Nope! I was just wondering if somebody would make a Fist of the North Star joke and what it would be.

I was trying to come up with something, but wasn't getting any decent ideas.

Funny thing is that America seems to have the same issue.

Before I started talking people from the US, I've never heard of people being concerned about their 1/4th of Irish or Russian heritage. But in the US that seems to be a common interest. I suppose that's because the US is a relatively new country and other cultures have much more history and tradition.

I don't think that whether you pay or not matters that much.

Cloud services are always paid for, whether by advertising, collection of data, or actual payment by the user. They all have a business model of some sort. It's not the sort of thing you can run from a box in your closet because you feel like it, and eat the cost because it's not a big deal to you.

So even if you pay, the exact same thing happen. So you pay $10 per month or whatever. Big deal, you're still insignificant in comparison to what's needed to pay for the entire infrastructure, and you have no significant influence on the company that runs it. If it starts being unprofitable, it will get shut down, even if you still want to pay those $10.

I think:

1) and 3) are necessary characteristics of a system that's intended to make data hard to take down. If you can know there are 4 copies, you can get the servers where they reside removed. Then we're back to having the problem this story is about.

2) is probably a temporary problem. Here's why: there can't be that much of it in existence. Production has to be small. With a small amount of content, the amount of requests will also stay fairly small, because people aren't going to redownload the same thing they already have. But on Freenet, what one has in the downloads folder doesn't matter. Data must be actively accessed to persist. My guess is that as Freenet grows and other kinds of traffic become much larger in proportion, any kind of unpopular content will have a harder time remaining stored. Of course it'll still exist, but it'll get buried in some obscure corner and be hard to retrieve.

4) seems to be getting better. With bandwidth and hardware now being much better than when Freenet got started I noticed that performance seems to have got considerably more tolerable.

Freenet is exactly that. Unfortunately it's nowhere near the normal web performance-wise.

Freenet uses a distributed data store, where information is pushed into the grid by the uploader, then spreads around further when accessed. That unfortunately means that things only survive long term if they're accessed. On the good side, data doesn't depend on the provider to keep existing. If people keep accessing something, it will remain present in the network.

It's also rather painfully slow. We're talking of minutes to load a webpage, though once the node is well connected to the network it can perform fairly well.

It's not very user friendly. Besides the slowness, conservation of data is not guaranteed, and Freenet addresses are long hashes. There ae no friendly domain names. All you can have is a categorized Yahoo styled index, and bookmarks.

Freenet has mostly static content. Things like forums are possible and exist but it takes special Freenet-targeted technology. You can't run any random web forum on it. There's a forum included in the Freenet system itself, you can access it from the interface.

The other option is Tor hidden services. That's the usual web, except the Tor network obscures the location of the actual server and its clients. Performance is usually good. Unlike with Freenet, there's still a single server somewhere, which if found can be taken down.

Given any dataset, you can come up with a formula that would match it.

That doesn't mean though that if they tried doing this back when he was on his 3rd or even 20th murder, they'd have managed to come up with something useful.

What a load of crap.

The vast, vast majority of work isn't Important. The people who make large real world changes are very few. The vast majority has the function of a cog in a machine. Some are lucky to be a valuable and well taken care of cog, but it's still a cog.

Even if you're really happy with your job, unless you're one of those incredibly rare people whose work saves many lives, or dramatically improves living conditions, or something of that sort, I doubt very much you'll wish you could have done more of it on your death bed.

My satisfaction with my job is usually quite good. At some points it's been really outstanding. But even in the most satisfying times, I can assure you that if I found out I was going to die in 6 months, I'd be out of there in a week at most.

That's almost entirely backwards.

Solar will never, ever work for cars of the kind people normally drive. There's just not enough surface area on a car to collect enough power to move a modern vehicle. All solar cars are completely unusable in practice due to their complete lack of protection, accomodation or anything a normal car offers.

On the other hand, pretty much all the energy we consume (save geothermal) comes from the Sun at some point. And there's more than enough of it if it can be harvested.

Things are what they are, not what you think they are, to put it in some way. Believing you can fly if you jump of a cliff doesn't make you able to. Believing organic matter has something magical to that can't be reproduced artifically doesn't make it so either (dispoved by WÃhler's synthesis of urea)

In the same way, it doesn't matter what somebody believes what a phone is, it's still a computer.

