stefanix

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a bit dated. Comparative linguistics has shown very convincingly that pretty much all languages have a similar set of complex features.

Even languages without a heritage, which are invented within two generations have complex features comparable to established languages. There are many good examples in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct."

Similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis I think "broken mindsets," and "poison," are exaggerations with little basis.

tl;dr It's really not that depressing. There are different ways of doing the same thing.

Developer here. I simply prefer satisfying defaults over crazy customization possibilities. Also dash and being able to call any file menu item through it is super fast and mostly mouse-less.

As somebody who used a laptop with touch screen and extensively uses the Unity Dash, I am getting increasingly perplexed by all this complaining about Unity (and also gnome, and windows 8) usability.

All of the above is easy to understand when you think of creativity as unconscious problem solving.

Also John Cleese has a great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ

Dev here. Moved from OSX to Ubuntu a year ago. Love not having to agree-click ULAs all the time. Setting up dev stacks is very often so much easier and better documented. Working with open source software to develop open source projects is very enjoyable and very often I feel this is just the beginning of something very profound.

With proprietary OSes I constantly have the feeling of banging against elaborately engineered limitations. This feels so counter-productive. Instead of producing something great why not spend incredible amounts of work-years on creating artificial limitations for the users, right. No thanks.

In other words I like my computers to be general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

You are mixing up what people can afford to what people think they need. It's a style your are criticizing. If anything Zurich has the highest frugality to wealth ratio on the planet, quite possibly.

> Creating a fake print that can fool the scanner is so much harder than stealing someone's debit/credit card.

No, it's not. Starbug used simple means starting from a photo of a fingerprint. The fact that fingerprints are blasted all over the place makes this very easy. You could probably even build a cheap machine that automates this process.

It appears you are implying that people in the US are well off because they have a lot of free time. Funny/sad thing is that this is far from reality. People in the US work more than almost any other nation in the world.

Funny, I just realized that I never think of the UK when reading about Europe. In a surveillance context it certainly feels closer to the US. And then I watched this far to often a couple of years ago ... in a desperate wish to find some humanizing qualities ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdlT7v476qY

Amending contracts before signing is a perfectly fine practice and should be done more often. I routinely do this to some reasonable extend.

I once singed up for a gym membership that had terrible stipulation to the point it was offending. I plastered the entire contract with "no" and "not" additions. It still went through.

Moved from MacBook Air/OSX to Ubuntu and super happy about it. The touchpad was tricky though. I had to deactivate the lower 20% (for clicking) and untrain me resting my thumb on the pad.

I switched to Linux after using OSX for 7 years. You do save a lot of time though not having to agree to EULAs and iTunes updates :)

Correct, it's called stylometry and means, given enough data, your normal writing is identifiable on the basis of content.

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

The biggest threat to the gov is quite possibly that Snowden's courage is contagious and it opens the flood gates on the more secret sides of power, stating with the intelligence and war industry.

It could potentially change how government currently works.

So far the actions of the Obama administration are quite consistent with walking a line between maximum deterrent and just not too much public uproar.

It's possible companies run an NSA module on their servers and let backdoor hacks happen based on an understanding the NSA will get pissed if they investigate.

This provides full PRISM access and allows for deniability of direct access.

Oh what's that? There is an NSA module most big companies run on their servers? Right, it's called SE Linux. The question that remains how do you build a backdoor that cannot easily be spotted in the source code. Maybe a weakness in a random number generator used for encryption. Oh what's that? The NSA does that too?

On Backdoor in encryption standard: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securityma...

On SE Linux: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-03/security-enh...

The possibility that Facebook actually deletes "all the data stored on you" is negligible! I give it 0.00000000000000000001% likelihood. This is against anything Facebook has ever done. Empty words!

For anybody who wants to read about this process in the form of a fascinating self-biography should read "Ghost in the Wire" by Kevin Mitnick.

Author complains "I learned that it means nothing when I hear it is open source and peer reviewed." Yet his article wonderfully illustrates the opposite.

I had the chance to meet Doug as a student a couple of times. He showed me and my friend the NLS system and thought us basic typing on the chord keyboard. He was the grandpa I never had who's wisdom extends to the technology of the future. I hold him in very fond memories.

From the last slide it appears M$ pretty much volunteered first, ahead of everybody else.

Was it one of these polls where they only call landlines? Not sure this means anything without exactly specifying how the poll was conducted.

There is certainly more you can do, specifically non-violent ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk1XbyFv51k http://beautifultrouble.org/

Nice, the atlantic just wrote an article along the same line. Even if you fully trust the current administration, why make yourself vulnerable to future ones ...

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/all-the-...

Cool, so you already had your your moment of outrage. It's ok to be outraged more than once ...

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline

I do agree that many of us knew about the privacy implications of software as a service already and the outrage is somewhat artificial and about reminding others.

It's still a notable event when huge amounts of personal data leave the different silos and is combined and exchanged. It's a breach of trust when you voluntarily give personal information to a company and then this information leaks to a third party where it's further exchanged with subcontractor companies. At this point accountability and transparency is completely lost.

If you have personal data on google and google abuses this information you have ways of dealing with it. You can change the service, out the company, sue, ... With an opaque shadow industry there is little you can do in case of abuse.

Good start to think about "nothing to hide". In addition there is no way of saying what becomes sensitive in the future and who might have access to the data. When pre-nazi germany collected religious census data it wasn't with the intention to supply the nazis with an efficient database to crack down on jews and other minorities. What can comfortably be public changes tremendously over time and who gets access to the data.

The question to ask yourself is really how much risk is tolerable that some data point will be used in the future to discriminate against you.

The other concern is the conformity this attitude breads. Do you really think everybody should refrain from testing the boundaries and adjust their actions to whatever the mainstream is? This way "nothing to hide" is an easy attitude. What kind of society actively discourages edgy thinkers and innovators and where does this lead to politically and culturally? Certainly not a place I want to be part of.

Google can't offer proper encryption because most of their business model is based on analyzing all the personal data they store. At least it's very unlikely and I wouldn't hold my breath.

not touching anything facebook even with a long stick ;)

Not opposed to Bret's ideas but also feel he has never looked into how artists use code and design interactions. Many like programming environments that are visual (like max/msp) with immediate feedback while other prefer the austerity of code. There is something very satisfying when going from code straight to simulation. It often feels more like materializing ideas than noodling around with guis.

Canonical example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQhoe_hJIZ8

CISPA will come back under a different name. Here is some historic context: http://blog.ted.com/2012/01/18/defend-our-freedom-to-share-o...

tl;dr "Time Warner called, they want you back on the couch!"