly awful history of subverting other countries' elections.

> I think we're starting to see it via cases like this.

Not really. This is just one case where you happen to agree with a judge's decision, it hardly means that software companies are going to start including one-page EULA's into their software. For decades these huge EULAs have worked quite well for most companies and this case won't change that.

Photoshop is as easy to pirate as it has ever been. The "SaaS" licensing scheme hasn't changed this one bit.

> Is it possible the unfathomably complex economic machine will simply adapt to the subsidy?

Not only possible: it happens all the time. There are very few industries in the US that aren't subsidized by the govt one way or another. Agriculture and oil being one of the best examples.

Honestly, I know things can't stay the same forever, particularly in the design department, but to me Aqua still looks way better than current OSX (granted, I only use OSX very sporadically for educational purposes). I have to admit though that I'm not a huge fan of the flat designs that are currently "in" where you can't easily tell when one UI element ends and the other begins. I don't think that's very easy on the eyes generally but it seems that I'm the only one that sees it that way. Whatever.

It is also bullshit. Existing technology doesn't "blow" either.

There will always be apps (and particularly games) to hit it big. Stop this End of History crap.

Do you just have a vanilla OSX VM installation or do you optimize it in some way? For me OSX is very slow on vbox on a very decently spec'ed VM. Far from my experience with Windows guests.

I think Fabric does "help" their revenue ID'ing all those phones where Fabric-enabled apps are installed.

> The reason why Twitter has took a turn over the years is because of their treatment of developers and their murdering of top apps instead of letting them flourish.

Oh how I wish this was true but sadly this is usually never the case. If it was Facebook would be long dead by now.

> But must the standard for safety be higher than existing human drivers?

Yes it must. I can readily accept responsibility if there was something on the road to which I wasn't able to respond properly and resulted in an accident but if it was autopilot that screwed up I would sue $brand's ass.

It's a minor quibble but is it accurate to put the project under the US "government" umbrella (@usgov)? I don't think the USG existed in any meaningful sense before confederation.

Many of your critiques apply to many countries considered democracies. Excessive gerrymandering is an issue in many democracies including the US. Not to mention that in the US minorities are specifically targeted for exclusion. A lot of countries don't have term limits for heads of state (for most of its history the US didn't). Press freedoms aren't what defines what a dictatorship is either. Would Saudi Arabia be a democracy if suddenly all censorship laws are purged from the books?

> Except for the time he lost, and within two days a military coup of the democratically elected body put him back in power

LOL. The coup was done against him after being democratically elected in 2000 but it failed disastrously, making him some kind of a folk hero in most of Latin America. If you don't know this basic fact you really have no business talking about Venezuela, let along calling Chavez a dictator just because you didn't like the guy. Venezuela had many chances of getting rid of him democratically and they decided not to, we all can disagree about how wise a decision it was but that is different matter.

> the past-time heavyweights would be serving a far higher calling today

Higher calling? It's a business dude, plain and simple.

> And isn't it ironic that this name was used to re-enforce Hugo Chavez's "Bolivar Revolution" aka dictatorship.

Actually, Hugo Chavez was very popular and won all his elections by a wide margin. You could say a lot of things about him but he was not a dictator.

> Using weakly biased arguments that government or business is responsible for "protecting" the customer is ridiculous, especially in light of recent revelations of corruption in our government and business sectors.

I don't think it's even close to funny that someone could potentially have their entire life savings stolen because of some zero-day so luckily, not everyone shares your libertarian utopia dreams.

I believe that p2p currencies are here to stay in some form or another but I don't think they will supplant our traditional banking system.

That's what anyone would guess but I was hoping for some kind of researched answer.

> I installed the Prime music app and found the catalog to be so limited (albeit "free" with my prime membership)

I wonder, how does the Prime endgame looks like for Amazon? Assuming almost every Amazon member upgrades, will Prime be profitable without a huge price hike? Something's gotta give at some point.

It's not even Vermont, he just wanted to trash it.

There is a lot of stuff you can't do to your own house/apartment without violating some rule or law. This is old. Airbnb can be disruptive in many negative ways and not every community feels that the trade-offs of letting them do as they please are worth it.

He also kind of shittalked his cofounder. Implicit in the setup of the piece is the fact that his cofounder was essentially clueless about everything.

"I asked my close friend of 20 years how he was doing. Dmitry answered, “Awesome! I love what we’re doing these days!” ... It was obvious that my most sarcastic friend genuinely meant every word. Little did we know then, that Dishero, the company we had co-founded a year and a half ago, would be shut down within the next 72 hours as a direct result of his answer."

I agree. I mean, Dishero was very young. I doubt that in a market as conservative as the one they were in they'd find the magic bullet in less than two years.

Interesting premise, if not exactly novel, but some could argue that, excepting some needed advances in medicine, we do have everything we need and we're still not satisfied. It comes down to this, will humanity ever design/invent something universally recognized as being perfect? I don't think so, I will still try to check out the book though.

I agree with this and it's baked into what I said. I wasn't referring to his use of labels.