I'm immediately reminded of countless Slashdot posts decrying the rise of appliance computing and lamenting the industry's move away from "general-purpose computing." That phrase is actually a euphemism for "nerd playground made by nerds for nerds," because that is what is actually being missed. Nerds feel power when they invest time and master a system, but non-nerds have neither the time nor desire to make computing a hobby. To them, computers are simply a means to get a job done, and that's the extent of their interest.

There's no conflict between a general purpose device and an easy to use one. I don't see how lack of DRM and user restrictions would suddenly mean anything different for the interface. All it means for most users is the ability to install unofficial applications. For the rest, the UI can be exactly the same.

Doctorow argues that an appliance computer isn't a specialized computing device but a general-purpose computer running "spyware." This is a highly politicized perspective to take.

And an entirely correct one. If you're not the owner of your hardware, then somebody else is. And if they can make money by collecting all the data they can on you, why wouldn't they?

Stick-shift automobiles are generally more efficient gas-wise because you are able to directly control the gears used to move the vehicle, but most people today drive automatics. They don't want to mess with things, or tweak things, or dissect things. The car is a tool, and that is also true of computers.

Yes, a computer is a tool. A tool should do what it's told. A car should drive wherever I want, a hammer should hammer whatever I want, and a computer should execute whatever code I want. The tool is my slave and I'm its master, and that's the only relationship I'm willing to accept.

Disregarding the pandering videogame terminology for a moment, this is a perfect example of the freedom-fighting perspective that appeals to techies and convinces them that they are soldiers in a "war". RMS has made a career out of this, and while his insistence on open technologies does contribute to progress in the long term, it's that step over the line into delusion that makes me cringe. There's no war. We're not soldiers. We're not fighting a "mini-boss" in a video game, and we're not "level designers." We're just nerds who like to tinker, and that is a niche demographic in this business. The free market has discovered that the best way to make a seamless experience is to close parts of it down so the user doesn't screw it up (and any of you who have done tech support already understand how painfully easy it is for non-techies to do just that).

Bunch of nonsense. The reality is whatever we make it be. If we decide to make a war where there wasn't one before, then there will be a war. The "free market" isn't some sort of deity, it's simply the consequence of the actions of people.

Besides, there's nothing approaching a free market in the modern economy. The cost of entry into say, the cell phone market is enormous, and all the existing players are busy making turf grabs to make sure nobody new moves in.

Probably, posting this will get me modded down, but I just wanted to comment on the bitterness toward appliance computing that has sprung up in online tech communities since the popularization of mobile devices like the iPad. There's this self-absorbed attitude that I just can't wrap my head around, a petulant voice that screams "Don't tell me what to do!" like a child throwing a tantrum. It's so out of touch with where the industry has headed in the last 10 years that it risks marginalizing its believers, turning them into crotchety, narrow-minded, unpleasant people.

You know, I don't get your position either. I used to hear that America was the Land Of The Free, where I imagine a sentiment like "Don't tell me what to do" would be quite welcome.

Again, we create our reality. Yes, that position is of course self absorbed. And no, I don't care that you don't like it, because that's the direction where I want things to go, so it's the direction where I will be pushing things. Neither of us are entirely passive actors at the mery of the world, we can and do shape it, even if usually in tiny increments.

PC gaming went from desktops to consoles, and now everything else is moving from desktops to mobile devices. It's where the industry is now, because seamless experiences win out in the long term. It's what users want.

That's not universal. I for instance mostly stopped buying games due to this. I do not care for consoles or gaming on mobile devices for the most part.

Now, as for DRM and the other points that Doctorow brought up, he frets over the computing restrictions of his future hearing aid, and I just can't take that as a serious argument. The whole talk reeks of alarmism, as the very restrictions he rants about have all been circumvented already, and several major players have abandoned such restrictions entirely, such as the aforementioned iTunes Music Store, which dropped its DRM (something Apple doesn't get enough credit for, honestly--I can't imagine what Steve Jobs said to the labels to get them to play along).

Er, and how do you think that lack of DRM happened? Because the industry suddenly decided to get rid of DRM out of the goodness of their heart?

No, because DRM failed miserably once and again, and again, screwing over quite a few people that were stupid enough to buy into it. And as a result it acquired a bad reputation. People made it clear that they don't like music with DRM, and go figure, the industry complied.

So all that needs to happen is for people to make clear they don't want DRM in hardware, and the industry will have to comply, because otherwise they'll lose a lot of money. So I'll keep pushing in that direction.