Re: Javascript.

You forgot the broken scoping rules.

And lame unicode support (as of ES 5)-- but hey, it's only the "World Wide Web", and no one really uses the astral planes, do they?

Brand has mentioned that the original idea that it would be important to see a picture of the "whole earth" from space came to him via an acid trip. In one of his earliest projects, he was going around handing out buttons asking the question of why we hadn't seen such a photo yet.

More recently, he's mentioned that clearly the problem with LSD isn't brain damage, but "personality damage". He's also commented on how you can rely on enthusiastic freaks to push ideas too far and find out where the limits are (he mentions a friend who took a boat across the pacific trying to live entirely on a hold full of carrots, arriving at his destination tinted orange and hallucinating).

You could have replaced the ignition cylinder and then pretty much stopped there.

Reminds me: I was once driving a car where the ignition cyllinder had gotten fucked up (I suspect a clumsy attempt at stealing it, but maybe it was intentional vandalism), and I "fixed" the problem by just removing the lock. I kept a plastic bag draped over it after that to make it less obvious it was missing. (In my cars, a piece of plastic garbage kicking around the passenger compartment never looked out-of-place.)

In general, my advice on cars is (a) don't own one if you can avoid it, (b) if you're stuck owning one, get the cheapest, simplest one you can find-- you'll have fewer points of failure, repairs will be easier, and if it goes belly-up, no big deal.

Sadly, I've never experienced the joy of having my car chirp at me in a freindly eager fashion as I walk up to it, and yet I seem to be managing to make it through life...

You aren't hand cranking a 100hp motor in some cheapass econo box, and you certainly aren't crank anything in a normal car.

I used to drive a Toyota Corolla with a defective starter, just by push starting it.

I don't think you have a fucking clue what you're talking about.

I give up the ignition key when they pry my bicycle from my cold, dead hands-- oh wait, it doesn't have one.

The terrible, terrible problem with the GM ignition keys was they neglected to spend an extra buck per car to save around 13 lives, and as I understand it, those were apparently idiots who like to hang ten pounds of crap from their keys. Wouldn't it be cool if we had some form of rational decision-making in the modern world?

Oh well, how's my "internet fast lane" coming along?

You've got a fair grasp of what's going on, but this is crap:

a) Repeal prop 13, rent control, the below-market-rate program and all the other government meddling.

You'd think in this day and age people would think two or three times before going with laissez-faire free market "solutions", but there's a lot of you guys around at this point...

The trouble with these ideas is that whatever they say, people don't really *want* to leave issues like the character of their neighborhoods up to the whims of The Market. Rent Control is essentially a hack to slow down these kinds of changes.

Do you really want to see an unrestricted build out everywhere through out the Bay Area? Personally I wince every time I see a construction crane, because I know whatever it is they're building it's going to suck. Circa 1950 or so, The Market apparently lost the ability to build anything that isn't a piece of crap.

BTW, the techcrunch article you liked so much leads up to a recommendation for a Bay Area regional planning agency (presumably with the authority to tell Mountain View to shove their NIMBYism down their throat). It's not at all a plea to get the government out of the planning business.

(Myself, I think Google should get over that "don't be evil" business, and hire some of they guys who work for sports teams shaking down cities to build stadiums for them. All Google needs to do is *hint* that they're thinking about moving to Fremont, and I think Mountain View would come around.)

The really puzzling bits are where he talks about how it'd be a shame if the bubble popped because of all the cool innovative stuff those guys are working on... that's news to me, I thought it was all mobile-phone versions of sweatsox.com.

"Our knew app automatically counts sidewalk cracks, and allows you to post the total to your facebook page!"

Remember, the idea doesn't matter, it's only the execution that counts!

Ayn Rand's big complaint about the Libertarians was they were willing to sign-up people who weren't atheists. (True freedom lovers value ideological uniformity above all else.)

Anyway, yeah, the "Objectivists" hated Libertarians, and the Libertarians all thought that was pretty funny.

But then, I'm not up on this Neo-Contractionary Counter-Retractionary Libertarian Revisionation movement... who knows what the kids are thinking these days.

On a related note, I can think of a few rich people we could all do w/o ... Mark Zuckerberg would be at the top of my list

I'm not a Zuckster fan myself, but in a world with the likes of Jeff Bezos (and worse), I can't see why he would even make the top ten of anyone's hit list.

Remember, one of the largest groups at those "Occupy" rallies were Libertarians.

I think you were at a Tea Party meeting. I know it can be confusing, but the tea party are the guys with the dorky (well, dorkier) outfits, though they do typically smell better.

I've been a libertarian since the early 90s and I have to say it's been an honor being hated by both political parties all this time.

No way do you qualify as a True Libertarian, you're not anywhere near crazy enough. Keep working on it.

My thoughts exactly. I spent a couple of decades reading libertarian literature and this is news to me: "Libertarians do not believe markets should be totally unregulated."

Of course, it could be this is simply a sign that the people formerly-known-as-libertarians are aware (on some level) of how badly their ideas have been playing out, and rather than admit they got some stuff wrong are going to start claiming they were really saying something else entirely.

From a certain point of view, this would be good news.

Google needs to find a way to move large numbers of people around, something to get the most of of the existing infrastructure.

Dirigibles! They need to invest in dirigible transit systems, and construct housing in floating geodesic spheres, then they could toe them around to venues with optimal tax policies.

And they could use Moffett Field as it was intended.

Google builds offices where their employees want to live

It's hard to find people who want to live in Mountain View. [1]

Actually, it is a bit of a puzzle as to why Google can't figure out how to shake down Mountain View and get the zoning variations they want out of them. If they were a football team, they'd be making noises about moving the stadium to Fremont, but *nooo* they've got to come on with that "don't be evil" crap, so Mountain View just walks over them.

[1] Yeah, I know-- I like the Castro St area myself. If Silicon Valley could build some more of those I'd stop bitching about the place.