LarrySDonald

Actually the US government spent quite a lot on the infrastructure. Around '97, I moved from Sweden to the US, after running an ISP there since '93. Since it was an obvious concern I checked and the US was pumping in slightly more per capita, while being ~40% more population dense. So no problem (I thought) - if anything speed and availability will rocket up faster here. However, back there the government kept control of the lines (not entirely unlike US telecom). Net neutrality was kind of a given - obviously the government can't (at least without massive legal changes) give preferential speed to some peoples information directly (i.e. blatant censorship - if you're a private enterprise you can limit stuff like that, not so much if you're the govt). Back home things rolled along swimmingly, the same crew I ran with back then are still online, some of them whining that they haven't pulled gigabit fiber into their areas and have to settle for 100 megabit symmetric. Even before the millennium 10 Mbit symmetric fiber was becoming pretty normal all the way into residences. No one really pulled copper wire for comm anymore really, if a new line went in, fiber. Need to redraw power lines? Throw in fiber. Water? Fiber. Just dug up a sewer line? Throw down some fiber, you never know..

Here? I can get 20 Mbit (5 down) in a fairly large town. Some cities have more, but I've seen none where 50 or 100 Mbit symmetric is considered the sort of "lowest tier" broadband (kind of like "at least it's not dialup"). For only 2-3x the price. Why? Because no one with the peoples actual interest kept the reins, they just handed shit over to the six majors and told them to get building. Why would they, when they're already competing against no one but themselves? Cuts into profit, stuff like that.. So you get to pay more in tax dollars for it, more for the service itself and it's way slower. The same seems to be true for korea (et al, the other fast nations), they're not spending more, they're just negotiating harder with those contracted to build it. Now, Sweden is talking about selling it off (since the whole place is shifting right). Predictably, prices are going up and speed increase is stagnating. Idiots, all of them. The free market rocks for optimizing low entry threshold fields and optimizing already existing solutions. It's horrible at things that are mostly infrastructure based, with high cost of entry and nearly all costs being in fixed infrastructure improvement chunks. Highways, telecom, power, water, etc all work the same - if you want to run them free market style, prepare to suffer until you decide to simply join forces and run it jointly without a profit goal bidding it out in small enough chunks to make actual competition possible.

If the user kept the secret key, that's not much of an online wallet - you might as well just use your secret key at home and send it directly yourself. They could encrypt it with a password or a pin that isn't saved on their site so that you would have to enter it to decrypt the secret key. That still counts on the site not just lying and keeping it or you getting it keylogged or otherwise compromised on your side. Many online wallets do nothing of the kind, they simply have the secret key and use it to send. Someone with your password or access to the site could do the same. It's the same as a normal bank really, you have no physical/technical control over what they or someone who snuck into the bank does. You can control your access credentials (passwords, cards, account numbers, ID info, etc) and that's good and well, but there's nothing preventing it from disappearing on their side besides what they (not you) do for security.

You'd imagine so. It wouldn't be legal though since modern.ie is for testing purposes only. Though I highly doubt anyone much would care if someone ran vitualbox and a copy of XP/Vista or something.

I suppose in a sense it becomes a bit of a worry if you run too lightweight on the VM which after all will have to contain your banking credentials (sort of the opposite of firing up a VM when you're doing something that feels too sketchy to run on the main system).

It would be useful in part because another surgeon can assess how well he is doing before actually stacking up enough bad/good statistics to notice. It's also useful for training, just like watching yourself swing a golf club or a baseball bat or rereading your old code can help you, with the aid of others, see what you could improve on. Doing the wrong thing over and over in a vacuum doesn't make for much learning..

Well, there's no particular reason that part couldn't be swapped too, sort of like swapping the motherboard in a PC and then connecting everything else you already had. Yes, that would be essentially upgrading to a "new" phone but if the standard held you could still use the screen, camera, memory and so forth which isn't possible now (potentially later upgrading those bit by bit as need be).

This is really the major issue. "Growth" in the sense of "increase in actual production" is going terrific (granted, mostly by virtue of "Copper is practically the new oil - reserves, especially easy to access them" matters). What isn't going so great is the second part of "We should be careful with that and funnel it back into the national economy. Pay to play - the copper and other metals are only there once and we know what they are worth".

