demosthenes

He doesn't know what 'temporal' means and doesn't write that well. He would benefit from more English instruction.

There are many problems with how kids are taught in school. However, it's arrogant to think that you won't benefit from further instruction at 15 - regardless of how well you think you're doing.

I've known many smart autodidacts, but they're often unaware of their weaknesses. They tend to be less 'well rounded' than those with academically trained minds.

This is why women often wonder why the world has become less 'nice' as they grow older.

In fact, the world hasn't changed. It's just that the extra consideration they got because of their looks goes away as they grow old.

In contrast men often spend their early years not being taken very seriously. They often have to fight to get noticed.

Because of Tor's design there's no need for trust at the exit node. Plus, you hop between exit nodes at 10 minute intervals, giving any one node at best a scrappy picture of your activities. You can also blacklist exit nodes that you consider suspicious.

Even if an exit node's logs are compromised an adversary wouldn't know your identity if you haven't given it up in the compromised traffic.

What better solutions are available? As far as I know Tor is still the most resilient option out there.

Anonymity is not the same as privacy. Tor is more about anonymity than about privacy.

That exit notes can sniff traffic has been known for a long time. Compromised exit nodes do not compromise anonymity as long as you don't give up personally identifiable information in traffic that gets routed via exit nodes.

More problematic is that compromised exit nodes could inject or run man in the middle attacks on your outbound traffic. These could then make you give up your real IP. This is why you shouldn't run exploitable protocols when exiting via Tor (ie. don't use javascript, flash, etc. if you want to remain anonymous).

I'm not sure why Anonymous does not fit the article's definition.

Videoconferencing and telepresence is big business. I expect those applications will lead the way, with the technology being adapted for entertainment purposes soon after.

What is the difference, if any, between alternate reality and augmented reality?

Spot on.

Also, browsing pages on Tor and similar networks reminds me a lot of exploring the internet in the early '90s. It's messy, there are lots of abandoned, hastily put together pages. There are weird rants.

The internet that the author misses is still out there. It's just not as close to the surface as it was in the early days of the internet or BBS.

Interestingly, Gibson's latest book - Pattern Recognition - is set in the present. It's very good.

http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-William-Gibson/dp/...

It's not the same dystopian future he envisioned in the 1990s. But his keen eye draws out the darker sides.

This piece reads awfully. I haven't seen anything like this since trying to understand inscrutable postmodernist literary criticism at college.

I am very interested in this, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding it. What's he trying to say?

Todays market of representations means that we exchange images that are valued by statements without consequence, statements whose only value is the one of attention, something we have learned from the advertising process, which has become the key process of culture. This cultural praxis fails to find a history of the human faces. The faces tried to break the boundaries of word and image, they were processes of conscious creation of speaking images for the feelings that words fail to describe.

asmallworld.net was started by a Swedish aristocrat, and retains a largely upper-class feel to this day.

How networks start out matters.

More detailed figures and trends here, with both wholesale and retail prices: http://www.unodc.org/pdf/WDR_2006/wdr2006_chap5_cocaine.pdf

With those price differences, it's no wonder the illegal drugs trade is so tough to shut down.. you can lose 9/10 shipments and still be profitable.

Keep in mind that you can set up a Limited Liability Partnership, which would seem to make a lot of sense in this situation. Liability is limited in the same was as in a Ltd. company, but it differs in how profit sharing is handled. Check with an accountant for details.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_partnership#U...

There aren't any hard and fast rules here.

It's rarely too early to get in touch with angels and get on the radar if you expect that you'll need funding.

Meanwhile, keep in mind that the longer you wait, the more traction you get, the better your bargaining position and the higher the valuation.

The Unity engine supports MMOs, Cartoon Networks' Fusion Fall MMO was built using it.. http://unity3d.com

Thanks for the advice!

I see how it would make sense if we had the money to go after people with lawyers. However, I can neither afford that nor am I particularly interested in having to do that.

I mostly see it as a deterrent.

Surely the same effect could be achieved by putting the purchaser's name / email address on there, without the hassle of steganography.

The impact of seeing your data emblazoned on the PDF would probably be a bigger deterrent than a hidden watermark, though of course it could quite easily be removed by a determined pirate.

We realize there'd no way to eliminate piracy altogether.

We're just looking for the simplest way to make casual piracy tricky enough to discourage anyone who might want to pay for it. And of course a way that doesn't piss off paying users.

I'm not too concerned about piracy by people who would never have paid in the first place.