That actually sounds great: "I was here when the company-mandated calendar app told me to be." Someone else gets the blame, and you got to skip a meeting. I don't see a downside.

This. Before, people were mostly concerned with learning the language of the bordering countries because that's what was most useful. Today people have the Internet and want/need a global language of communication. While this graphic is also in many ways biased, English in the World shows most of the world has English as their first foreign language. That trend is only going to grow stronger because there are huge network effects at play here. While the US may be seeing a big influx of Spanish, here in Europe the trend is opposite - few people learn Spanish and the Spaniards learn more and more English. And I don't think it has any traction in Africa, Asia or Oceania.

And that's assuming they offer a second language at all. More often than not the language ends up being Spanish, which all too frequently becomes more of a service to ESL students than value to anyone else.

First - I appreciate the value of knowing a second language. I don't mean this as a "speak English or die" rant...

But learning a second language while living in the US counts as a complete and utter waste of time. If you don't use a language, you lose it, simple as that - Personally, I took seven years of French in school, starting from a young age (2nd grade), and I can just barely read it, painfully slow. Despite having wasted somewhere on the order of thousands of hours of instructional time cramming that language into my head, I have very nearly no ability whatsoever to carry on a conversation with someone who only speaks French.

Now, if you live in an area (even in the US) that has a large Spanish-speaking population - Perhaps you can use it enough that it will "stick". If you live in Europe, where they have multiple languages spoken regularly, a second or even third language makes functional sense. If you live somewhere that doesn't speak English (and again, I don't mean this as a pro-English screed), it makes sense to learn English as a second language, as the lingua Franca of international business (and yes, I appreciate the irony of that phrase).

Australia will have the exact same problem we have in the US. They can mandate kids pass a proficiency test, but three years after highschool, it will have made no difference in the number of languages known.

File sharing is a technology to share files, piracy is shorthand for copyright infringement that may or may not involve file sharing and file sharing may or may not involve copyright infringement. Calling them one and the same is certainly running the "proprietarians" errand in their quest to kill file sharing. It's not like they care about the collateral damage of shutting down non-infringing file sharing, in fact it's a competing distribution channel. Besides, why do you think they're increasingly using the words "thieves" and "stealing"? Because "pirates" and "piracy" no longer have the desired effect, more people associate pirates with the Jack Sparrow variety who is something more of a bad boy-hero / Robin Hood than Somalian cutthroats. Not to mention the ample opportunities to use pirate symbols, co-opting a brand is easier than building one.

First of all you're complaining about a "brand problem" of a movement that probably wouldn't even exist if they hadn't put up the pirate flag as the rallying point, getting off the ground is more important than how gracefully you do it. Secondly if they'd gotten lost in the finer semantics of language nobody would care, wasting precious media time arguing that it's not piracy but copyright infringement. Except it's not short, catchy, made for headlines and they'd probably lose. Media loves the pirate branding too you see, without it they wouldn't have gotten a fraction of the attention. Near as I can tell, neither the Swedish or German Pirate Party - who have come the furthest - have a problem with their pirate branding, but more with what the rest of their politics should contain.

The wider "mainstreaming" effect you're talking about is more seen in the other youth parties and possibly a few more concession in other political parties (I'm talking about here in Europe now, US is a lost cause). None of the other parties really cared much about their environmental policy before the Greens put it on the agenda, likewise none of the other parties cared much about IP before the Pirate Party put it on the agenda. Some of the left wing parties have framed it in terms of digital public property, some of the right wing parties in forms of market liberalization - less government regulation. Piracy is perfectly free of left-right connotations, while "sharing is caring" I'm pretty sure would become socialist politics and so inedible to the right. For all its flaws, it still has more potential than the alternatives.

Private property has collapsed much more rarely than fiat currencies, as a matter of degree. But if you find yourself in the middle of the Civil War II, chances are very good you'll be relieved of all your "tangible assets" by an army while your claim to the land might survive the war. And refugees are almost always robbed blind by bandits and armed gangs, if you're first driven from your land. I'd rely more on stealth, feigned poverty and forged surrender than mere accumulation of assets. Chances are you're not the biggest and baddest thing out there and any hoard will attract a lot of unwanted attention. On the other hand, I have to live somewhere too so I'd rather just try transferring my assets there ahead of me and escape by a long distance flight. I'd rather relocate across the globe than rely on a prepper bunker.

You, uh, realize we pay for that anyway? No federal TLA actually needs to worry about things like balancing their budget - The more they pay, the more you and I pay!

