skore

No, no they should not. You really don't want to be involved with those kinda guys:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading

It's the sort of hyper-liberterianism that looks and sounds like a passable option until you consider it for more than a second. And then there are the proponents for this kind of insanity...

> When it is very clear that his motivation is his own interests and selling his car. And making more money for himself. Most businesses don't make it that obvious.

You cannot possibly be saying that with a straight face.

Pretty sure Musk has the high road rather solidly booked all to himself when it comes to his credibility concerning trying to change things for the better when you compare him to any other auto corp.

> An even bigger conflict of interest with auto dealers is that they make most of their profit from service, but electric cars require much less service than gasoline cars. There are no oil, spark plug or fuel filter changes, no tune-ups and no smog checks needed for an electric car. Also, all Tesla Model S vehicles are capable of over-the-air updates to upgrade the software, just like your phone or computer, so no visit to the service center is required for that either.

Gotta hand it to Musk - that's some smooth salestalk in what is supposed to be just voicing a public opinion against shady politics. I was halfway through the third sentence when I caught myself thinking - "indeed, that does sound like such a better dea--- Hey wait a minute!". Musk, you sneaky bastard! Never missing a chance to remind me why I want a dang tesla.

He is right and it's a terrific salespitch. That's the best kind of right.

No matter how frowned upon straight quoting wikipedia may be, this seems appropriate:

> Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself. --- Samuel Johnson

I think Mark Zuckerberg is sincere in his request. And I think his sincerity and thus his self-delusion is the far bigger, systemic problem.

Alright, ok, still - for an article that was put on cryptome, the whole thing seems pretty staged. If you buy from kinda-sorta Amazon, put your data on a device you don't want, send it back without checking you erased the data, just kinda-sorta trust that they will do it for you...

At some point this seems less like a * World Exclusive * FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION and more like... fishing for drama.

> He tries but doesn't ensure his data is fully deleted, but Amazon say they'll organise that (?!)

What am I missing here? Why did customer "A" put his personal data on a laptop he did not intend to use?

"It's like, if you — people of a certain age — would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures."

Having read Snow Crash... I'm getting used to appreciate Neal Stephensons rather heavy handed (if only at first glance) use of Sci-Fi tropes as very dry pragmatism.

Yes, this is feudalism, plain and simple. They're simply abusing basic democratic institutions to obfuscate the fact.

At the very least, maybe this overly clever joke of showing off that you know the original name of the service will finally die with it.

This is, as always, the elephant in the room.

A lot of people are seeing their internet use throttled for certain services lately, so even the supposedly "simple and fast" alternatives are taking a beating in the race these days.

(Bittorrent) P2P technology is a marvel to me. It's such a simple concept and the recent advances at distributed links, encrypting and/or obfuscating the traffic etc. have done a good job keeping up with attempts at limiting it. It's fast, takes little effort to use and makes incredible use of the resources that the internet offers while being more true to its core values (fault tolerance, distributed data, "route around censorship" etc.).

If you want to (and have a modern connection), you can find TV Shows in high definition shortly after their original broadcast, with zero advertisement interruptions and at download speeds that vastly exceed realtime streaming. Even in the rare cases where you cannot stream what you have downloaded so far (because of early missing chunks), simply waiting a minute or two will usually do the trick. What I would call the "inconvenience level" is down to where the time you need to wait for your content to be ready is about what you need for getting a round of snacks. Ergo: Virtually Zero.

A content consumer like myself, in particular using a GNU+Linux system, is receiving vastly superior service at pretty much zero cost (save for effort and internet fees). Not to mention that for a content publisher, bittorrent is a mindblowingly simple and cost effective tool.

For a while, I was actually considering moving away from my usual routine of "watch first, buy properly (in disc form) later". With all the BS they are still attempting to shovel into those, however (in particular the recent net-neutrality and surveillance crap), I find it harder and harder to ease up on my stance.

In my opinion they should burn it all down, put it on bittorrent and charge in crypto money. Pretty sure we will be moving to some form of that eventually, might as well get it over with before we have to endure even more collateral damage from outdated monopolies trying a little too hard having it their way.

What it comes down to, for me, is the question of trust. If there are 30 messaging applications, I will use the one that somebody I trust uses or recommends. Otherwise, I would have to spend a lot of time searching through the options ("collateral damage", as mentioned before).

Managing trust on a large scale (or in terms of the big app-stores, ultimate scale) is very hard because people are very different in their needs and in which providers they would trust in the first place.

Funnily enough, even if you decentralize this process as I'm trying to do, you might end up serving all clients with 90% of the same product. But those 10% make all the difference in the world.

In a sense, what I'm trying to do is to make that dynamic of relationships and trust the main focus of how the network is built. It is a marketplace of marketplaces that rise or fall depending on how much value they provide and how much trust users put into them.

The problem with "apps" is fundamentally one of curation which IMHO is, in turn, a problem of centralization.

If you set out to build "the one big marketplace", you inevitably get to a place where mostly what your marketplace offers is crap, because you have optimized it towards providers putting stuff onto your marketplace.

