1. Guarantee privacy. This is something that Google et. al have been trying to wean the public away from-- wanting privacy. So many people simply don't think to ask for it any more. You can't do it just for those who ask for that to work. You have to do it for everyone.

2. Provide hard anonymity. One of the things that made email super useful and that we don't have any more is the ability to be reasonably anonymous. Law Enforcement or 'Public Firewall' officials world-wide have clamped down on the ability to use or reach the anonymous remailers we *used* to have. It's not just LEOs who will fight this tooth and claw, but also the 'think of the children!' types.

3. Enforce non-commercial communication at the user's request. Spam filters have gotten pretty good. Most businesses that want to contact you have to jump through hoops to get your okay. However, once you establish that one 'business' relationship, you're fair game. Buy one toilet seat on Amazon, suddenly you're deluged with 'Today's hot toilet seat deals!' and the like. You've got to dig through their website to find the 'unsubscribe me!' button, and a lot of the time it doesn't do what it says. The user needs to be able to turn commercial email on and off with a switch, and every 'rejected' email needs to get bounced back to sender at the mail exchange level.

One new webmail client or novel server configuration is unlikely to solve these problems. I do think that all of them are solvable, though, even though they'll require a great deal of re-architecting email.

Unfortunately, unless you can somehow invent a magic bullet that will keep world governments, law enforcement, and marketing types from ever being able to touch such a service, it won't stay usable long.

This is one of those... 'we've got something we really didn't expect. We've gotten it a few times now, and don't really know what to make of it. It suggests the absurd. Can anybody see any flaws in our methodology?' moments where everyone involved is very nervous about having to redo ALL their math to try to incorporate something NEW.

And yeah, the standard model is pretty fucky. A physicist at UT Austin once explained it to me as 'well, basically we just multiplied out all the particles we had into a matrix. It describes the phenomenon but offers very few insights into it, '.

Are Bats and Supes gonna kill folks in this cut? Do we get to see what few amazons survived get sexually assaulted by aliens?

The as bad as the JL movie really was, it was far and away better than 'Superman vs. Batman'.

The DCCU is just better off without Snyder.

I read this as 'both we and RMS need to leave abusive language, and toxic environments behind."

It could have used an implicit subject since the OP actually does call RMS out on his behavior.

and

"this is more important than the coddling of a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently."

I read this as a jab at RMS or any other individual who won't or can't grow up to the point they work in society-- basically anyone who feels its more important to complain about SJWs and political correctness and those who beat a drum and chant, rather than actually trying to address the real, underlying problems.

Both strongly connected to Epstein, Minsky through testimony and Ito through cash trails. I'm thinking that MIT may be about to have its very own Penn State-style culture of denial exposed.

Just the demo image on the homepage makes me break out in cold-sweat flashbacks to endless conference calls. Sure, there's Steve Carrel in the bottom right, but watching 'The Office' gives me a little too much work-stress-related grief to really enjoy it.

I think that folks aren't going to really be happy with this unless it contains a transistor-perfect emulator or a very-close facsimilie thereof of the C64, complete with c64 BASIC.

I'm not terribly familiar with the state of c64 emulation. I'm in the apparent minority of people who grew up in that era that went on to become techies that did NOT own a c64 or Vic20. That said, I know that newer machines do have some reference-quality emulators out there. I can't imagine that the c64 would be terribly difficult to handle if it's not already, especially if you owned or licensed the rights to the original hardware design.

The real trick, in my book, will be to allow the 'bare metal' coding that the c64 did on a modern architecture. USB controllers like to offer an enumeration and access to their terminals rather than bit-level access to the serial pins.

"So explain to me again how you broke your arm..." the doctor said.

"I was trying to get away from the creeper."

"As in a monster."

"Yeah. It hisses and then explodes."

"And you felt you had to run into moving traffic to get away from it."

"I had an entire stack of diamonds on me! I couldn't just let him blow me up."

"Uh-huh."

The police officer chimed in, "You know, some of the people on that bus that hit you were more seriously injured than this. You're damn lucky you *only* have a broken arm."

The doctor shook his head. "Last year this same time, it was a kid chasing a Gyrados pokemon into the side of a street-sweeper. He's still in halo gear. But this year, they've got virtual treasure to hide and monsters intent on taking it from them."

HP's 'Enterprise' blog.

Yeah, it's a fucking advertisement. Way to pay the bills, Slashvertisements!

