I really hope you're right. 4 billion dollars for cheap, plentiful energy by 2033? That's possibly the greatest bargain our species has ever been offered.

I don't think we can put the surveillance genie back in the bottle, and I fully understand why anyone involved in national defense would want to keep things just as they are.

My primary concern is the lack of oversight. Or rather, the lack of *proof* of oversight. They could have the best oversight in the world and it wouldn't matter if it were all performed by secret courts.

I'd be satisfied if they'd simply let people know when their records were being viewed for any reason, with a reasonable delay for ongoing investigations. 3 years from now a bunch of people would get letters saying "We intercepted your email on Date XX with respect to investigation YY". And those letters would be our raw data for determining how out of control the NSA may or may not be.

Feel free to pick apart the idea, but the core point is that these guys are backed by a ton of money and power. Their only restraints are legal/procedural. There is very little physically restraining them from vacuuming up all the data in the world and using it as they see fit. The most important thing we can do is provide a feedback mechanism from the rest of society so we can detect and correct when they've crossed a line.

This is exactly why the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

It is? Why the hell aren't we banning Kickstarter then? We could have this wealth-disparity problem licked in a year!

How? Seriously? How do we put that genie back in the bottle?

Transistors and memory keep getting cheaper, and there's so much interconnection between companies, partners, advertisers, etc that the data goes everywhere. How do we stop anyone from surveilling in this environment?

I honestly don't know if we can. I think our best bet is to mandate *transparent* surveillance. There has to be a middle ground between "don't tip off the mob about our wiretap" and "we'll jail you for leaking our interpretation of the law".

Yeah - I've seen that too, but I rarely write them (anymore :)). For instance, I'll sometimes see a bunch of small methods that all access the same global variables, or rely on state changes to parameters passed between them. That's worse than the monolithic method they originally came from.

The trick is to ensure that each method neatly encapsulates a single concept, and the concept is a "What" rather than a "How".

isExpired(Date): Great
isTwoYearsInThePast(Date): Bad

The longer I've been coding, the more convinced I've become that the most undervalued strength a coder can have is picking the perfect name for a variable or method.

I liken this to an overflowing garbage can. Every subsequent coder delicately places his code on top of the steaming pile, praying that it all holds together.

Then someone makes one too many changes. The pile topples, and the poor sod who touched it last is the one who has to take the garbage out (rewrite it).

On the other hand, even if code isn't used in more than one place, that doesn't mean it's not "expressing something concisely".

Additionally:
1) Methods are great ways of naming orthogonal snippets of code, rather than using a comment that may become obsolete.
2) Breaking large methods into smaller ones increases maintainability by enforcing certain constraints such as not reusing variables declared 100 lines up just because they happen to serve similar purposes.

I agree that you don't want to just arbitrarily break your method up for the sake of smaller methods, but I don't think reuse is necessarily the best way to judge whether methods should be refactored.

I wouldn't agree with you in all cases. Depending on the quality of the blog, it could be a valuable resource for other developers. When I get stuck when coding, I often find solutions in blog posts. If he's blogging about issues he and his coworkers regularly run into, he could very well be saving more time than he spends.

On the other hand, it could be a useless pile of crap like 90% of the blogs out there :)

That's ridiculous. How can you possibly know what a machine intelligence capable of destroying humanity is going to look like? We're nowhere near the algorithms that could produce that type of intelligence.

Maybe it's a dumb algorithm simply caught in a self-replication loop. Maybe you'll never see two robots arguing over "white" or "black", because there's only one single "intelligence" spread over the internet - that seems more likely with the rise of cloud computing.

There may be plenty of reasons to dismiss this type of institution, but "human intelligence doesn't work that way, so machine intelligence won't either" isn't one of them.

Not to burst anybody's bubble, but other than Google's search engine, pretty much ALL of the successful ideas from both companies have been evolutionary, not revolutionary.

How was the search engine *not* evolutionary? They entered a crowded marketplace and won because they did the same thing, but better. That's all they have to do with driver-less cars/wearable computers/fiber.

Google's "next big idea" wasn't "search the Internet", it was "how can we improve searching as much as possible".

Most of the time when a picture or video has been faked or photoshopped, you can probably tell if you look at it carefully. Their usually isn't something quite right, about it, that most people will miss.

I think this post might be fake.

I'd never heard of Kim Dotcom before the raid, and my opinion of him has been shaped solely by /. comments (who has time to RTFA?). So I'm in a pretty good position to comment on the "Slashtard hypocrisy".

The general consensus seems to boil down to "He's a dick who's on the right side of one specific issue". So you'll see comments supporting him in the one specific issue, but you'll see other comments decrying his general dickishness - including his current patent trolling.

However, I'm not really sure having a nuanced view of a person really qualifies as "hypocrisy".

But you should know statistically. If you suddenly stop receiving 0's for thousands of samples, wouldn't it be a good guess that your partner up on the ISS has turned on the '1' filter?

This still bothers me. Just because a spin is unobserved doesn't mean it's not there.

I still don't understand how this is different from sending a red card and a blue card to two friends. When one opens theirs, they "instantaneously" know the contents of the other. But that doesn't mean the contents weren't predetermined the moment I sent the cards.

Just for fun, try to come up with the wording for a law that wouldn't infringe on your ability to:

* Skip commercials on recorded TV
* Block spam
* Blacklist sites that have served malware ads
* Filter porn ads (router-level parental controls)
* Apply greasemonkey fixes for sites not built for your browser (uncloseable javascript panel, for instance)
* Use a screenreader, for blind users

And now imagine you write a law that misses just one of those - or something I've forgotten. A lot of companies would take their chances with the bad press. But if there's a single company out there that doesn't need a huge million-signature petition decrying them, it's Google. Their business model is built on trust more than most of their peers.