Thus, in building "the big marketplace", you necessarily fail to optimize it towards users getting value out of the marketplace, because you kinda sorta hoped that would be taken care of by "free market" pressures. (And also because it's one of those "hard problems" that you would rather forget about and build some neat code instead.) But it's the users bearing the collateral damage.

I'm currently working on a package/application distribution system that is decentralized and the "app-pocalypse" is one of the reasons why I made it so. Being decentralized means that the value you are getting out of it depends mainly on the trust you invest in your immediate channel provider who in turn now has a responsibility to keep you happy. By splitting up the relationship and giving people proper roles instead of the delusion of a grand audience that is fit for whatever some app developers shovel into the system, I hope it will end up providing actual value instead of just a top-down revenue system.

Having worked on it for a while now, it always strikes me as weird how we are all on the Internet (which by its design is fault tolerant and decentralized), building these centralized, monolithic services that inevitably fail (either in a big way due to security reasons or in a slow way, like in the app-pocalypse) for the same reasons.

In Linus Torvalds' talk on git at google[0], he mentions that the reason why he did not choose SVN (one of the reasons why he saw no other way but to build GIT) was that SVNs mission statement read "To create a compelling replacement for CVS"... which Linus hated with a passion and thus could not see why he would even use "a compelling replacement" of.

Interestingly enough, in the 'Open Source projects and poisonous people' talk[1] with two SVN developers, they mention how they chose that line specifically to make sure that everybody is on the same page with the scope of the project - improving upon what people knew and were used to instead of wild, new things. Specifically because they would often have people come into the community with some grand plans that would have just exploded the scope.

It is of course arguable to what extent there could be a general rule to this, but in this case, GIT is just so fundamentally and obviously the better option than SVN. Had somebody tried to make SVN into GIT, it would have simply killed SVN, so it was the right course of action to make it a new project. SVN was destined to die by its design.

To see the GIT adoption rates these days (particularly due to tools like GitHub) is very encouraging to people who like to think that sometimes, starting over fresh is the only option. Of course, the thing you want to build really has to be that much better than the old thing you're trying to replace.

So I agree with you - it's alright to say that GIT is better than SVN. The crucial point to me, though, is that it is so much better. So much better that it is worth the effor to build and worth the effort of the community to switch.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-3E8pyjFo

Absolutely their right. Pretty sure they would have made a very good deal with the film author and everybody would have benefited.

> We don't allow half a million kickstarters based on our ip without any deals in place. :/

Using the term "IP" leaves a sour taste in my mouth, though.

The other day, I was talking to a friend in England and the topic of The Second came up. I told her that even though I have no first hand knowledge, I still find it deeply, deeply disturbing and humbling to ponder what happened during that time.

She offered words of consolation: 'Well, but that really was a long time ago.' - 'Maybe, but all those people are still dead.'

I refuse to find closure with that part of my countries' history. The least I can do is be eternally sad about what my country has done to the world.

Thank you to the OP and thank you for sharing those links. They have reminded me once again to stay deeply disturbed and humbled.

> I can't wait until they start producing TV shows

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/4/5379520/amazon-studios-the-...

Maybe you can... wait a little longer?

> Not one American has been found who has been demonstrably harmed by any NSA program.

First they came for some foreigners and I did not speak out - because I was an American.

Interesting. Couldn't they just run a tracert and, through broad data comparisons, prove quite elegantly what the holdups in the chain are?

Reinforces one of my golden rules for internet discussions:

Gender Discussions on the Internet - Not even once.

And there I was, thinking I had an original thought.

Then again, this just moves it from clever joke to irony. I'll take it.

Given enough eyeballs, all jokes are shallow.

Very happy to see these cases be increasingly either laughed out of court or used to punish trolls.

> naturally emergent nanobots

That's an astonishing thought. "Look at all those bacteria that we cannot possibly eliminate with conventional means!" - "Well, maybe in the future, we could build nanobots that kill them individually...".

Yep, already there. Viruses. Really seems like a terrific shortcut.

I was pondering whether I should put in a "or husbands" qualifier. Seems like I should have!

I also fixed the spelling.

> My wife is not well and was recently hospitalized, but her birthday is coming up. I think it would make her happy to receive a lot of birthday cards. Could you please send her a birthday card?

Wait, so your wife is sick and you think a lot of cards from random strangers will cheer her up? In my experience, that's rarely how wives (or for that matter: husbands) work.

I'm all for random acts of kindness... not too sure about soliciting them.

If you want to check out the games so far: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=81142

Phew, game #2 is a real blood bath: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1736633

> a diet rich in extra-virgin olive oil, grass-fed beef and wild fish provides “life-sustaining fat that modern American diets are so desperate for.”

So a diet completely unsustainable when considering a human population of 7 billion?

Indeed! Did the same for my own youtube thingie: https://github.com/daviddeutsch/yt-sanegrid/

Careful, though - Google is fighting back against this and in many cases, you don't get all resolutions when disabling dash.

Pro Tip: Just use github pages to instantly give people a demo. All you need for that is to make a gh-pages branch and rename your main file to index.html.