Don't you mean a GNU HURD of protesting armchair engineers? ;)

Seems like a very ambitious project. The implications would be vast for intelligence if done correctly. I'm imagining a program parsing through terabytes of satellite data....

Whatever advances come out of the project might also be applied to doing broad semantic studies of how people use video sharing platforms like YouTube. That would be good for better HCI and, of course, getting more relevant content. Exciting and scary stuff.

IANAL and this is not legal advice, but this may be illegal depending on the labor laws of the state you work in. I work in California and my employer provided this nice little tidbit from California Labor Code 2870 when I signed my contract (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=02001-03000&file=2870-2872) :

"(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:

(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer.

(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.

(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.”

The "relate at the time of conception or reduction ..." clause may bite you depending on when you developed the free software and how broad a judge's interpretation of your employer's business is, but a law like this in your state may give you some wiggle room out of a nasty contract. Good luck.

Wouldn't the same thing apply to these other services? I think we should use the official data as a metric given that we're not sure whether we can trust one service above the others.

Also, I've read interviews from employees at Facebook that say they try to cull duplicate accounts from the statistics they release. Plus, over half of Americans now use Facebook, so I don't think that 600 million is a bad estimate when one considers their international audience.

right to consume healthcare resources =/= right to freedom of speech. One involves a question of scarcity and property rights whereas the other doesn't. Me writing this post does not prevent you from writing another post, but me taking your money for healthcare prevents you from using that money for other purposes. I personally believe in a right to healthcare, but I believe it's on a different level of debate than freedom of speech.

I think nycto's point was that "cultural differences" should not be held above universal human rights. Saying "this oppression is just our culture" is bad because it essentializes culture to a particular ethnic/national identity and demeans the very people denoted as "part of the culture" because it posits them as unable to embrace liberty. Universal rights > "particularist" multiculturalism. For more info on universalism, see Slavoj Zizek's writings. He probably answers your calculative ethic at some point in his writings, too.

I agree with your point about the freedom to run the software you want on Apple's hardware and think that should be more of an issue of contention than whether or not Apple should have removed the gay cure app. Those are two fundamentally separate issues; one is about freedom of software, the other is about whether a company should be forced to endorse hate speech.

Apple made a right move in disabling Exodus's app. Insofar as they're the ones deciding which app to market to consumers using their store, they shouldn't waste their own bandwidth in letting people download an app that would be used to oppress a group that already has enough internalized self-hatred. I'm sure the app would also be downloaded by parents trying to "fix" their gay kids, and we know how trying to change sexuality using other, less ethical electric therapies has worked in the past.

Voice recognition might be an option, but I think it's more likely that they'll get their revenue from charging for non-Gmail-to-Gmail calls (calling "real" phones) and attracting more users to Gmail (and thus Gmail's targeted advertising) with the new feature.

Gugusasete kudasai (maybe guguresasete).
Although I don't think people would use that as much as the translation for "Just fucking Google it."

Sites can/will track you regardless of any "private mode" if you have flash enabled. Also, does anyone know where the SSL certificates are stored by Safari in OSX? Thanks in advance.

Cheating on a benchmark test given is NOT cool, no matter what the temperature of the machine.

This might just be my love of the classics (including Wuthering Heights) talking, but I think that kids at least need a basic education in some older literature. Kids aren't allowed to choose what to study in math until they have a basic understanding of things like arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. The point of teaching the classics isn't to indoctrinate; it's to give students a basic education so that they can make a more informed decision about what to study in the future.

I think it's great that countries you wouldn't expect to develop world-class infrastructure are investing so much in the Internet, but it makes me lament the priorities of the U.S. in terms of broadband development. I have no complaints about my personal connection as I live in an urban area (although sprawl is plentiful), but friends from rural areas are stuck with connections akin to old 56k dial-up modems. Dial-up in those areas is something around 5 kb/s at times.

This hurts those areas and broadens the gap in wealth between urban and rural areas because companies aren't really willing to invest in areas with no information infrastructure. Also, education suffers; online schools seem to be a good way to escape bad public schools for kids who really want to take their education into their own hands.

Hopefully, some good policies will help bridge the digital divide. I feel that that's a good start to bridging economic and geographical divides in this country as well.

"Freedom of Consumer Choice" implies that most consumers have a choice when selecting a broadband provider. Lots of folks are stuck with good ol' Comcast because they're the only provider in the area.

I've had a lot of problems with language teachers as well. It seems like it's easier to get around bad teachers in math and the sciences because of the lack of wiggle room for grading. My Spanish teacher senior year of high school would literally assign grades at the end of the semester based on how hard she "felt" you had worked. Luckily, I'd had teachers like that in the past, so I knew how to BS my way into higher grades. She was also a bit crazy; once she lectured us on how Muslims must like the number 11 because of the Moorish invasion of Spain in 711 and the attacks on 9/11/2001.

A lot of the fault in my school district didn't lie with the teachers themselves, though. The more advanced Spanish literature classes had a lot of native speakers who were put into the classes prematurely just because they could speak Spanish. Counselors had incentives to put them in the advanced classes because it looks better for the school when we have more kids enrolled. They had no clue about orthography, grammar, polite speech, etc., which wasn't their fault, but nonetheless detrimental to the class. Teachers had to keep up with multiple levels of learning all in one class period, so it was hard for them to focus on any one group.

On the original topic, though: I obviously don't think that bad teachers help students. Self-motivated learners get dragged down by trying to please the teacher's whims, and those who aren't yet self-motivated see the teacher's actions as a disincentive to try to learn. Why the teachers are bad is a multifaceted problem that involves both the teachers and the bureaucratic environment the teachers work in.