So no, I actually do not feel okay about giving an extra chunk of my salary to Utah. Fuck you, Utah, make your money back from the fundies and your crappy low-alcohol liquor, and leave me out of it!

Well let's take a process like "quenching steel" compared to regular steel, you still have all the same basic ingredients, you heat it up and cool it down but really the rapid quenching brings out new and novel properties in the steel. It surely should qualify for a patent, it's not like the regular steel smith has a patent for everything his smithy could do - yet the smith has never done or even thought about doing. In the same way it would be absurd to patent the Turing complete machine and say all software is merely the application of machine states. On the other end of the spectrum if you add 0.01% table salt and claim your quenched steel+salt isn't infringing on any patent because it only says steel, the courts will laugh at your attempt to trivially avoid the patent. Most software is like that, trivial changes of inputs, instructions, ordering etc. are "new" but not in any sense novel while software with new functionality that's never been done before sounds novel and non-obvious to me.

No, because the obvious answer is yes. But do you have to lump it together with tests to measure specific knowledge? I've had years of regular full time onsite university education, if what I need is to prove my ability in a specific topic then that should be possible without requiring a meager and largely irrelevant addition to my general interpersonal skills, particularly if my available hours, location or other duties make it impractical or impossible. At least anything that can be reasonably accomplished through exams and exercises, I don't really see how we could let loose doctors and lawyers without real world experience with real patients and clients which necessitates a controlled training program. Most fields are not like that though, if it's all on paper or computer or with inanimate objects then you should be able to read yourself to a degree in most STEM fields.

Several times since the Revolutionary War, nutcases have tried to rise up in armed resistance to the U.S. government.

...Whereas in the Revolutionary war - The nutcases fucking won, against the world's greatest superpower at the time.

All excellent points. And there are still more.

#1. Unless your password is "password" or some variant AND the site does not limit password attempts then "password strength" isn't that important.

#2. You are more likely to have your passwords compromised by using a cracked computer or by falling for a phishing link.

#3. If not #2 then when one of the sites you use is cracked and their username/password file (unhashed, unsalted) is stolen.

Also, why can't a site tell you what the requirements are PRIOR to you having to come up with a username/password/secondary-password/pet-name/school-name/maiden-name-mother?

I love my Mint desktop but haven't tried running and apt-get dist-upgrade yet. If a Debian descendant can't manage that, there's something fundamentally broken about it.

This is definitely not a scam. This company built a device which uses quantum-mechanical effects to quickly solve simulated annealing problems. They get a huge speedup in solving quatum annealing problems — which is what the customers are paying for. The customers understand exactly what they are buying -- no shenanigans here.

However, D-Wave's publicity is rather dishonest. They call their device a "quantum computer" and issue press releases with that term, despite the fact that their device is definitely not a quantum computer in the sense that theoretical computer scientists use the word. It may be that we need to redefine what "quantum computer" means, especially since D-Wave are the only ones with a product on the market that uses quantum mechanics in a computation, but so far this hasn't changed.

O'm not sure what that means for "my rights online"

It means that we have yet another shining example of the last bastion of justice in a 1st-world legal system demonstrating their complete incompetence when it comes to making decisions about the most powerful tool ever devised by humans.

Not only does it show an outright scary lack of understanding of how the internet works (in the organizational sense), but it also proves him as so out of touch with the reality of the modern world that he doesn't even recognize the sort of memes we pretty much take for granted - In this case, the "Streisand effect".


/ I've got my copy, and you have no jurisdiction over me, Mr. Peart. Your move.

As the highly abused saying goes, the proof is in the pudding - in this case the grey matter. If the brain is capable of having this processing and storage capacity, interconnectivity and power requirements then surely so can we, if we don't it's because our silicon-based technology is inefficient and inferior compared to the organic "technology" of the brain. Using custom silicon that mimics the brain - rather than trying to emulate it on a Von Neumann architecture - it should be doable in the same realm as supercomputers, I saw one research paper that said based on the size of emulating one and one neuron it should eventually be possible to do it at the size of a car with a 10 kW power supply. Still, the real issue is that they're not usable for anything else than research since we really, really don't have a programming model for a system like this.

Yes, but good luck finding out what that jurisdiction is, at least they don't seem to have much luck in locating and shutting down hidden services. If you only really need a DNS name that'll stay constant and that doesn't need to be "easy" then the onion system would be just fine, you own them by virtue of owning the private key and they all look like ebiueabv35rwas.onion. Unlike an IP you can move the key around and run your site from any box you want, which is the most essential part of DNS. You probably won't type it up but if you find it on some web page somewhere and bookmark it you'll have it.