IETF made everything possible, but has unfortunately been somewhat abandoned, or at least isn't functioning as a mooring-of-sanity as it used to. In some ways, this is inevitable, since the e-world is big enough that even a small company can do its own thing, and still succeed big.

This matters for IoT, since most cloud-enabled IoT devices do totally random things: poke through firewalls with UPNP, shove your private data into some random website, potentially over insecure protocols. (Or protocols that could be secure, but are implemented poorly or are simply in need of an update.) At some level, the problem is really that the easy path, for any given cloud vendor, is to set up their own cloud infrastructure (though it might be layered on Amazon, etc). This is bad for the customer because what happens when the company crashes, or gets bought and dissolved, or when the company just decides to stop supporting the device?

IETF should be thinking along the lines of a *local* data hub that you own, that your devices talk to over a simpler, standard protocol. Not that security can be ignored just because traffic is local, but an extra level of indirection makes all the difference in hardware as well as software. Whether that local hub is intelligent, whether it has storage - open question. And maybe devices need to fall back to trying to talk to the external cloud. But customers will eventually realize that they should want their own data to at least potentially be under their own control, not inherently subject to the vagaries of some whispy, transient external cloud. You don't want your fire alarm dependent on random external sites, or your internet-enabled door locks, or your thermostat, etc.

People often confuse systematicity with science. Which means they don't really get the point of science, of course. But this also explains things like Kabala, Homeopoathy, betting systems, orthodox religion, some diets, as well as the astrology thing.

let people perform whatever edits they want, but track the provenance of *everything*. let readers select some function of provenance as a rendering option, with the default being provenance of a pretty high standard of quality and non-conflicted-interest. letting people attach endorsements or upvotes is a pretty valuable kind of metadata anyway.

the problem seems to be the very idea that wikipedia should present a single, canonical version. absolutes are only found in faith, not the real world...

He played an important part in the history of open source, but the movement is well-enough established that ideological purity is no longer necessary.

the big problem is that all this desktop crap doesn't matter. oh, sure, it's pretty. does it get work done? compared to, say, OLVWM from ages ago. sure, I think wiggly windows are a cool hack, and like to use a GPU to make things smoother. but most of this desktop stuff is just masturbation-by-coding. dbus, systemd, wayland, most of gnome, any form of skinning, etc.

yes, X-over-ssh is non-negotiable. it would be great if the X-now-wayland wankers did their wanking on some more-async, lower-bandwidth interface that didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. VNC, I think not. Xcb was about the last good idea to come from these people...

pretty soon desktops will be completely irrelevant, since the only GUI of the future is html*.

They're treating the symptoms of the problem, not the cause. This is usually a bad idea.

No, this is not clickbait.

Normal, mentally-healthy humans have a lot of empathy - otherwise we're psychopaths. Sure, the amount of empathy varies - mainly as a function of whether the animal in question tends to act human-like. We should embrace this, not cynically write it off - empathy *IS* humanity.

Yes, that also means that anyone who is intelligent and reflective will be uncomfortable with eating meat, concerned how the animal died, and of course what kind of animal it was. This is basically orthogonal to issues of environmental or ecological impact.

These systems are the moral equivalent of leaving your door not just unlocked but ajar. It doesn't change the morality of anyone trespassing to steal or destroy, but it does make the owner much more culpable. We do not face a threat to our cyber-infrastructure, but rather have irresponsibly left the infrastructure unprotected, and should not be surprised that people of varying motives might take advantage.

We do not need a cyber-infrastructure police force, unless they're actually tiger teams who publicly shame the idiots who leave their systems unprotected...

The really really stupid thing is that desktop isn't even the reason why Linux. Obviously no server needs dbus let alone kdbus, and plenty of desktops don't either. Yes, it's amusing that I get a popup when I plug in a USB stick, but is that essential functionality? Sure, some very simple form of event multicast would be good, but is this it?

Everything LP touches seems to epitomize rebellion against, or ignorance of, the *nix/OSS philosophy (you know, modularity, loosely joined, liberal-in-what-you-accept, etc). systemd is the USSR of rc systems. pulse only remains because apps can still bypass it.

the proliferation of distros is just stupid - people don't seem to understand what "distro" means, or why they should be offering addons to an existing distro, rather than pretending that they are building a new OS.

the ONLY value a distro offers is in establishing a particular set of versions, with a modicum of consistency of config and hopefully some testing. none of them offer anything significant that is also distinctive - just slightly different versions of the same packages maintained by others and used by all the other distros. yes, apt vs rpm, so what? they're functionally equivalent.

the real point is really a matter of software engineering: forking a distro is bad, since it increases the friction experienced by source-code changes. streamOS (sic) people may be dilligent and honestly propagate their changes upstream, but fundamentally, they should really just be running an apt repo containing their trivially modded packages. sure, that may mean a different kernel, big whoopie (very little of user-space is sensitive to anything but huge kernel changes.)

but yeah: it wouldn't be very sexy to say "I've got a repo of 37 tweaked packages I call a brand new whizzy *OS*".

can you give examples? perhaps you mean that implementing brain-inspired special-function processors is best done in hardware - if you want a widget that detects pictures of cats or something. study/understanding is not often rate/scale-limited.