You can't really grow forever, but you can still grow and they do. But this is sort of like the early oil rush in the midwest. Oh wow, holy crap, people will give us 25 cents a barrel for crude! And we don't even have to dig it up, they'll even come over and do it! How cool is that?!? Uhh, not that cool when you were sitting on top of oil reserves the size of saudi arabia that are now all but bone dry with some entrepreneurial farmers pumping up a few barrels for a slight short term profit.

The main law that seems to be missing everywhere is "X amount stays here. No really. Invest whatever you want, but a certain part of the gained value is stuck in the local economy and another chunk is paid to locals because OUR HOUSE".

Temp CCs. There may or may not be money on it when the fee comes in..

This was an actual challenge at a hack-a-thon I was at way way back (I'm guessing around '92). The total instructions were pretty much "(best game category) build a pac man variant", the restriction to pac man only mostly there to render quite a bit of the prior-to-the-event design less useful when it was announced. It was over 48h though. There were some pretty creative entries. I built one with more ghosts (increasing per level) with generated mazes, but from a predetermined per-level seed so that level 1 was always level 1, but there were still infinite(ish) levels (I was in a kind of Elite phase again after Elite II). Didn't even end up entering, I'd had a HD crash a few days before so I didn't even have my normal go-to bag-o-tricks in terms of stuff to render, time, do controls, etc and did it from scratch. By deadline it worked "almost some" but not enough to really be playable.

That's the "use it to buy things" which isn't utility. The laptop I'm typing on will not be worth more later. Ever. This very second is as much as it'll be worth, which is perhaps half of what I bought it for a year and a half ago. But I bought it, because I need a laptop. I fully expect it to be continually worth less, just like the couch I'm sitting on, the watch I'm wearing, the table I keep the laptop on, etc. But I put up with that because I'm using them. Bitcoins are useful for these things, but that's not utility - you don't buy a bitcoin and (supposing they dropped heavily in value year after year) shrugged and said "Oh well, I need this bitcoin for this so I'm keeping it even if I get very little in return for it in five years when I craigslist it as '1 used bitcoin, still in pretty good shape'".

Yahoo has been in it's death throes for quite a while. I'm sure they'll survive in a sort of AOL sense, but they are quite desperate to stay relevant. News is likely their last outpost and even that is starting to slip very fast.

It's sad to see, what used to be a crack directory, social hub (besides AOL one of the first true social networks), email, map and IM providers is now barely an afterthought and throwing the next cool "stand back I got this" manager to the wolves. But I can understand the frustration. Google and Apple both would have been happy to snap it up at one point, but it's too late and there is zero value left in the company besides the really nice Yahoo! name, and there's no big name to sell it to beyond perhaps AT&T or someone else that may want the infrastructure for something.

> the credit card industry HAS and IS deploying the most up-to-date technology. In some regions, e.g. US, there are legal or infrastructure barriers that take time to overcome.

And why is that, you think? People are somewhat surprised that a magstripe is still even considered valid here and have been for years. I've seen zero chip readers in the US. It's been more than five years since I've heard of a merchant using magstrips in the EU.

The industry in the US isn't toothless. Nor is the government. They seemed perfectly capable of banning betting and sales of illegal goods or donations to causes they disapprove of. Yes, they are now starting to roll out stuff. I have no idea how they're going to do it seeing as they're apparently still living in the remote past. Can they roll out all this by 2017? Perhaps. Meanwhile, in the EU Square Up is distributing free chip readers for android or iphone, same as the US side does for magstripes. Which they can then transmit over the nice 100 Mbit fiber. Apparently, it wasn't that damn hard, except in the US.

Having someone visiting from Africa, there is apparently the inverse belief in some areas (sitting on a too-warm surface causes bladder infections/UTIs). There is definitely a European obsession with "fresh air". I'm not sure how warranted it is, I think most people (if being honest) agree that it's more of a "Ok, time out - I want to go somewhere quiet because this situation is wearing me down" and wanting "fresh air" is a good reason if you don't smoke and don't have a dog.

That's true, but also the problem. Which university should, then, these best students hang out at? I think we all agree they should be at the one that is the best at teaching them, or which has a style of teaching that works well for them. But we wouldn't know that because most of the ratings can't (or rather won't) discern this. Why is school A the best? It has the best students. Why do they have the best students? Because school A is the best school. So it's not bad for figuring out where the school you belong at is, but a complete non-metric for the school itself - they can't tell how they rate at actual education or if they're a good choice teaching wise (or if all the students would be better off congregating elsewhere - they'd still have each other as well as potentially better teachers).

