I remember people said the same about smartphones. Waah, the battery only lasts a day, I'll never use one of those. Somehow smartphones still took over the world. People do go to sleep every night - a nice cordless charging stand seems like a relatively small issue if the devices are genuinely useful.

That's not quite how I remember Manna.

The reason the American economy is trashed in the world Manna envisions is not because it's run by an AI but because America failed to adjust to a post-work society. Everyone is on social security/benefits, because hardly anyone has a job as it was all automated away or pirated. So people have a kind of futuristic subsistence lifestyle in which robots attend to their basic needs but they can never get anything more.

The Australia project, on the other hand, is not meant to be communist. It's meant to be a society where your having a job was disconnected from you having social value. It's a society that prioritises leisure time and finds other ways to allocate the few scarce resources that are left in ways that aren't money. Communism as a term is too heavily linked with the real-world implementations in the Soviet union to be useful for describing this state of affairs.

IIRC at the end the story goes off on a bit of a tangent and all the Australians just end up having VR sex all day or something. Not a great ending. But I remember Manna kind of blew my mind when I first read it, and its prediction that robots/computers would replace middle management before the toilet cleaners was (to me) very new and obviously correct. Indeed that's what this story is about.

I think you massively overestimate how bad Russia is, especially compared to the USA.

Snowden is 30 and newly single. Russia is a large country that is notorious for its abundance of highly educated and attractive women. It has quite a few famous and sophisticated software companies, especially in the security realm that Snowden likes. 143 million people manage to live there without going crazy.

Of all the places in the world to have landed, Russia is definitely not the worst. Heck it's probably the best place he could have landed. I guess he was trying to get to Ecuador but they don't have the stones Putin does, nor is it a large country, nor does it have any noted IT firms.

Probably nothing can be done to stop it in the short to medium term. I suspect that many years from now historians will look back and see this as just a phase humanity had to go through, kind of like the evolution from monarchy to democracy.

It's clear that the power to know everything about everyone has gone to the heads of the political class so badly that they'll never give it up. They'll always find a justification and any "reasonable compromise" that is arrived at won't be what we had 40-50 years ago (i.e. no total surveillance) even though that seemed to work OK, it'll be "slightly less than totalitarian surveillance, sorta, unless there's a good reason for it".

So for now we're stuck with it. The geek in me wants to believe that what starts with Snowden is an epic and very long struggle to design technology to make it surveillance-proof, which will inevitably result in some kind of (hopefully mostly non-violent) quasi civil war a la the monarchists vs parliamentarians. Governments will fight back hard and eventually the fact that technology needs to be government-proof will become as widely accepted a principle as the free press being government-proof. But it will take a loooooong time. Probably longer than any of us will be alive.

The cynic in me says we're all boned and 1984 has arrived.

I think it's smart. Lots and lots of people don't respond to stories that are technical and abstract. OK so they spy on people using "tor" with "selectors" yawn change channel *zap*.

Human interest stories are different. This story might reach a whole audience who just couldn't find it in themselves to care until now. But ooooh juicy details about someone's romance with a jihadist, interesting, and huh .... wait. They could get that stuff on anyone, couldn't they. They could get that on me.

So this story could prompt the housewives of America to care more than perhaps they have so far.

LOL. This is the intelligence world we're talking about. There are no courts.

This particular complaint will be heard by a special tribunal that meets in secret, makes secret decisions, and has ruled against the intelligence agencies in less than 1% of all cases it's heard - they do publish the fact that a hearing took place, mostly, we think, of course if they didn't we'd have know way to know so the real number is probably much less than 1%.

The UK has much worse accountability structures in place than even the FISA court, and that's a kangaroo court that's a fucking joke. So this complaint will go exactly nowhere. I have to assume at that point they'll try to go to the EU level, but of course nothing really ensures the outcome will be any different there either.

Bitcoin is deflationary in a world with increasing population. Also BTC has made land grabbers and early adopters rich - it doesnt look like the currency of the future to me.

No - if you're talking about money supply then Bitcoin is inflationary until it stabilises. What happens to prices in the meantime is anyone's guess. So far the price has gone up, it's gone down. Over the long run it's got a lot more valuable, but that's a temporary artifact caused by the novelty of an actually working e-cash system. Nobody really knows where the value will end up, but one day Bitcoin will be boring and all the issues it raises will have been resolved. At that point the price should be stable unless the Bitcoin economy is growing, in which case falling prices is the behaviour you would intuitively expect had you not been propagandised by central bankers into believing that as a society gets wealthier everything is supposed to get more expensive.

With respect to "land grabbers and early adopters", yes, it has made some of them rich. It could also make them poor again if the price collapses. If it doesn't, then it's no different than the internet which also minted an entire generation of nouveau riche, but that's OK, we can tolerate a temporary increase in inequality in return for something like the internet. It gets balanced out eventually anyway, as none of those new millionaires fancy the idea of establishing a dynasty.

