mithaler

You don't stay in business for 100 years by coasting. I can see they've kept with the times in ways other than the video goes into; from a quick Internet search, they own the domain https://customfabricflowers.com/, and they have a quite active Etsy shop. https://www.etsy.com/shop/Customfabricflowers1

If what you really need is security, then I don't see how (1) and (2) can be overriding concerns. If I were in a situation where my life depended on my messages being confidential, my choice of medium wouldn't turn on the convenience of long-form messages or social conventions around reply time.

To put it another way: if I'm in a situation where being able to type an easy-to-read long-form message is more important than it being end-to-end encrypted, I'd just use Gmail. I don't see why Signal needs to satisfy both use cases; at worst it's kind of ergonomically awkward, but it isn't making false promises of security, which is worse than useless.

I have to disagree.

I'm a programmer, but I'm not good at math. I know this. And yet, the Tau Day Manifesto explained the geometry of the circle to me more clearly and understandably than any of the math classes I've ever taken. And it's not just because it's a well-written work; the concept is genuinely simpler to understand.

Pi really is a pedagogical disaster, and tau really does help.

By this logic, Coinbase basically can't win. If they do what they need to do to allow Bitcoin to become popular -- that is, make it as pleasant to use as a bank with credit and debit cards -- they essentially become a bank, thus earning the scorn of the Bitcoin community. But if they don't, Bitcoin remains a niche product that no one besides a few ideological supporters with axes to grind will ever use.

You can argue that "undocumented immigrant" doesn't capture the actual meaning, but that doesn't make jorgeleo's point any less valid: the action is illegal, not the person.

More detail on the cycle-stealing bit, which caused an alarm during the Apollo 11 lunar descent, which the AGC's priority scheduling allowed it to recover from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#PGNCS_...

My understanding, unless I'm wrong, is that a Title II reclassification can be done unilaterally by the FCC without Congressional assent (though it would immediately be sued by all the carriers). Accordingly, I'm reading it as a political ploy to force Congress into giving the FCC a better-suited regulatory regime for it than Title II, despite Congress currently not being friendly to such a thing. He's saying, in effect: "I want net neutrality badly enough that I'm willing to use this horrible regulation to do it that no one really wants, unless you cave and give me a better way." It might be a bluff?

Without remarking on the relative rightness of the moral stands in question, the difference between being vegan and switching to a new social network is that the latter affects people beyond the person making the moral stand. It's perfectly possible to switch by oneself to a free-as-in-freedom social network, but what's the point if no one else does?

And in any case, I'm not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should be respectful of what our audience actually wants as we do. The uphill battle is the social aspect of convincing users that the change is worthwhile, not the technical aspect of building it (which is easy).

We can probably go back and forth for hours on whether I'm being "defeatist" or "realistic". :)

I would love to see positive change in this area, but we need to be aware of what's really important to our intended audience if we're going to try. I could storm off of Facebook and leave a post behind to follow me to my self-hosted Diaspora pod, but I know no one's going to do it, so why bother? My friendships are worth more than my irritation at Facebook-the-company, and I can promise you that the vast majority of users will come to that exact same conclusion. Let's be honest with ourselves about that, before we try to fix this problem. Otherwise we'll only get as far as Diaspora did.

Today we have users voting with their feet: eg I use Twitter/I stopped using Twitter after they pissed off the developer community.

The fraction of users who actually do this is so tiny that they don't make a dent in Twitter's userbase. The vast majority of users don't care about "trust", or "privacy", or ads, or federation, or API limits, or the ability to leave the provider if it turns evil. They care about where their friends are. That's literally the only feature that draws users in the numbers that make a social network last. I wouldn't expect Ello to be able to convince enough people to join and stay without massive, enthusiastic, engaged adoption -- and what engagement it has is coming from the bandwagon effect, not its promise of no ads.

By the way, remember Diaspora[0]? It's an open-source, federated social network that anyone can host, that requires no trust in any individual provider, and with no ads. It still exists, after attracting quite a lot of attention and Kickstarter funding a few years ago. And it dropped almost entirely off the radar, because its selling points have nothing to do with people's friends actually being there.

[0] https://joindiaspora.com/

Not just "ideally"; I would go so far as to say that the situation where the rejected person does not gracefully accept it is the point at which anyone in that situation has first done something "bad". (We have a term for further retribution against the rejector in a professional context: "sexual harassment". In an ordinary personal context, we would simply say it makes the person an asshole.)

Do you mean "arbeit"? http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Arbeit

There's a difference between an explanation and an excuse; rayiner was giving the former, not the latter.

In any case, is it a flaw of our government that our legislators write laws that the majority of people happen to want? The fact that the majority want something irrational is incidental; people want it, and that's why politicians do it.

I love Turntable, and it's sad to see this, but it's not a huge surprise; for their whole history they've offered an amazing service and charged well below the true value of the service (they only added ads recently).