Car seating is DMV in the US. And yes, they have specs - you can't claim it seats more than average amounts of humans without backing that up by claiming they're unusually small.

If you're saying we should aspire to be as honest as the car industry, could we perhaps aim a little higher and aim for perhaps as honest as the nutritional supplement industry or the mafia?

Goes back further, even the C64/C20 was hard to squeeze the whole ram out of unless you wanted to scratch build everything. Even a Timex 1000/zx81 didn't get full use of the 2/1k ram. I'm thinking this has been standard literally forever (I'm assuming no one argued over usable space v total space pre-transistor).

That doesn't mean it's right of course - space post-os would be a great spec to have. Also a motivation for more people to question why. A lot of the overhead (CPU, ram and long term storage) on a regular computer or phone is there for good reasons, but I would venture to say the majority of "no-load load" is questionable at best.

Same here - I learned/used commodore HW with cathode ray timing. I thought that's how all of the others worked too, it's not like NES is wildly less powerful than a C20/C64, and was a little disappointed that this wasn't how it was done.

It really seemed to go out the window much earlier except for arcade machines before cathode-ray went out of style. I never really saw it widely used except NES on future platforms. If anything, the recent reboot with Wii (any screen, trigger off IR LEDs on top of it for direction) is a revival.

It does sound like a bit of a strange assertion. gcc is amazingly core to so much and (in this case importantly) so much commercial. Not even the linux kernel itself has this many things that need it to be continued.

Could it be ousted? Sure, if a gnu (or otherwise foss) competitor steps up and does it better (good luck..) but in that case, no problem. Could it be that the gnu/linux distributions and applications running the majority of the internet will have to rely on a proprietary compiler or die? That's just wildin' - issues aside that's nothing even any of the major corporations could really suggest.

I think it's partly because so many of us grew up basically hating him for the software we had to work under (and before it's brought up, no, no gun to the head, but usually there were few options and for the most part you work with what the boss tells you to work with), rightly or wrongly.

It's also partly because there are some flaws in his methods here and there and it isn't perfect. That's more of a reason stemming from a complete disconnect from how charity projects usually work. It's very rare to see any metric, useful or otherwise, nor any consideration toward "Ok, so looking at the data, is there a better approach?". Most take a kind of "field of dreams" approach and at best confirm that they're doing more good than harm and leave it at that, rather than heavily crunch into how much good it's doing or isn't doing, how well it works compared to other approaches, what could be learned and applied to future efforts including area differences, and so forth. That's terrible - just because something is better than nothing is no excuse to not attempt to optimize it. Yet it never seems to happen outside of medicine (a field used to living and dying on it's data) and even then often taking a rather naive approach and considering improvements in cases rather than a more bulk-medicine approach similar to military medicine (people are dying constantly at a high rate, so the problem isn't so much how well an individual treatment works as how well a treatment, applied shotgun over a group, works considering it's cost).

These were kind of my thoughts. I love having a smartphone and even before they existed I tried to get the dumb ones to do the maximum possible via sms. I really like being able to not worry about finding my way someplace or being able to think "Hmm, I want to go to a museum/eat at 5 guys/walk around a park/swim. Where's the closest one?" and be told. I like being able to check my email or take a picture of something I find amusing. But it's not ruling my life, it's a tiny fraction of it. If people want to know so badly what I'm thinking, eating or doing, well, call or text I guess - I don't have time to document it. I've found very little disturbance to anything, the only possible time I might miss something is if I'm somewhere deathly boring and I choose to ignore it in favor of browsing and even that isn't common.

This is already standard on ereaders, nearly all (even if it's a tablet or PC app) do this. I don't like it, more than 1/3rd of the time a page turn is accompanied by a "back to last page, back to current page" as it annihilates my flow (yes, that includes dead trees).

VT100 may have something to do with this though. Straight scroll isn't optimal either. When reading long texts, I prefer to have it presented in chunks, but retain 1/8th-1/4th of the information I was already looking at in case I need to refresh where I was just now. If I can't have that, a straight scroll (bar or paper) is preferable, and if I can't have that, page to page isn't so bad either.