Wait, when did stopping work on old projects become arrogant?

Jesus. If that's now arrogance then I must be far more arrogant than I ever realised, as I've worked on many projects over the years and presently work on just one or two ...

Google was originally going to show that message only on pages that had results removed. But that would make too much sense so the EU banned it, because then you'd know someone was trying to hide something! So now they just put that message on every query that contains a name.

After the cookie law that broke my browser settings by displaying a stupid nag on every website I visit, I thought the EU couldn't fuck over internet users even more, but yup they found a way!

How? That sounds like a pretty apt description to me.

Anyway, the real problem with this ruling isn't that it's stupid (though it is), it's that it's unenforceable without building a Great Firewall of Europe, and when people realise that they're gonna be pissed off that their new "right" doesn't really exist or work.

It should go without saying why a GFE would be a disaster of unspeakable proportions. It effectively means partitioning Europe into its own internet. And I don't think that will happen just to defend this stupid "right" of people who don't like what appears when people search for them. They have a much better solution - either put better information about themselves online, or go after the people who uploaded the original information, and if neither of those appeal, then learn to deal with it.

I think international enrollment may very well start to be a thing.

But I would point out that in Europe, there's people crossing countries on a daily basis just commuting to work, while in the US, there are families who haven't left the country except for brief vacations, or not at all. Living in the US is all they know, and all they want, and the parents are already twisted up inside about having their kids leave home, to consider sending them halfway around the world adds to their stress.

For many years college has been seen as the indispensable class gateway to access the middle-class life. No introductory price could be high enough to offset the prosperity the graduates would see on in their career. This vision changed VERY suddenly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

The cost of college grew at a lightning pace since the time the parents had gone to college, the kids had never dealt in financial matters, and the intangible debts accrued were a problem for the future when the kids would already be enjoying a successful career that would allow them to pay it down...except that with the recent financial crisis and recent-graduate employment rates falling off a cliff as recently laid-off middle-age workers are taking up entry-level positions, the young graduates found themselves with significant debt but without the middle-class career path they'd counted on to help pay down that debt. I think that international enrollment will indeed grow in response to this problem unless something else is done to address it. It's just that this problem had hit so suddenly that the culture of choosing colleges hasn't shifted quickly enough to keep up. Colleges transformed from a gold mines to minefields in a short time span. We're seeing the opinions shifting now though.

It's important to bear in mind that the massive spike in tuition is at least, a progressive pricing structure (though it has its flaws and gaps). US colleges defend their pricing by saying that the ridiculously high tuition is the list price that gets charged to the more affluent families, and that inflated price helps allow for tuition discounts to the less affluent families to get into the college.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

There is some nuance to that pricing structure. TL;DR, if a student goes to a reputable STEM college to major in STEM, then that high tuition is funding the salaries of famous professors and their projects that make your STEM college reputable (and your degree as well). If a student goes to that college to major in art history, they're probably going to get a very bad deal out of it.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Somehow most countries manage to treat terrorists just like regular criminals. Lots of IRA members are sitting in jail at the moment - not spread over the countryside in tiny pieces courtesy of a drone strike.

If you're fighting with our enemies, as an enemy combatant, why do you believe you should get a trial as a criminal rather than simply being killed on the battlefield after identification As an enemy?

Blurring the lines between soldiers and terrorists is exceptionally dangerous, especially for America.

After all, using the implication of what you wrote above, it would apparently be OK for the British Royal Air Force to drone strike Congress, because a Republican congressman has been and probably still is an outspoken supporter of Irish republican terrorism. And if a few innocent other congressmen get blown to bits too, well that's unfortunate collateral damage but I guess they shouldn't have been hanging around known supporters of terrorism should they? The world's a battlefield these days.

Heck things had changed 15 years ago. I don't know when mjwx went to school but a broad swathe of religions have been taught in UK comprehensives for a long time.

Part of it could be their parental leave policies. These tech companies like to hire talented young people. Some of those young people will want to have kids.

So if you're looking at 2 equally qualified candidates that are 30 yrs old. One will be taking 7 weeks of paid vacation in the next few years, the other will be taking 18 weeks of paid vacation in the next few years. Well, why not just take the one who's going to be around more?

Now, I didn't specify if either candidates was male or female, but I think we all know which one is going to create less disruption when they have a kid. This kind of difference between the genders is pervasive throughout the country's culture. The assumption that the female will be taking care of kid more than the male is already codified in every company's parental leave policy.

Here's the solution: Give them both equal parental leave. It reduces the benefits of gender discrimination.

It eliminates an ingrained assumption woman as the primary caregiver for children, and opens up the opportunity to view these two hypothetical candidates as equals. Because in practical terms for the hiring manager, they aren't equals.