The question's whether
On gubmint you bet
Or whether one's trust
In market is set
Burma Shave

It's sort of like ThinkGeek, but without so much thinking, or geekiness.

Here's the tricky thing about privacy and social networks: Facebook's privacy support is actually pretty good. Whilst people might tell you in the abstract that they want more privacy from Facebook, figuring out what they would change in concrete terms is very hard. For example, they might say "I don't want to see ads" - but given the choice, they don't want to pay for anything either. So this feedback ends up being pretty useless, equivalent to hearing "I want everything and a pony". It's not a basis for a product.

Google learned this one the hard way with Google+. The original way Google+ tried to differentiate itself from Facebook was with circles. The idea is, Facebooks relatively singular notion of "friend" doesn't reflect the way real people work, this means it doesn't respect people's privacy and so people use the product less .... therefore by giving them better tools, they'd win a lot of users. Facebook responded that they'd tried the same thing, it turns out people don't like making lists of friends and controlling their sharing at a fine grained level, so it wouldn't work. And guess what? Facebook were right. Sure, you interview people in focus groups and they say one thing. In reality they might do something else.

So - decentralised open source social networks. Not gonna work. People might sound enthusiastic when you pitch it to them in the abstract, but actually Facebook works fine for them, and the kind of privacy that matters to them (can people see who views their profile?! Can my parents see my drunken party pics?) is already well supported and tuned.

Ultimately what will do off Facebook, eventually, is a change in how people use social networking that for whatever reason they cannot replicate in their main product.

I think you know this but sometimes it's a bit hard to read tone on the internet.

HSBC processed transactions for Iran in Europe, at a time when the USA had not successfully forced Iranian sanctions onto the EU and thus they were entirely legal.

The USA did not like this one bit, because Congress had a 'fuck Iran at any cost' mentality that extended to trying to make US sanctions global. And one way they did that is by prosecuting or threatening to prosecute American employees of international banks for transactions entirely legal in both the source and destination locations. It's just empire, nothing more.

This has always been my opinion. We NEED another generation of modernized nuke plants to bridge us until renewables are more mature.

Trying to mass-deploy renewables now WILL fail. We simply don't have the energy storage technology to do it.

One more generation of nuclear will bridge the gap. And ideally, during that time, in addition to renewables, work will be done on next-generation nuclear plants that can use the current generation's waste as fuel.

If I recall correctly, the IFR reactor design in the 1990s had the potential, if it had continued development, to be able to supply 100% of the US energy demand for 100 years, using only the existing reactor waste at that time as fuel. The resultant waste from an IFR fuel cycle would only remain hazardous for 500 years (as the longest-lived waste products from LWRs can actually be used as IFR fuel)

Not entirely true, if anything, it's MORE dangerous if you're changing power levels to match load.

There's a reason France (along with nuclear-powered ships) are the only ones that do such a thing. (In both cases because they have to - those communities have gotten VERY good at doing so, but it's still NOT an optimal way to run a nuke plant and does introduce new ways for the plant to have an accident.)

Nuclear reactors have properties that cause delayed reactions to control inputs, if you don't handle these properly, Bad Things happen. (And in fact, such Bad Things DID happen in an extreme case at Chernobyl. They tried to restart a xenon-poisoned reactor too quickly, and when the xenon finally burned off, there was a massive power transient.)

That's not "lack of diligence", that's a fundamental bootstrapping problem. CA's are meant to verify identities. If the identity you are trying to verify is not itself cryptographically verifiable, then the attempt to verify can be tampered with, but the only way to solve that is to use harder to verify identities. Which is what EV certs do, and my own experience of getting one was pretty smooth.

You might think I'm exaggerating, but even major corporations fuck this up all of the time. There is no "just choose sensible defaults and give me a secure socket" call, because if there were someone would complain that it's not secure and shouldn't be used.

Sure there is. Perhaps not in C but what did you expect? Here we go in Java:

HttpsUrlConnection conn = (HttpsUrlConnection) new URL("https://www.google.com/").openConnection();
Certificate[] certs = conn.getServerCertificates();
InputStream stream = conn.getInputStream(); // read stream here ....

That'll do the right thing by default.

SSL is imperfect, but that's because crypto is hard, not because of some fundamental fuckup somewhere and if only we all used the alternative protocols (which?) everything would be peachy.

Yes, but exploited browser rendering engines have been a large source of infections too. Sandboxing mobile code is just really hard. However the web is indispensable whereas Java applets aren't, so Java is the one that gets thrown out.

I suspect there isn't any way to build support for Java applets that satisfies Google's policies, therefore, they will end up being restricted to other browsers for the small number of people who need them (mostly enterprise apps).

These days the Java sandbox is actually a lot better than it used to be. Last I heard there had been no zero days this year at all. However, the Java update story still sucks, and Sun/Oracle have made Java supremely unpopular on Windows thanks to the crappy update nags and bundled adware. So nobody will be sad to see it go. Java is moving to JRE bundling for distributed apps anyway: I've written one with the new tools and it basically works like a regular desktop app, with a native installer / package on each major platform.

Jesus said much about helping out the less fortunate. On an individual basis. As one should, for spiritual growth.
This whole business of confusing God with Caesar (a chronic Progressive error) is the source of much, much woe.
After we've passed the Communist Manifesto in the kidney stone fashion, maybe you'll up your game and go for the Gospel of John with me, for good therapy?

Karl Marx is sort of an unintentional proto-Monty Python.

Are the bourgeoisie scattered, or concentrated? Are they a gaseous solid? Are they all over the room, or piled in the corner?
Communism seems to want a Rousseauian melding of everything into One Honking State, while somehow bemoaning the loss of a proper Lockean notion of the individual.
Either the jape is eluding me, or Marx just seems contradictory.
I'll see if I can get the next chunk of the C.M. out tonight.

I sense we may not be using "prove" in the same sense.

As though the GOP,
Bugbears as they be,
Through that Galifianakis beard
Even shag-all could see.
Burma Shave