whyme

What indication did I give you that leads you to believe I'm making that assumption?

I didn't make any claim to suggest why poor nations are poor, did I? I simply suggested that as poor nations evolve, their people will consume more.

I'm not sure you could to do straight math like that as it does depend on the implementation. I presume there would be corporate tax laws introduced that would re-coupe most dollars associated with employees. So a govt could craft whatever policies they want in order to make it work out.

I don't think it matters which. We are potentially going to go from 7 billion people to 9 billion people. At the 7 billion mark we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone were to consume at the level Americans do, so where does that leave us is a few decades while the poorer nations are evolving at such a rapid pace? Ideally we get engineers and scientists to start with x amount of resources and x number of people then learn along the way.

Obviously this is not a new idea... Twenty years ago I sat around with college mates, in Canada, listing the merits of the "Guaranteed Income" and quite frankly I still support the idea today.

If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guaranteed Income (even if you had a small group dedicated to counter fraud abuse).

I could list out the many benefits and the nay-sayer objections with counter arguments, but after twenty years I've come to realize money distribution is not the problem. The problem is money = power and society is hell bent on gaining power.

The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together. But quite frankly we as a society are not there yet and I doubt we will be in my lifetime.

I wish I could find the HN comment from a few months back addressing the same idea. If I remember correctly there was consensus that the US govt has enough legal power over American corporations to force their hand with even independent international subsidiaries. As stated earlier, I wish I could find the previous thread covering this.

I have to say, while I really like this article, I think it goes too far with the statement: "Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot."

He prefaces that statement with a very black and white example of people who ban the color yellow. Using that example every reader can agree they are idiots, but in truth these issues are never that black and white. So calling them idiots, and suggesting you would become one by entering the debate goes a little too far - IMHO.

I've done business with IBM at a corporate level and I assure you that's not what's happening here. It's the clients whom are buying services from IBM saying "whoa, I'm using your services, but I don't want our data falling into the US govt's hands", that they are addressing. IBM is appeasing these clients by telling them they'll locate their data elsewhere, yet there's quite a bit of data attached to and flowing into those services.

I find pg's earlier writings, like this one, to be the best.

How is it that IBM would gain business? They are still an American company which makes them equally susceptible to this form of data theft. I can't see handing my data over to IBM any more than I would Facebook or Amazon. Surely the article could have picked a better example.

Do we really need comments telling people to read the article before commenting?

I once worked at a company that made code to be owned by the gov't of Canada. I'm not sure if the government imposed the rules, but we did have strict rules to use Canadian word versions. Though this was like 1999 so I'd be shocked if that's still the case.

Edit: not to imply a reason for the noted situation, just an example to lend some credence/reasoning elsewhere

The the only sentiment I take from the article is that wealthy countries are open with their data compared to poorer countries, which author seems to believe, are intentionally hiding things.

That does not sit well with me. I'm from Canada and have spent a decade making use of gov't data and while Canada does open up a bunch of it, 90% of what they open is benign. The important data, or rather the data which would expose problems, is kept from the public.

These wealthy countries also have other ways to hide even the open data from prying eyes, they simply charge high prices for the data. This easily prevents the general public, who would use the data more critically, from actually using the data.

We could create empowerment for the people.

I deleted my Facebook account 3 years ago and up until a few months ago I was able to spin up anonymous google accounts when I needed them. Fortunately I have the skills to create Facebook and Google equivalents for both myself and my family.

We just need to get more options out there and fragment the industry to the point where data collection becomes difficult again. Plus we need to lower the hurdles to get alternatives up and running.

So let's remove the barriers, remove the sign offs and make it really easy for people to find alternatives.

If culturally we can get to a point where the world denounces privacy breeches and technologically we advance tools to easily expose these breeches, can't we establish some privacy standards and keep them in check? We don't need perfection, we just need to make the cost of privacy breeches high enough and risky enough to create a meaningfull disincentive.

I hadn't thought I was doing that, but thank you for saying it. I'll re-read and I give it some more thought.

Makes me wonder why stories like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6107478

are so easily killed off on HN.

HN is built using arc which is really just an abstraction layer built with racket (previously mzscheme).

If iOS or android app development succeed, then you would be proving yourself wrong as they would be displacing the entrenched technology. It's that, or they are not real competition.

I have no pipe dreams. Displacing the aforementioned technologies with something better is inevitable. I just gave an example of how easy better ideas are to be found.

But not limited to them.

One mans junk is another mans treasure. Looks like you're offended.

I was suggesting to ditch specific technologies, not the "web" as you put it. So it's... what the web means... That I referred to.

I think you're making a great number of assumptions.

There's no reason we can't keep backward compatibility as long as it's desired.

No one is "throwing away the web", what ever that even means.

We can always put the current stuff in a nice museum and pay tribute to the technological importance it achieved during the evolution of the web! vs an evolution of any seriously flawed specific piece of technology.

Also, this really is not a "want", rather the real problems are creating real needs.

It's not a case of the wheel needing to be round enough. The wheel is old and has not been able to keep pace. We have many people walking aside the wagon repairing the wheel at every turn. Those people are the current browsers. The wagon is the current technology and the people going along for the ride can see just how painful this is.

Anyone who has attempted to implement trivial things, like thematic scrollbars or cross-browser capable code, or dealt with dom thrashing via JavaScript, knows the amount of effort going in (or knowledge required) to do trivial things is ridiculous; considering how long we've been travelling down this road. Why are we still using a wagon? And why do we want to build more of them running in parallel?

At a really high level...

Create an entirely different model. One that acts as a hybrid between a full blown inefficient co-ordinate system and, plausibly, a more efficient box model.

We could start by modelling 'movement' which equates to objects having 1. A reference point, 2. A magnitude and 3. A direction.

It would be beneficial to do this in such a way that one could apply functions to said model achieving a reactive design that gives you a sense of a full blown co-ordinate system while achieving simpler mechanisms for ease in development and efficiency.

I know that's pretty high level stuff, but in my mind I can see a fairly clear path to achieve a significant improvement.

XHTML 2.0 was not a worthy successor. Apologies if my hatred for the current technology is coming through, but hey... At least I'm being honest.

Well the sooner we start the better. ;)

I would have thought ditching HTML, the box model, CSS and JavaScript to be a more important objective that should come sooner than this. Or another way to put this would be: Wouldn't development efficiency/simplicity be more important than running the current junk in parallel?

Sadly, we live in a world where it's quite possible that phones like these are nothing more than a ploy to lure NSA targets in. They need to get people, who have something to hide, to feel safe again.

Guessing applicant quality is making a judgment of their capability, which is the core point of the article. I never suggested anyone was judging solely on a persons worth. I am suggesting that getting to know the person provides better insight in all regards.

Edit: And quite frankly hiring a programmer solely on programming capability can often lead to disastrous consequences. So if you can see some higher quality examples, it's worth investigating - IMHO.

So we've gone from "Don't judge a book by its' cover" to 'Don't judge a book by its' content'?

How about don't judge anyone until having "walked a mile in their shoes"? Or even... "Don't judge".

Ideally, "before you judge...", you at least spend some time getting to know the person to find out a little more about who it is you're judging. And maybe that's really the issue.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/judge

There's no such thing as mass surveillance being used solely for either good or evil. At least as long as people are not perfect, which I expect will be forever.