Xenmen

Yes, 'universal within the defined scope'. Everything within that service.

Microsoft Windows doesn't have a backdoor to data on your android phone, but its backdoor is still universal within the scope of your your Windows installation'. Do you have a more appropriate term he could've used? I'm not familiar with one offhand, if you know one I'd appreciate you sharing it.

I think the point is that in writing something like systemd it's more likely to be the norm than if you were, say, writing a Ruby server.

Thank-you so much for sharing Life in Life!

It's the perfect way to convey how complicated transistor-level emulation is to design...

Preserving dying languages is not unlike basic archaeology, preserving our past so that future generations can understand it, in a way that isn't superficial.

The way you put it, "the emotion of the people who feel it's important", is more sufficient justification, unless you propose it's better to sacrifice any human experience or paradigm that doesn't fill someone's coffers.

I have a better idea; municipally subsidized automated agriculture, to be distributed to all citizens.

This has the added benefit of removing fear of starvation from starting a business, or from doing charity work. Housing and other costs are still an issue, but money's gotta come from somewhere. Printing more of it devalues the money, building automated farms will not devalue food.

"Rich Person Acts Like Bigotted Asshole: World Agape in Awe"

Well, it's funny you mention that, because I think kids are right to question compulsory pedagogy: http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm

I think your drive to learn is what's really valuable (disclaimer, I'm 23). Looks to me like a lot of people give up on learning anything at some point, and just rot away.

The fact you're still learning something radically new for you at 31 means your soul hasn't been crushed. Stay that way!

I took a couple years not coding after a stress attack, and just recently I've been getting back into it. Entire days debugging, writing, learning; it's the biggest joy I have in life besides music and my two guinea pigs. It's also the most creative and powerful tool suite I have. Maybe it's like that for you too.

I had a dilemna in my late teens, I thought it was too late to learn to program. Most of the best people I know of started around age 11. I decided I would never become a programmer, I just couldn't compete. Then I went to university and by chance, took an intro course, had a good prof, and learned anyway. I still can't compete, I only got one short job as a programmer, but I'm a lot happier for understanding how the Internet works, and my computer, and cpu design, and... everything.

So, I don't know at all how your age will affect getting hired. Maybe just don't mention how recently you learned to program :]

Regardless, I'll bet your life is more worth living for having learned more computer science, so at least for that, keep it up.

Automated food production at the municpal level, tax funded. You solve a whole lot of other problems at the same time.

There's a lot of understandable barriers to implementing that, but it's the only reasonable path I see. Guaranteed minimum wage is fundamentally broken, because cash is not an innately useful resource. Food is.

Soylent highlights the path to solving the regulation nightmare that surrounds agriculture. It's a hell of a lot easier to verify a soylent mixture is to spec, and the processes that created it, than it is to verify agriculture.

Soon the miracle of rocks to bread will be as ordinary as instantaneous global communication.

Isn't this actually fraud?

It's identical to giving an ad clicker script to your readers to artificially bump up your ad revenue.

Certainly; if you can audit the source and reflash the device yourself :]

But that's unthinkable until it's possible to build alternative devices locally as cheaply and easily as it is to buy one of these devices, without such competition we'll never have the choice.

Assaulting a person is neither legal nor ethical

She should be going to the police, not tweeting.

As it is, depending on jurisdiction, she seems to be committing the crime of defamation. There's nothing she can accomplish here, except to erode the credibility of the journal, for...?

Perhaps she has some economic interest, perhaps a 'Linux journal by women' that she plans to chair? I'm very suspicious of the motives of any person making such an ad hominem attack.

I have a raspi with ArkOS as a home server, and it's good. Some minor stability bugs presently, but the user interface is beyond excellent compared to other home-hosting solutions.

[For a purported breakthrough with such grand plans for reshaping the food industry, I found Soylent to be a punishingly boring, joyless product. From the plain white packaging to the purposefully bland, barely sweet flavor to the motel-carpet beige hue of the drink itself, everything about Soylent screams function, not fun. It may offer complete nourishment, but only at the expense of the aesthetic and emotional pleasures many of us crave in food.] [It suggests that Soylent’s creators have forgotten a basic ingredient found in successful tech products, not to mention in most good foods. That ingredient is delight.]

Christ, it's as if he's willfully ignored everything; that's the POINT of Soylent, to give the option of a functional meal not for pleasure, so that you actually have a choice whether. Right now you don't, you have non-nutritious meals that don't take preparation time and are cheap, and nutritious meals that take vast amounts of time to prepare and/or are generally more expensive to acquire/prepare.