I figure we'll soon see a tiered model letting users upload directly for a fee, which is probably a good move.

I still remember using Aardvark, which got shut down shortly after Google acquired it. This seems to be similar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)

https://developers.google.com/cast/

How does one make the claim that a response to an action was disproportionate, without implicitly claiming that the action that precipitated it was a lesser evil?

Either way, I don't think either of us is ever going to convince the other of anything on that score, so it's probably best to agree to disagree on it.

Whether Aaron's actions were morally wrong is irrelevant to a discussion of the morality of MIT's response to them?

I do not believe MIT was a bully. A bully is someone who harms others because they can; MIT was responding, I believe reasonably, to a person breaking into their network closet and violating their terms of access. That that person happened to be at risk of suicide was tragic, but not their fault; I can't even think of a way the legal system would be able to reasonably take that into account, nor can I imagine how a system of morality can indemnify a person's actions because they happen to be suicidal.

You might not think what Aaron did was morally wrong or deserving of negative repercussions, but others might reasonably disagree.

In the hypothetical you raise, Weev is at best an unprovoked aggressor, and at worst a bully who harasses people because he can. In contrast, MIT can reasonably claim that Swartz was the aggressor against them; he was the one who sneaked into a network closet to "liberate" JSTOR.

So you automatically assume any allegation leveled against the government to be true until someone in the government spends effort disproving it?

Is it really so much to ask that we criticize the government for things that we know it actually did?

That depends on what your standard of accuracy is. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-o...

I happen to live on the 7 train, so I know a fair bit about the difficulties of installing it there.

The 7 train is still controlled entirely manually, with the old block-based signalling mechanism that can only be aware of the location of a train in very vague terms. It's currently having CBTC (Communications-Based Train Control)[0] installed, which will give dispatchers much higher resolution information about the location of every train, and go a very long way towards automating the entire system. CBTC installation is scheduled to be completed in 2016, and it's the reason why there are currently so many service disruptions afflicting it during weekends (it actually just began a series of 13 consecutive weekends during which it will not go into Manhattan). If I recall correctly from the posters, the total budget of the project is about $750 million.

If and when the line is fully automated someday, it will become possible to create a reliable barrier mechanism (like what currently exists on the very small automated portions of the NYC subway, which is really just the JFK AirTrain). Until then, human operators can't reliably get the train cars to stop in the same place.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_cont...

The move to MTP was because Android now uses a virtual file system that unifies the SD card and internal storage, making it unsafe to allow a foreign OS to munge the content of the filesystem at the block level.

This is why it uses MTP for storage, as explained by Android engineer Dan Morrill: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mg14z/whoa_whoa_ics...

Law enforcement agencies routinely unravel money laundering schemes that are much more sophisticated than this. You really think this'll stop them if they have a reason to investigate your funds?

What is it about this comment that you worry is so "controversial" or "dangerous" that you wouldn't consider posting it under your real name? (I'm not saying you should, I'm just curious.)

As an aside, I'm starting to doubt the inherent value of Internet anonymity in the first place.

There are obvious good uses for it: Wikileaks in its heyday comes to mind (that is, the time when they were actually a wiki, releasing leaks while keeping their sources safe, not going out of their way to create PR nightmares for the US government). But the vast majority of other widely-defended use cases for it seem to be people using it as a license to do nasty things like jailbait/creepshots. Even VA recognized that a compromise of his identity would mean professional ruination, even as he exposed himself and his family to that risk by revealing himself to people he thought he could trust.

While Reddit definitely shouldn't start trying to "solve" the problem, clearly the use of vigilante "doxxing" as a weapon against people they don't like isn't a real solution either. Is there even a good middle ground? "Do distasteful things on peril of Gawker running a story about you"?

Dunno about iOS, but Chrome does on the desktop; it asks you for an application-specific password when you turn on sync.

The key problem with Gnome 3 is that it wants to be both general-purpose and opinionated.

Gnome 2 was an excellent basis for a desktop because there were so many ways it could be used. It didn't limit you; you were free to trim out things you didn't want, or add things you wanted. Aside from that, it got out of the way.

Gnome 3 aims for the same demographic, but tries to force too many opinionated decisions on its users from the start. Distros that care about branding hate that because it makes it hard for them to differentiate (see Ubuntu). Many users hate that because it's too many things that they can't change without learning a new Javascript platform. It's certainly fair to say that typical Linux users (their target market, whether they like it or not) aren't used to that.

This post is wrong to blame tablets and smartphones for the decline. Linux users aren't abandoning desktops; they're abandoning Gnome 3, because it isn't giving them what they want. It's that simple.

I must be missing something. Is there anyone who actually thinks Turing wouldn't be worth remembering if he hadn't been mistreated for being gay?