American Senators sure have a lot of time to spend on impossible tasks and tilting at windmills, instead of learning about technology and displaying adaptability.

If he wants to look good for banning some scary technology thing, maybe he should start with something easier - like getting porn off the Internet.

... because I can't see anything anywhere else (wtf is this post?) I figured maybe this might be worth mentioning:

Yesterday Moxie Marlinspike announced a new version of TextSecure: https://whispersystems.org/blo...

TextSecure is an encrypted messaging tool - currently for Android, but iOS is in the works. It is open source and has a high focus on privacy and security.

I encourage people to check it out - if you want to Snapchat securely and privately, then using an open source tool that isn't maintained or built by some giant corporatrox that is simply trying to get bought out by Facebook might be a good idea.

Please make a news post about the issue. I'm glad you're finally responding to the comments but today has been a train wreck and failing to publicly acknowledge that will not help matters.

Give people an official thread to comment about the beta. Ensure that it has the feedback mechanisms - the survey and the email address, both of which I've used - prominently listed.

I'll try that. I actually have a Kobo reader - every book I've wanted on their store has been DRM'ed, so I haven't bought anything. I'll give it another crack.

Thanks. I just wish everyone was on Baen - that is exactly how I want to buy books.

How do I buy DRM free books from Tor? Every few months I try again and I feel stupid because I can't figure out how to do it.

They have a "looking for Tor books?" module which takes you to http://us.macmillan.com/TorFor....

Then I end up on a page like http://us.macmillan.com/thehum... which just gives me a list of normal retailers, like Amazon, Kobo, etc to choose from - with no evidence that I'm getting a DRM-free version.

I just want an epub, like what Baen deliver - is that possible?

Is it possible to buy

In Australia it's reasonably common for the insurers to care about modifications - here's one common car insurance company's page on it: http://www.aami.com.au/custome... .

It's http://baboom.com/ . Sheesh.

Pretty sure the interesting thing isn't that he made an album - it's whether or not he can make a free music service that artists want to use.

... than to constantly use fear of imminent danger to try to scare them into action, and then have nothing happen.

It's classic 'boy who cried wolf'. I don't know what the right way is, but I can't see any evidence that the Doomsday Clock is having any effect (...is there any?)

Interesting idea. I wonder if you could just /say/ you had gun parts to get this check, but not actually carry any so you don't have to deal with the local gun control laws at all no matter where you're flying. (Just take a weird piece of metal pipe or something and say its gun-related.)

Presumably, that is the point - take a rather boring job that humans have to do, and make it so a robot can do it.

The Tor guys just went through this process of creating deterministic builds to solve this problem. Fascinating process and some more info here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-June/009257.html

That's basically why I think utilities should be public services provided by the government. They're the only ones that can have a planning horizon that extends that far.

It used to be ad-free because the cost of running those services was trivial and handled by educational and research institutions.

Now the number of services has multiplied (by a lot), both to cater to a wider variety of experiences and a larger number of people.

The cost of running those services has multiplied (by a lot) - no longer just a few kilobytes of plain text, they are rich multimedia experiences including, in many cases gigabytes of high definition video.

I too remember the good old days of the "wonderful" 90s Internet of using lynx to look at web pages and figuring out Trumpet so I could get Mosaic going to look at images. It was fun and exciting and great. But when I compare it to what is possible now - in many cases, completely for free if I'm prepared to sacrifice a tiny part of my attention and privacy (both of which I am conscious of and careful to manage) - well, I'm pretty amazed and what is on offer.

Any time you want to put your hand up to be one of those intelligent, compassionate human beings and provide ad-free wonderful services - please let me know because I'll happily sign up to take advantage of them!

When we stop voting the same people in, I guess

Is there any reason to artificially create it? Surely people that are buying this stuff are not putting a lot of skeptical analysis into its actual providence. I would actually be surprised if the majority of it that was sold was fake anyway and only the ultra-rich are buying legit stuff.