'Store your data in the cloud so we can sell more server-room class hard drive arrays! Don't store that shit at home. You know you what happens at home? Mexicans. Mexicans break into your house and steal the platters right out of your cheap TB hdds. DO NOT STORE YOUR DATA AT HOME. WE'RE BEGGING YOU!'

Companies in the U.S. are vastly less honorable and loyal to their employees than they've been in a long time, and they're getting worse every year.

Loyalty and respect are a two-way streets. If you treat employees like mindless tools, they're going to treat the company like a tool-- in this case, 'getting fair compensation' by hook or crook. They know that a board-room full of executives are still going to be super-wealthy at the end of the day, even if they five-finger every piece of kit they can lay their hands on. That's not an environment that breeds loyalty or honesty.

>Another down side to this is that because I am in a music bubble of my own making and have probably been missing a bunch of new music that I would actually like.

I think you may be grossly overestimating the quality of current North American-produced music. There are only a very few tracks worth listening to.

Europop was getting *just* listenable again, but has suffered a setback in 'old steady' acts incorporating autotune. K- and J-Pop have become so bland over the last decade that it's like trying to enjoy the sound of pipes draining.

The big problems making NA pop music unlistenable are

a) a divorce between instrumental melody and vocals. The vocalists aren't just making the music 'their own', but are taking it home, microwaving it, and serving it as appetizers without ever listening to the rest of the song.

b) increasing repetitiveness within songs. Consider Fleetwood Mac, which is typically really repetitive. They typically have songs that consist of a few, repeated verses and choruses. However, they have solid instrumentals backing their vocalists up. Now consider a slightly more recent act like Imagine Dragons, which frequently plays tracks consisting of an imaginative idea, very few lyrics to go along with it, and what amounts to synthesizer, drum and bass to back it. There are frequent repetitions *within* the verse and chorus, with very little attempt at structure, rhythm, or aesthetics.

>but not enough pro media apps and games without WINE.

I couldn't really comment about the media apps. It seems like we've got a fairly nice selection of multimedia producers and photography workers - Darktable, etc... but I've not been doing a lot of media work lately.

However, the Linux gaming environment has changed dramatically over the last 3-5 years. Aside from the games that run well under WINE (WoWarcraft is a good example) There is a now a huge selection of Linux-native games on Steam and gog.com.

Frequently the 4A studios give Linux a miss. However, Steam has dramatically cut that number. The 'SteamOS + Linux' category has grown just as dramatically.

GoG focuses on bringing older and niche games to players that would otherwise miss them. There is a very wide selection of Linux games available on GoG.

Many, if not most, indie game devs want their games to be available to as wide an audience as possible, so frequently develop with Linux and/or Android in mind. For example, I'm currently playing 'Terraria'. Small dev team. 29th most popular game ever-- Linux native install with some help from Mono.

Now, in addition all to that, let's go back to WINE. Steam has, in the last few weeks, begun testing 'SteamPlay', which uses a custom build of WINE called 'Proton' that runs underneath steam to run some previously Windows-only titles with fantastic quality. In the last week or so, I've been able to run some games I loved, but abandoned along with Windows like 'MagicMaker' and 'PixelJunk Eden'. Steam is giving back to WINE, which just released a new version.

It's worth noting that the Java version of Minecraft has always worked on Linux and Fortnite apparently plays very well under Wine.

Right now, Linux gaming is in a period of Renaissance. If you've despaired of gaming on Linux, it might be time to give it another look.

As soon as we figure out how to torrent Higgs Bosons, Gravity will be the same kind of free that music is.

You jest, but at this point, I think we'd get a lot more out of shuttering all our coal-based power-plants than yanking tobacco.

Most of the boomer smokers, many of whom took 'Tobacco is good for you' to their graves, are dead. Folks who smoke *today* don't only know they have it coming, but they've been told all about it by their doctors, teachers, and television for most if not all their lives. They're doing it to themselves and they know it.

What we need to address that problem is more education and recovery programs for tobacco addicts, just like with any other terribly addictive drug. (Opiate crisis deniers, I'm lookin' at you here.) Smokers need help. Blanket bans and kneejerks won't accomplish much.

While Nuclear plants need a hell of a lot more scrutiny than they're getting (Fukushima Daichi was a lot worse than it had to be because folks at Tokyo Electric Power Co were cuttin' corners to maximize personal profits -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), they are, in general, ANGELS compared to the Coal industry.

