I believe the 'you' in "you voted for them" is the plural. That is, you and your neighbours and friends voted for them.

I don't like it either, but like you, I can't be arsed to go out and canvass my neighbourhood on the merits of the Pirate Party (or even just to vote for someone other than the incumbent). Hence, like you, I have got exactly the government that I voted for.

As an aside, lots of people here in the UK have been voting for UKIP. As far as I can tell, the majority of UKIPs manifesto is that they want to 'rebalance' immigration so that we have less immigrants. Once UKIP started getting voted into small seats, the 2.5 major parties all started talking about their new plans to tackle immigration, whereas before that they'd just shrugged it all off as nonsense (hell, Labour actively encouraged immigration so that there would be a whole new generation of Labour votets, and even they are now talking about curbs on immigration). The point here is of course that you don't necessarily need to replace the incumbents, but actually just make them alter course a little. It all still means getting off your arse, and that's where my whole argument falls down because none of us can be bothered.

Already being done, although sadly that island appears to be Britain :-(

Since it's a thought experiment, and it's slashdot... I think all this, running on a Raspberry Pi. ;-)

Someone's got to pay for the billions worth of IT and manpower used to run this stuff. Why not rent it out to anyone with a suitcase full of cash?

If you're going to go down for something, make sure it's big. In the case of theft, make sure you're stealing several wasted lifetimes worth of money so that you can afford the legal defence, and eventual breaking out of jail. And you can afford to do the same for everyone involved.

There's no point getting banged up and a criminal record for petty theft.

I'm with you on this - it might be criminal, and it might be taking money from the banks customers, but it sure is a slick manoeuvre.

This post might as well have been called "Kids cho0sing to live in trendy SF instead of cultural vacuum of Silicon Valley"

The valley is dull - really dull. You need a car to get from one store to the next, let alone to get anywhere interesting. That means you have to be sober the whole time, which is dull. SF on the other hand, has decent public transport, has some cool places to go, and because you're on public transport you can have a drink whenever you want.

If anything's getting worse, it's the lack of public transport between SF and the Valley.

So how do you deal with sites that use a CDN domain? As I understand performance 'best practice', you should deliberately host your static assets on a secondary domain so that it doesn't ever get sent cookies. You mention vimeo.com and vimeocdn.com, but many CDN domains aren't quite so obviously named - even here on /. we seem to have slashdot.org and a.fsdn.com and www.gstatic.com (not sure if gstatic is serving any JS, but you get the idea).

FWIW, I use Adblock + Ghostery to avoid most of the cross-domain crap that you really don't want. However, the whitelists for noscript are proving more challenging.

I don't disagree entirely, but I'd like to add that it's not quite as simple as you make out. As an Ultimaker owner, I've found that very small details make a huge difference to print quality. I've also found that as the machine's design evolves, so does the 'ease' of getting quality out of it.You can get some really astounding quality out of an Ultimaker, but it takes hours and hours to print, and simply printing again doesn't always yield the same quality as it did the first time. I seriously doubt people will want to wait hours for their $2 curtain rings, and they certainly won't want to tinker with the machine and software for an hour before printing, or indeed put up with failed prints.

Lastly, the quality of the model has as much to do with the outcome as the printer itself. I've tried some truly horrible models that I've downloaded, and I've also used some really good ones. Garbage in, garbage out.

Ultimately though, you will be right. It'll just take a few years until the cheap printers really can do what the more expensive ones can do. In the 2 years I've owned an Ultimaker, I'd say the cost of the quality I bought 2 years ago is down by about 30%. Paying the same as I did 2 years ago probably gets you better quality/reliability/repeatability than back then too though. And even though the Ultimaker has been copied by the Chinese, and there already are various Chinese printers available, I'm not aware of any that are credible enough to eat any of Ultimaker's lunch just yet.

Suffice to say though, you'd need to be some sort of shower-curtain weirdo to need to print enough curtain rings and whatnot to make it worth owning a printer. Popping down to your local Tescos and having them print it for you sounds a lot more likely (and is something they've talked about on their blog).

Perhaps you have more money than me, but I don't want my fridge re-ordering stuff for me at all.

We use an online supermarket to buy our groceries. The app/website has a "you've ordered this before" sort of feature, and also "you might also like", "start with your last basket" etc etc. The trouble is, if I'm ordering (say) deodorant, I'll buy either of the two major brands that my supermarket stocks. I'll buy the one that's on special offer, and if they're both on special, then I'll pick the one that gives me the greatest volume for money spent. If neither is on special, then maybe, just maybe I'll consider the supermarket own-brand, but then I'll buy the minimum quantity possible, just in case it doesn't work very well or something, otherwise I'll probably pick the cheaper of the two major brands, or else the one I didn't buy last time.

I know in theory I could absolutely have an app on my fridge that works all this shit out and orders what I want. However, reality suggests it's never going to happen. In fact, reality suggests the supermarkets will p0wn the fridge apps so completely that the fridge will never be able to order a special offer, and will just happen to think I want to eat steak in the one week that steak prices are unseasonally high, or in the week that the supermarket has a bit too much of it going off in the freezers.

Oh, and yes, I realise that you don't keep deodorant in the fridge, but the same goes for packs of ham, or organic eggs or whatever.

Time to routinely use RedPhone and TextSecure. I've been using the latter, and it's actually very nice. I've yet to find a friend doing the same though :-(

> They're about at the same level of quality as they were 25 years ago.

In which case, our Trans-Atlantic Bullshit Filter seems to be broken these days :-(

In the UK we only really used to get the fairly-reasonable-might-just-work-out sort of films at the cinema, presumably because it wasn't worth shipping the crap ones over to us. Nowadays, the cinemas are putting films out at about the same time as they appear in the US, and so the TABF doesn't get a chance to take effect. They do their best to have some big premiere, and then the film tanks because it's rubbish. In the past, we might have had to wait, but it meant we stood a chance of getting reasonable films.

I suspect the only reasonable solution is to cut the cost of production. That way, they can afford to release dozens of crap films and see which ones work out, and then produce endless sequels and prequals in an attempt to squeeze out every last tiny bit of revenue. Oh wait... they're doing most of that right now :-(

A quick run around those million servers shows the most used app is the System Idle Process. Microsoft's marketing department is already looking at how it can rebrand and promote this awesome app. Research suggests Linux doesn't even have a System Idle Process, so Microsoft is hoping to capitalise on this in the constant battle of Windows vs. Linux.

I think also you forget that when a flaw is found in FOSS, it really does get many-eyes on it, and in fact, if it's a well-used application, it'll probably get multiple proposed patches too. Further, you could patch your own copy if you desire - thus, your copy at least is indeed more secure as a result.

It's true, comparatively very few people really spend time reading code looking for flaws. However, a reasonably well run FOSS project should get fixes out the door far faster than most of the commonly used software vendors do.

It's a Monday, and /. is stating the bleedin' obvious.

What's less obvious is how much NSA snooping hurts US companies. I doubt it's nearly enough to be able to call it a justification for dismantling the infrastructure.

For Australians, I'd imagine this news to be worse than Edward Snowden reporting that the NSA blanket-monitors the US. I mean, monitoring is one thing, but actively sending full content to another nation seems like another entirely.

That said, I think we know what will actually happen about all of this, even with whatever public outrage it incites.