Depends on how visible your name->email is. I got one yesterday to my current non-public email address (never used for anything except person to person email, and usually not even that), from the one guy I know who uses yahoo email. Told him he might want to make sure his AV is in shape and change his password. Still no idea if it's from this or something else, he discovered that he had a bit of malware (nothing extreme, your average user level) so it could have been anything, but the timing is pretty suspicious considering his setup has gotten infected exactly once over about the four years I've known him (that I know of, but I have no doubt I'd be the first to know).

For some absurd reason I read "Cable porn", all the way through the first page of pictures. I was further confounded by that there were indeed some cables (although nothing that super impressive) but none were very prominent and many seemed to have no cables at all in them..

Forgotten doesn't exactly mean "unliked" though. Unless whatever pages I hit "like" on in some situation make lots of noise, my "like"s are near-permanent - I probably won't even remember it's there. If they do make noise, it really needs to be enough to be seriously annoying before I bother unliking.

Of course, I didn't like his page, but I'm probably not that atypical. A lot of people use facebook once in a great while and make almost no effort to keep their page up to date, reflective of current friends, etc.

Depends a little on what you run on the Kindle. It's perfectly possible to run 100% open source. Amazon isn't exactly making it super convenient, but they're doing very little to prevent it. Stock, of course, they retain the ability to do so but on the other hand A) sponsor the hardware and B) provide updates and very good support.

I consider it a pretty fair tradeoff. They're not stopping you from churning your own butter, so to speak, but do count on you deciding it's easier to just run their stock stuff. Like a lot of semi-locked hardware, it's not like they'd be such floozies about proliferating the hardware if they weren't making a lot of it back in book sales.

I remember it well. It seemed like such a solid idea - be able to send money to anyone with only both parties responsibility for what it was, just like handing cash over. I pushed it hard at the time, figuring it was the best bet for being able to finally do transaction freely. Three years later, yeah. You can send cash to anyone. Except, you know.. anyone dealing in drugs. Or porn. Or gambling. Or potentially illegal electronics. Or hebs. But anyone else. Well, not you personally - we dislike you already so for you, no one, but other people might..

I remember thinking that was strange. How do you settle an antitrust lawsuit out of court? Ask every consumer ever to agree that 10c is fair for having been prevented from having the option of saying "No OS or GPL OS please, I'll sort it out myself when I get home"? I don't recall getting one red cent, even though I was sold hardware through several vendors who had been bribed to not offer me options. While I'm sure many consumers would still have said "No, I need things installed" I can also see many saying "Nah, I'm not forking up for an OS, I'll run GPL" or "Nah, I'll... No. (pirated CD at the ready back home)".

By the same token, half the crap on a fresh install nowadays doesn't really benefit either although it's hard to say which direction the money is flowing, I suppose if they're charging me less for installing McAffee/ton of ISPs/etc whatever, I'll opt in and remove them. But I still don't have the option or anything..

I was a little disappointed by the lack of resolution. I remember seeing some of these, one with mindblowing resolution. As the article states "You can see a closeup of the statues nose" it turns out.. you can't. You can see a full-screen of the statue itself, but that's about as far as it goes. While that's impressive, it's hardly cutting edge and overselling it makes it more disappointing than just presenting it.

It'll get more complicated later I'm sure, but yeah, that's the current patch. Except replace "dissertation on kittens" with "gay porn collection" (or "straight porn collection" if you're publicly gay. or whatever else makes good sense to encrypt, but is still perfectly legal).

I, being one of the precise brats with trash-80s mentioned, bumped into it in 84-86 era. Fortran and pascal were, to me, options to basic and all three were somewhat ok, perfectly understandable and no use whatsoever since they were much to slow to do anything remotely cool on our tiny boxes. In high school four years down the line, I bumped into it again, trying to rewrite old fortran code in C and bumping into stuff written in pascal off and on, sometimes being pressured to write in Pascal. Again, we (true to our bratty nature) had no concept of what all the old timers were bickering about - unless you used C or assembler to get close to the metal, who cares? Write in Modula2, Perl, Basic, Lisp, ML, Smurf.. whatever. Once you're not using what the machine uses, pick your poison - it's of little concern to us, though sure, we'll write in it and read it it you'd like. Took another decade before I saw that there was some actual merit to debating what language to use since it influences the style quite a lot, but I still think it's perhaps given a little more credit than it is due.