The difference is that Katz posts were entertaining. Perhaps entertaining in entirely an unintended way, but they possessed a level of surrealism which felt like high art. It's like if The Jerk were to take up editorialism, I think that's how his stuff always read.

These posts are just dumb.

Rob Malda's personal blog.

Rob Malda's blog was more interesting, that's the real complaint. He did a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Articles like this one reduce the usefulness of slashdot, which was always a monoculture that ignored significant, but off-topic developments elsewhere.

Uber is technologically noteworthy due to how they are using technology, I think they get a bit too much air time, but it's interesting to see the taxi industry get shaken: they are relatively poor and survive only due to their government regulations. They serve as an example to any who might try to use technology to try to overthrow more well heeled industries, like say, Hollywood or publishing in general. How long are we going to fight that particular battle?

This, however, is clearly a post about business models and the economy, or I assume it is, tl;dr The business side of technology is irrelevant to my interests, business is just a bad reality TV show.

I'm so glad my tax money is being well used here. I'd hate it if the libruls spent this money on health care or if we could just tighten our belts and do away with useless big government programs.

It seems like his lectures are about 1000x more awesome than what I had to sit through in school, so you'd think they'd keep those and just make sure he's out of a position where he is interacting with students on MIT's behalf, which it sounds like he did voluntarily some time back. Kind of ridiculous to eliminate a person's work because he did bad things. How many of us read Moby Dick in school? Herman Melville was not a good man, but we ignore that, and focus on his work.

The best thing MIT could do is release the lectures for free (i.e. remove a profit motive from themselves), eliminate their name being used in association with it, and step back. That's reasonable. Trashing the whole thing is silly.

Seeding has always been where the real legal risk is, even before torrent when people were getting stuff from IRC bots, "secret" FTP sites, etc. The person hosting the file hosts all the risks, and relatively few people can make such things work, and those that do want to limit their audience for a variety of reasons. Torrent eases this a bit in that it forced people to seed at least as long as it takes to download, although I think even that has gone away.

Warezing will live on forever in the old style of warezing networks and word of mouth, it's far too expensive to police effectively, and easier for the public to defund adequately. What TPB did: show the seeders to all the world in a public way, probably won't live. It makes it far too easy for various interested parties to find offenders without having to spend any money. The general public cannot defund law enforcement to that degree (and probably shouldn't, copyright has some limited value) and certainly can't stop civil suits.

I might too, but that doesn't make us right.

There will always be systems & embedded programming to provide the platform on which higher level languages will run, and thus there will always be C.

I've heard of a few attempts to write system level things (kernels, device drivers, etc.) in C++, but none have gone anywhere.

Not dead yet....getting better.

Calling it a hack is like listing the body count on a mass shooting, it makes great headlines and guarantees repeat business.

but...but...we clothe our women

This is a case where someone like the EFF needs to get behind any individual who is hacking in a way clearly is NOT in violation of the intent of copyright/patent protection, let someone sue the doer and get the whole thing undone. I'd gladly throw money at them for a "DMCA kill opportunity fund". Congress will never get behind removing the DMCA, both parties have been bought and paid for.

What will likely happen is any such case will be dropped, hacking will continue to be legal as long as you watch your ass, and you can't ever be sure. "Land of the free" my ass.

Ad injection, webpage redirection. "Value add" for network owners, not end-users. Fuck em.

When I was 4 I wanted to be a baseball player. I became an engineer anyway. I'm not sure that a 4yo wanting to be a princess is so earth shattering, people grow up.

Leadership skills... Sorry I agree with most of what you said except that part. Never has such a word had such an ironic meaning as the word "leadership" in context of the corporation.

Is it rating's chasing, or is it pandering to their owner's interests? I remember when I was in NY, one of the tabloids that somehow is considered a major newspaper there was perpetually running front page news that was basically a reflection of the owner's failed business decisions. I couldn't tell if the owners were mafia or libertarians, or quite what the distinction between the two were, but it was clear that the newspaper was their PR device not any attempt at reporting news.