Also, Paris, London, Berlin. All cosmopolitan cities with diversified cultures that have proper mass transit networks.

This is the lamest excuse I have ever seen for USA's failure in mass transit. Americans worship their cars, just like the auto industry told them to.

Yes, that is possible.

I have never actually tried such setup, but you could have a local repository holding only code you trust (either because you verified manually or because you developed yourself). Ideally, you would have an staging environment where you would test updates received from upstream (debian/ubuntu) to assure they won't break your setup; after that verification, you could refresh your trusted repo and let production machines update itself.

Jobs died, but his humongous reality distortion field is still operational.

> Could you describe that a lil more?

Debian's APT allowed for multiple repositories since the dawn of time. That used to require some command-line fu, but nowadays is just some clicks away in synaptic's interface. There is even a Ubuntu Software Center interface thing right now, giving a appstore-like experience.

The concept of centralized catalogs for applications is REALLY old for the linux crowd. Apple, Microsoft and their ilk are raving about it like it was some new shit.

For those who are not reading/watching it, a huge aspect of that world is that seasons are quite irregular and unpredictable, with winters or summer having sometimes three years, other times lasting up to six or seven years. Apparently, sometimes there are even longer winters, but those are quite rare.

So, my question is: is it possible for a planet to have Game of Thrones-esque seasons? My guess is that it would require some really weird orbit around a binary start system, but I'd guess such orbits can't possible be stable. Any ideas?

you should read Bret Victor's Magic Ink essay. He goes about breaking this fill-submit-wait-for-return paradigm we currently have for everything on the web, proposing instead designs that answer to user parameters more quickly. His flight ticket UI example is wonderful, but so far I haven't seen any implementation of that.

Also, the very same thing happened in the other two bundles (at least by the time I bought it)

And again, randall munroe has summarized your post into a comic.

Well, I've seen so many otherwise knowledgeable people endorse government control over the internet that is kinda hard to notice jokes on this subject.

> If it were the ultimate tool for "freedom and anarchy" would that be a good thing for society?

In my opinion: fuck yeah.

> Imagine if you couldn't trust the data on wikipedia

Do you trust it right now? Would you use it for mission-critical tasks?

The very premise of wikipedia is write-openness. Everyone using it should have that in mind and exercise common sense when reading informations there. If anything, it should remind us that every piece of written information published in our society may have bias or may be factually wrong. Even the most respected houses of publishing have their agendas. In my opinion, Wikipedia is upfront about its "vulnerability" and, therefore, people read it more critically than traditional media.

> Or if your bank account access could be spoofed
> Or your emails could be read by anyone

These cases are solved by digital encryption, specifically, one that is not plagued with backdoors. In the "social control" version of the Internet, we'd either be denied the right to encrypt, or the encryption mechanisms would have backdoors mandated by the governments. It follows that in the "anarchy and freedom" version of the Internet, where there is non-backdoor encryption, spoofings and eavesdropping would not occur.

It is important to note that, right now, we are closer to social control extreme on this subject, seeing as our encryption models rely on authorities supposed honest (the certificate authorities). A sufficiently powerful government could influence CAs on collaborating in spoofings and eavesdropping activities. We cannot observe this signing process - right now, we simply assume CAs are to be trusted, because we feel that governments haven't sunk so low in the social control measure. Should social control show its ugly face in the future, the only way we could achieve real secrecy and authenticity of communications would be having the sender and the receiver directly exchange public keys - preferably in person. By any metric, this is impractical, and could seriously hamper commercial usage of the network.

> Or even a reputable site by a known firm with a reputation to protect would use online tools to deceive

Yes, that indeed is a problem on the "anarchy and freedom" version of Internet. But how, exactly, does the "social control" version address this problem?

> What if lone individuals could topple governments and cause international diplomatic incidents?

So, we should suppress any speech that rats out illegal or inhuman actions to avoid embarassing governments? If a lone individual is aware and has evidence a government is doing something wrong, it is his duty to expose it. It does not matter if there are multiple nations involved. A perfect example of this would be e
extraordinary renditions, waterboarding, Abu Grahib and yes, the cablegate. The more government critters are afraid of being exposed, the better they will behave, and the more the people have control over their leaders.

--
Human societies were built upon the trust of individuals between each other. Problem is, the larger a group of people gets, the less we appreciate the externalities that our actions inflict upon others. We trust governments, far away as they are from our daily reality, to care for problems we are not specialized enough nor able to care. This trust depends on there being good checks and balances; social control of Internet is a weapon too powerful to be satisfactorily checked.

also, his name is not written like that. I would write the correct spelling, but this frakup called slashcode can't get utf-8 right in 2011.

Maybe useful, but all you've done for them is saved them the trouble of cutting the wood themselves.

and God forbid those pesky Africans be spared of menial work by using more efficient, automated tools.

That will work only until wikileaks' opponents force them to switch to another IP.

OF COURSE there is a clause that allows them to jump of the deal unscathed. That's precisely my point: the disparity of power between the parties makes the contract horribly biased, and that sucks.

Amazon charges for usage in arrears (i.e. after the resource is consumed). That means AWS is extending credit to all of their customers. When businesses extend credit, there are always credit limits in order to limit potential credit losses.

Or, if you are a nice guy, you contact your client to warn they may be incurring in a huge bill.

Or, if you want to be really cautious, you stipulate quotas in the contract according to the client's credit history.

Now I don't work for AWS, and I have no knowledge of the specifics of this case, but if I had a brand new customer run up a massive bill with no prior payment history, I'd cut his ass off.

In my book, "cutting off" means suspending one's account until problems are solved. Say you are an ISP and a zombie-customer gets infected and starts spewing spam - you suspend access and attempt to resolve the case. AWS didn't try, afaik.

It seems to me that AWS booted wikileaks like, forever. What if wikileaks had the actual means of payment? Again, a good shop would try one of the approaches I suggested above.