Now you have a third choice, complete nutrition at cost, minus the pleasure associated with the above two choices.

The issue is that, given a little more time, we'll see a "one-size-fits-all" captcha breaker, one that needs little to no modification to break the captcha on new sites.

A lot of ordinary people seem to be barred from doing anything by willful ignorance. It seems to be a rational decision too; if they let themselves fall into Stockholm syndrome, they won't be weeded out for 'fighting the system'. Just having an attitude your employer doesn't like is enough to be denied opportunities, or work at all.

^People need relief from this fear, and time to read and become informed.

People are working on bringing convenience to self-hosting. Don't assume that freedom precludes comfort: https://arkos.io/

But... Mozilla IS irrelevent without it's differentiating principles.

Microsoft sacrificed backwards compatibility with Vista and look where that got them...

Funny this happening near the end of the filming of James Rolfe's movie about the E.T. game...

http://cinemassacre.com/2012/11/10/avgn-the-movie-trailer/

The more people investigating and reminding us of the lessons, the better.

Relatedly, Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Space as culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNxnCzz5oQE

I'd agree with the both of you on the value of big space exploration projects as driving our culture.

Okay, sure. There's R&D for the $40,000 arm.

There's R&D for the $50 arm too. They didn't just download the code and print plans from Github.

Justifying a fourty grand pricetag based on R&D costs is absurd in the face of this competing arm (which we should note is not actually $50, just $50 to replace plastic printed components).

The point is that the price difference is several orders of magnitude, and R&D was independently conducted by both groups, therefore R&D cannot justify the price difference alone.

Yes. Today. This was not always the case.

Consider this; at what point was the first person hired to work on the kernel? At what point were there a majority of patches submitted by paid workers?

^And then consider that up until that point, it was all unpaid. Just... think for a while, just think please.

I suspect there was research conducted by public universities to create this pill, IE that it was publically funded.

The ethics of "I researched this I made this it's mine so you pay what I demand" is one thing. The ethics of collective research, where part or all of the actual labour is conducted by individuals who are working on the public dollar, or while studying (grad students are infamously used for most of the labour in university research), or have no residual income from the results of the research, or a mixture of the above.

If university students did most of the work, is this company then justified for asking this price?

We don't know whether any of this is the case. In our discussion, without additional research, our only metric should be "what are the manufacturing and distribution costs". The public health is the concern, first and foremost.

If, for example, an illness reaches epidemic proportions, it's entirely reasonable for a government to step in and say "it is more important that citizens NOT DIE than that your company makes a profit".

Hepatitis C is not at that stage anywhere in the US to my knowledge. I suspect that this drug just happens to be the straw that broke the lawmakers' back; they're arbitrarily choosing to make this particular drug the battleground for stopping a negative larger.

There's also http://www.graphicsmagick.org/ ...

I'm sure there's room, but you really have to ask yourself; room for what? Running anything server is a constant drain on resources, and surely you could strip down and optimize the code from one of these projects to make it run fast enough.

A friend of mine did this back in high school, with blender, not knowing C-family languages at all, 'kingblender'. It runs fast as a bullet. It's a five year old build, but the interface is so streamlined and it loads/runs so fast I still use it myself :P

Reimplementing these functions can be justified... but you really should justify it. For one thing, you automatically lose the metered network market, because they can't afford to be sending things serverside all the time. There goes a bunch of Australian customers.

Outside of the most basic image manipulations, stretch/blur/saturation/Paint.Net-stuff, what features are you thinking of that would run so much better serverside that it's worth building in all that extra network functionality AND the image editing library?

(EDIT: I should clarify; you can embed a stripped down graphicsmagick in your clientside program, it's under MIT license after all. http://www.graphicsmagick.org/Copyright.html Some people complain about limited system resources on mobile platforms... Well, those people, frankly, are full of shit. I've seen Minecraft and Portal clones run on the Nintendo DS Lite. That thing has 4MB RAM and no hardware floats, all software emulated :P The 'Mixed in Key' guys run their audio analysis off their server, and as a result have a 15MB cap and some unhappy customers. On the other hand, they've got an algorithm they're trying to protect. If you're not heavily investing in a custom algorithm, or unique new features, then serverside image editing is just plain silly.)

Blocked in Canada as well; I'm confirming from Vancouver BC