+4 for somebody who thinks the internet was created using "the html"?

What about ARPANET, CSNET, etc? TCP/IP? Email? FTP? NNTP? Gopher? (all US inventions by the by)

They may not have started calling it the internet until 1982 but it'd been around for ~19 years before CERN hooked up to it, over 21 years before TBL's Christmas 1990 invention of the WWW, and over 24 years before the WWW really started picking up in late 1993 as the later-but-more-popular Gopher (U of Minnesota) dwindled due to shortsighted license problems and Mosaic (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) gave people a new vision of what was possible.

I'm under 30 and I remember using Gopher, Mosaic, and Netscape 1.0. GET OFF MY LAWN.

This is true. The strongest category is CAT IIIc and the need for visibility is not existent. The so-called decision height for landing is also not existent. IIIc is not in use though, so I to IIIb are used. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

I remember people said the same about smartphones. Waah, the battery only lasts a day, I'll never use one of those. Somehow smartphones still took over the world. People do go to sleep every night - a nice cordless charging stand seems like a relatively small issue if the devices are genuinely useful.

That's not quite how I remember Manna.

The reason the American economy is trashed in the world Manna envisions is not because it's run by an AI but because America failed to adjust to a post-work society. Everyone is on social security/benefits, because hardly anyone has a job as it was all automated away or pirated. So people have a kind of futuristic subsistence lifestyle in which robots attend to their basic needs but they can never get anything more.

The Australia project, on the other hand, is not meant to be communist. It's meant to be a society where your having a job was disconnected from you having social value. It's a society that prioritises leisure time and finds other ways to allocate the few scarce resources that are left in ways that aren't money. Communism as a term is too heavily linked with the real-world implementations in the Soviet union to be useful for describing this state of affairs.

IIRC at the end the story goes off on a bit of a tangent and all the Australians just end up having VR sex all day or something. Not a great ending. But I remember Manna kind of blew my mind when I first read it, and its prediction that robots/computers would replace middle management before the toilet cleaners was (to me) very new and obviously correct. Indeed that's what this story is about.

This is why I hate debates. It's not the person who is right who wins, it's the one who flings the poo the farthest. I was aghast to discover those 'debate competitions' in US schools: pick a subject and 2 people, one has to debate pro, the other against. And fuck the truth, let's just get ready to form another generation of lawyers and politicians.

Well, I RTFA and it's bullshit. I was hoping for a way to have a drone follow you automatically by following the tension of the tether, like a kite, but that's not the case here. What I'd like to find is a way to hook up the drone/kite to me while mountain biking / extreme skiing and have it film from above while not having to control it. Does such a thing exist ?

I think you massively overestimate how bad Russia is, especially compared to the USA.

Snowden is 30 and newly single. Russia is a large country that is notorious for its abundance of highly educated and attractive women. It has quite a few famous and sophisticated software companies, especially in the security realm that Snowden likes. 143 million people manage to live there without going crazy.

Of all the places in the world to have landed, Russia is definitely not the worst. Heck it's probably the best place he could have landed. I guess he was trying to get to Ecuador but they don't have the stones Putin does, nor is it a large country, nor does it have any noted IT firms.

Probably nothing can be done to stop it in the short to medium term. I suspect that many years from now historians will look back and see this as just a phase humanity had to go through, kind of like the evolution from monarchy to democracy.

It's clear that the power to know everything about everyone has gone to the heads of the political class so badly that they'll never give it up. They'll always find a justification and any "reasonable compromise" that is arrived at won't be what we had 40-50 years ago (i.e. no total surveillance) even though that seemed to work OK, it'll be "slightly less than totalitarian surveillance, sorta, unless there's a good reason for it".

So for now we're stuck with it. The geek in me wants to believe that what starts with Snowden is an epic and very long struggle to design technology to make it surveillance-proof, which will inevitably result in some kind of (hopefully mostly non-violent) quasi civil war a la the monarchists vs parliamentarians. Governments will fight back hard and eventually the fact that technology needs to be government-proof will become as widely accepted a principle as the free press being government-proof. But it will take a loooooong time. Probably longer than any of us will be alive.

The cynic in me says we're all boned and 1984 has arrived.

I think it's smart. Lots and lots of people don't respond to stories that are technical and abstract. OK so they spy on people using "tor" with "selectors" yawn change channel *zap*.

Human interest stories are different. This story might reach a whole audience who just couldn't find it in themselves to care until now. But ooooh juicy details about someone's romance with a jihadist, interesting, and huh .... wait. They could get that stuff on anyone, couldn't they. They could get that on me.

So this story could prompt the housewives of America to care more than perhaps they have so far.

That will have to wait.

The HURD developers have just noticed that their code would be more elegant if it were implemented using the new features of a modern programming language, so they're now starting a ground up rewrite of the HURD kernel in Perl 6.

Shouldn't that be called 'normal' ?

...if Musk is in for the long run or for an exit within the next 2-3 years. Any ideas?

I also found this very strange I'm both extrovert and introvert, meaning I have to problem taking with groups of people, even at the center of attention sometimes. But I can be alone. I'm a climber and I've done numerous solo ascents and expeditions, the longest was 28 days alone. It's a good thing that nobody was around because of the smell, but I didn't have any problem 'being with myself'. I even think that people who can't stand 'being with themselves' are not people _I_ want to be with in the first place !!! I mean, if they can't stand themselves, why should I ?!?

I was thinking of building something like that, but I would want to get the min distance of a passing car and its speed. Which would give me a good reason to beat the shit out of them when I catch them. I ride half an hour on a fairly large but winding mountain road every morning. Not much traffic (150 cars on average during those 30 min). But on average there'll be one car that passes within 10cm of me every day. At 90km/h. Assholes not fully awake yet who think they know their daily commute road by heart and cut all the curves no matter if there's a cyclist.

It gives me plenty of time to imagine remedial solutions. Yelling is no use. A 120dB air horn sometimes surprises the asshole afterwards. A paint gun in the windshield (not precise enough and I'm no Doc Holliday) ? A real one shot in the air (not in my country) ? A piece of ultra-hard sharp ceramic on a thin stick held at windshield level ? What I've been doing so far is writing down the license tags and then looking for them around my small town. So far I've caught two and made a very public scene. They've been plenty cautious since then.

I work for a very big, bureaucratic company. Communication tool needs are really different for different scales of companies.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and have a lab across the bay with a couple of coworkers that I generally go to once or twice a week. My current supervisor is in Atlanta; I've never met him in person. I worked for my previous supervisor for a year before I met him. I've worked for my director for about 5 years (he's in Indianapolis, and I've never met him in person.) We work with a bunch of developers and operations folks around the US and some in Eurasia. We use all those tools, and they've got different purposes. For maintaining documentation that sticks around, sometimes it's useful to have wikis and similar web sites that users can edit; for shorter-term documentation, we use tools that are designed for faster communication, and haven't really figured out how to handle the problem of obsolete chunks of information, which is harder on less-aggressively-managed systems.

Social networks are another point in the communications spectrum. For dealing with bug reports or feature suggestions from users, they're less formal than ticket tracking systems, but sometimes that's useful. If some developer wants to steal my ideas or listen to my rants\\\\ insightful comments, that's just fine. We've been starting to do a lot more with social networks, and we'll see how well it handles the problems of disposing of conversations that don't need to be kept around or are no longer current, or keeping information accessible that is current.