He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they don't want to talk to a solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's packing a couple of swords.

So this is it. The metaverse end-game, except instead of The Street we just get 'the street you are standing on' with your retinas being sprayed with lurid depictions of pedestrians who've configured themselves to show up as their desired sex, weight, hair color, dick size, fursonas, or favorite Naruto outfit.

That's totally valid. It still is nice we have the freedom to choose the tools in your toolbox though. I worked on Gnome for a few years and was a Gnome foundation member: I fully appreciate the position of not wanting to deal with democratic messiness and just consuming the output of such.

How many consumers do you know of who give two shits about the OS that runs on their system? They use what comes with the computer. When they buy Steamboxen it'll come with SteamOS and they'll use it as endusers use anything. If you honestly think the vast majority of people are going to weigh the pros and cons of various linux distros AT ALL much less down to the level of detail of their INIT SYSTEMS I honestly don't think we can have much of a conversation.

Some super windows-fied linux systemd based distro would most likely be a net positive for the whole 'linux on the desktop' bugbear. That doesn't mean I shouldn't have the freedom to chose differently for myself however.

Oh day of days! Now it needs to statically link in gconf and we'll all have a registry too!

Is anyone really concerned about this? Let me put on my prophetic wizard hat and predict how this is going to go from here:

1. Systemd isn't going anywhere. The distros that use it will largely continue to use it.
2. Enough people hate Systemd enough the motivation to create some distros that absolutely do not use it will be very high.
3. Such distros will be created (Maybe use nixos/nix/guix as the base for extra change-it-up-ability.).
4. Much like Mate/Cinnamon vs Gnome 3: people will use both the systemd distros and the systemd-less distros.
5. Much gnashing of teeth will ensue for years to come. A la emacs vs vim, kde vs gnome, gnome 3 vs gnome 2, etc ad nausem

I'm really not trying to be flip but this is just the FOSS process at work here. It's messy sometimes but so is anything that involves people. Embrace the ecosystem that makes this whole argument possible! If Apple or Microsoft decided they want some polorizing system like Systemd to be the new hotness in their OS offerings there's literally fuck all we could do about it. At least with the FOSS environment we have the freedom to make our own decisions

Would never have been an error in the past sadly.

Kind of a weird example but RpgMaker is a tool that lets non-programmers create their own RPG games. While there is a 'text based code' (ruby) layer a non-programmer can simply ignore it and either use modules other people have written or confine their implementation to the built in functionality.

Now look at the complexity involved in the application itself to enable the non-programmer to create their game. Dialog boxes galore, hundreds of options, great gobs of text fields, select lists, radio buttons. It's just overflowing with UI. And making an RPG game, while certainly complex, is a domain limited activity. You can't use RpgMaker to make a RDBMS system, or a web framework, or a FPS game.

The explosion of UI complexity to solve the general case -- enable the non-programmer to write any sort of program visually-- is stupendously high. WIth visual tools you'll always be limited by your UI, and what the UI allows you to do. Also think of scale, we can manage software projects with text code up to very high volumes (it's not super easy, but it's doable and proven). Chromium has something like 7.25 million lines of code. I shudder to think how that would translate into some visual programming tool.

I'm not sure how well it would scale

"If it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

Plastic asshole.”

If we go by Arthur C Clarke (and really, why shouldn't we?) it would be Europan which has a nice ring to it.

In other news leaked internal NSA documents show that they only begin to have trouble cracking AES at 256-bit key sizes and higher.

It's almost like they're modulating a signal and then demodulating it. I wonder if there's a name for this sort of thing.

Exit nodes weren't involved in this since it's an attack against hidden services whose traffic by definition remains within the TOR network. It's not really an attack on TOR, it was an attack on the server software Freedom Hosting was running and clueless/idiot TOR users with javascript enabled and other unsafe TOR habits.

Totally agree with you on people thing that TOR is some anonymity panacea is shortsighted.

My fault, at least August 2nd. Potentially longer.

Probably not but the analysis of the malware is still on-going. Hence 'potentially'. Regardless I think it's safe to assume any thing traced back to FBI lab computers are probably not high on the list of actionable items.

You're forgetting that our immune system blocks the vast, vast majority of bacteria, viruses, etc from doing anything at all. The ones that can have found explicit "hacks" that leverage vulnerabilities in the immune system. I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree on this one but if you can make a case about what the 'something completely different' would be that a) is compatible enough with our biology to infect us, and b) able to bypass our immune system entirely I would love to hear it.