For individuals, coal work is pretty damn deadly all on its own. Besides the twenty-odd thousand deaths from Black Lung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker%27s_pneumoconiosis) each year, there are thousands of accidental deaths around the world in coal mines. We're actually a low point as safety regulations and technology advances. China is a pretty poor example compared to the U.S., which actually stays in the double digits these days. In 2013, the last year China has on public record, there were more than a thousand accidental deaths in coal mines. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_in_China#2013)

For communities, Coal Seam Fires are pretty damn serious problems, making whole towns uninhabitable. Coal fires dump 40 tons of mercury into the atmosphere, yearly, and are responsible for 3% of the worlds total CO2 emissions. They are, of course, almost, but not always triggered and/or made worse by mining. Imagine that!
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire)

For the world as a whole, one of the major producers of CO2 emissions are hydrocarbon-/fossil fuel-burning electrical power plants. In the U.S., a little less than a third (28%) of our total CO2 emissions are from generating electricity. (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions) Additionally, about a third of our power is generated by Coal, and another third is generated by other fossil-fuel hydrocarbons including Natural Gas and Petroleum. (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3)

Happily, the amount of renewable energy generated is growing and the amount of fossil-fuel energy is dropping. It's not enough, though. Nowhere NEAR enough.

If we just *bam* shut down all coal power-plants, (or better yet, Natural Gas plants too) and dealt with the economics of the situation, we'd take a massive bite out of our greenhouse gas emissions. I think the U.S. and most of Europe could do it as a whole, but that it may not be in the 'industrializing' world. We can hope that China manages. They talk a big gain, but, well, we know what kind of game China actually plays.

tl;dr: Global Warming is going to get a WHOLE lot worse before it gets better, and shutting down all our coal production would help a lot, and not just in that area.

About a year and a half ago, I purchased a Dell Laptop (Core i5, integrated graphics, 500gb HDD) because a) my Samsung tablet had just shattered and b) I needed something to do schoolwork on that could be taken to my local 2 year college and used on their premises.

(Note that a pencil and a spiral notebook would have been just as effective for 90% of my work there...)

It cost me ~ $450 US. The Chromebooks and Android tablets that were equivalent and available were in the $300-$400 range. The laptop came with win10 preinstalled. I could not get a 'bare' laptop for less since I was taking advantage of several overlapping discounts. I never let win10 boot on it. I immediately blew it away in favor of a Mint Linux install.

The amount of computing power that laptop wields in comparison to a Chromebook or Tablet is, frankly, ridiculous and unnecessarily. Unbound by Windows idiocy, it is far more powerful than many 'enterprise server' (*gag*) class machines that I've worked with in the not-too-distant past. Not only can I be running 1080p video on the thing, I can run the IDE and development environment of my choice, including a database server, Libre Office, a real email client, Firefox *and* Chrome, simultaneously, *and* still have cycles and resources left for downloading more crap to watch.

I'm almost completely unbound by proprietary and/or closed-source software. I don't have to run any closed source software if I don't want to. I don't *have* to run any mandatory spyware. (Chromium gets launched if I'm developing against it.) I'm immune to any kind of lock-in and thanks to my IT background, feel no bonus for keeping my crap 'in the cloud'. I am not a 'sync-er'. (If it's not backed up and stored in a fireproof container, etc..., etc...)

Now a lot of that power is conditional on the fact that I understand how to install and take care of a linux desktop. I understand how to do my own backups as well as their value. I understand how to work to protect my privacy with encryption and VPNs. I understand how to troubleshoot little, niggling problems that would drive an Android or MacOS user insane. (You poor Windows guys. I just ache for you. I've been there, and I'm so very sorry there aren't more ways out for you.) I don't *have* to get nickeled and dimed to death by the 'Android Store.'

About the only places that any given Chromebook really outshines my setup is on weight and electrical power consumption... and that's not really an issue for me since there are charging stations near everywhere these days. It's also a reflection of the kind of power I'm sitting on. If a Chromebook is an electric smart-car, my Laptop is a highly-tuned muscle car, with the gas mileage to match.

Yeah, there are benefits to be had in ditching a Windows Laptop for a Chromebook. However, if you're willing to take the time to understand what you're doing, and that's NOT a little thing, you can get a WHOLE LOT MORE bang for your buck with a laptop equivalent in price to that Chromebook.