If you are uploading geotagged, unblurred pictures to a public site, then you are uploading geotagged, unblurred pictures to a public site. If you don't want people seeing those pictures, don't upload them (or mark them private). It was always possible to look through Flickr pictures, so this doesn't change anything in that regard.

The problem with Google Street View is that they are _taking_ new pictures and making them public.

My general response to those claims is a combination of what you said and the following argument:

Yes, his quote was ambiguous and probably gave a false impression of what he actually did. It was poorly worded and probably misleading. However, he said this in ONE interview and even by looking at the rest of that quote in context, it is clear that he meant something along the lines of "I pushed forward a number of plans and funding proposals which helped to turn the Internet into what it is today." If he repeatedly or directly claimed that he had "invented" or "implemented" the Internet, I would be less sympathetic, but it seems like it was little more than a slightly poorly-worded answer to a single interview question that was blown way out of proportion for purely political reasons.

I happen to believe that it is acceptable for the government to infringe on our freedoms in order to internalize externalities. Tragedy of the commons and all that.

Those who don't are very hardcore libertarians or anarcho-capitalists. It is a legitimate viewpoint to take, just one I happen to disagree with. However, the idea of accepting government infringement on our freedoms is by no means unique to environmental legislation, so an objection on those grounds applies to a publicly-funded police force or fire department as well.

You jest, good sir, but I have been toiling on just such a foul creation. They said I was crazy, but could a crazy person really embed the Uzbl web browser into Emacs? NO! Those cowards were merely afraid of the infinite power I would wield by putting a browser in Emacs. Think, then, of their horror when they learn that someone put an Emacs clone in the browser.

Behold, the fruit of my demonic labors: Ymacs in Uzbl in Emacs. IT'S ALIVE!!!

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

As others have said, the "$15 extra for exchange" is wrong; if you have a "corporate" account, then you have to pay $15 extra for the data plan, but it is the same data plan as the "regular people" plan. You can access Exchange just fine with a regular data plan.

Also, it is possible to use tethering without any permission from Verizon. I just got my Droid and spent some time last night setting up TetherBot. It lets you create a SOCKS 5 proxy over USB, which is good enough for web browsing (and anything that can connect over SOCKS). In my test last night, I got speeds of 1.2Mb/s down and 0.44Mb/s up over Verizon's EVDO.

As far as I know, the 5GB "unlimited" limit still applies, so use that tethering carefully.

You laugh, but I have have started working an Emacs interface for Uzbl called Ezbl (pronounced "ease-able"). It's still in a ridiculously early state, but it's coming along and getting dangerously close to being useful.

SPIM? Ack! I took (and later was a teaching assistant for) a class which used SPIM for teaching MIPS assembly. It is a god-awful program. It is horribly outdated and hasn't been updated in years and has the most confusing UI I've ever seen in any program ever.

Some students wrote a replacement with a reversible debugger (can go forwards and backwards through the code) here:

http://mipscope.sourceforge.net/

I second Swing. I've been doing it for 3 years, and it is great way to get exercise, just take a look at this if you don't believe me. Of course, it doesn't start out that fast, very few people, even those who have been doing it for years can't dance that fast for any amount of time.

Plus, it has a very goofy, carefree attitude, which can be easier to approach than the intense, "stare passionately into your partner's eyes" that the Latin family of dances tend to have. Just about any lack of skill can be excused by a big dopey smile.

Lastly, and I have no idea why this is, but swing dancers tend to be techy. At my local scene, almost all (no joke, like 80%) of the guys are either Computer Science or Computer Engineering. The girls are a bit more diverse, but cluster around biomed or applied math/econ.

But the advice of the parent is essential. If you make it clear that you are there to pick up girls, you will quickly become "that creepy guy." On the other hand, I've known fat old guys whom all the college girls are lining up to throw themselves on, so attitude plays a huge part.

Wow, that was an awesome article!

I have been thinking about the same problem for a little while, and have some comments on some of the stuff he proposed.

It doesn't surprise me at all that Salganik's experiment showed that popular songs would become more popular, almost regardless of their quality. This seems to be a hard-wired human character trait, to conform to popular opinion, even if contradicts direct observation (see the Asch conformity experiments or the No soap, radio jokes). I think that any "solution" to this problem is likely to be fighting a losing battle against peer pressure, since people will likely try to subvert the "find the merit" process in order to figure out what the group thinks.

On the topic of solving the problem of pre-existing bias, I say, "why bother?" He proposes a number of increasingly complex (though well-thought-out) solutions to the "Pro-Bush, Anti-Bush" article problem, all of which, I think, would be doomed to failure. This seems to be a cat-and-mouse game of "outsmart the rater" which I think the creator of the system would lose. If you try to make a smarter process of preventing people from injecting their bias into an article, they will just figure out a way around it. Rather than trying to outsmart the reader, simply include their bias in the rating of the article.

If you saw an article with a rating that said "95% of Bush supporters liked this article," it would tell you something about it, as would "90% of Kerry supporters also liked this article." You could rely on self-reporting or fancy statistical extraction of preferences to figure out who is a "Bush supporter" and who is a "Kerry supporter." That way, you wouldn't have to trick people into anything.

Additionally, who says something is an important part of what is being said. If you see an article about how 9/11 was a conspiracy by a well-known Truther, that is a very different piece of information than if President Bush says it. Likewise, a heavy metal fanatic liking a heavy metal song sends a different message than someone who thinks Vivaldi is just a young upstart and a passing fad liking the same song.

There could be problems with this (like how to keep the display of who said what short enough to be comprehensible), but it could be a step in the right direction, or at least something interesting to think about.