That's not Heinlein, that's H.L. Mencken, and I can assure you, he would not be on the side of the truckers in this case. He didn't like stupid people, and called the under-educated middle class 'the booboisie'.

Yes, the actual cable in question is a direct connection between Suva in Fiji and Nuku'alofa in Tonga, a distance of about 750km, give or take.

Ever shown ID at a bar or a liquor store? It's like that. They check that the photo matches your face, they let you in.

Because logs aren't databases, and don't require the same kind of structure.

There's a reason why databases keep their own logs in plain text format, even when they are specifically designed for information storage and retrieval. They are hedging against catastrophic system failure, in which the only way to diagnose problems is outside the system. That's pretty much the role of logs. They're diagnostic tools. And they are designed—well, supposed to—be accessible when the system itself isn't working. So that you can find and fix what's wrong with the system.

People suggesting that it's sufficient to intercept the logging data as it's being gathered and stored in binary format probably aren't experienced (or bitter) enough to understand the multitude of mysterious ways in which systems can fail, and have yet to come to terms with the paradox of simplicity, and why its beauty transcends all ornamentation.

I did a double major in Theatre and English Literature in university, and then went on to spend a couple of decades coding and working in tech.

I learned an immense amount of deeply technical matters in theatre. I had to learn basic engineering, the physics of sound and light, electronics and much, much more. I used to be able to calculate lighting power loads in my head.

And yes, we spent classes learning to communicate with only gibberish, or without speaking at all. We did silly trust exercises and re-learned basic movement, speech, vocalisation and other skills.

But the single most important thing I learned—a skill I still use every single day—is how to put my fucking ego and even my dignity aside and focus on joining my efforts with those of others in order to create something that is bigger than anyone's individual contribution.

The number of entitled, holier-than-thou shitheads who think they don't owe it to the world to actually live in it is way too high in tech. If your entire self-image can't survive a few hours a week actually learning to communicate, then I feel genuinely sorry for you.

I'm not sentimental, and most of the left's touchy-feely, sharing-caring emotional virtue signaling sends me to the exits quicker than fire in a match factory. But these particular exercises provide you with tangible, useful, reusable skills that you can apply to any collaborative project, and the people who pooh-pooh these things are the ones who are most lacking in them.

Yes, but he never actually processed it.

I think the point of this exercise is that anyone can build, maintain and pay for the physical infrastructure, so people can effectively pick up stakes whenever they like. The premise seems to be that competitive forces will keep the behemoths from monopolising your data, twisting it out of shape, or rendering it inaccessible to outside forces.

Given our experience of the commercialisation of the open web, and the commoditisation of the user, I'd say that premise is naive. At best, this is a new weapon in the online arms race, and for the moment, it's in the hands of the freedom crowd. The moment there's money to be made from your pod—and that's a necessary condition for SOLID to work—there will be vendors who will customise its contents at the expense of interoperability, and a concerted effort to make it as difficult to move as possible.

Governments will want to be able to control the movement of pods as well, for obvious reasons. And they'll no doubt want to legislate backdoors into the security mechanisms, especially those establishing identity.

I saw Tim Berners Lee back in 2000 when he first proposed what he was then calling the Semantic Web. Most of SOLID derives from what he had in mind back then. Then, as now, his ideas are inspired and powerful, but vulnerable to the buffeting of external forces. And compared to a smart man with a computer, governments and vested interests are looming large these days.

Hang on there, I thought that Messenger was end-to-end encrypted. Someone help me out here—I can see how FB could become aware of these messages (abuse reports), but how could messages in an end-to-end encryption setup be 'detected and stopped from going through'?