This is why I love git (and distributed version control systems in general). For the most part a short downtime isn't the end of the world. When it comes back up I'll push my changes and that'll be that.

In short, at the risk of trivializing the argument:

The ability to gleam private details about people is having some power over them. The entire modern theory of government rests on limiting and dividing up the power of those in power. With mass surveillance, that balance is broken. Not only do we have private details on individuals, that knowledge is held by a small and unaccountable elite, protected by state secrets.

Even if you live completely lawfully and morally and truly have nothing to hide you can either:

1. Unwittingly do something illegal (there are too many laws on the books for anyone to know they are completely innocent); or do something that can be construed as such, since the police and prosecutors can be fallible;

2. Still live in a society where a small group of individuals can exert blackmail and intimidation on a significant proportion of citizens. Even if that power would be rarely used, it creates an environment of fear. People start to be afraid to speak against abuse, those in power stand less for their own scrutiny.

If they're selling software which they don't have the right to sell, and not sharing the profits with the rightful owner until and unless confronted, that fact should be communicated far and wide. It is a serious breach of ethics if intentional, a show-stopping flaw in Canonical's Software Center system if not, and illegal in any case.

I'm on a pretty fast line, and I am sometimes appalled with how long it takes pages to load, and often it comes down to loading content I have no interest in:

  * comments
  * ads and images
  * headers
  * sidebars
  * toolbars
  * menus
  * social network tools
  * meebo bars (really google, really?)
  * javascript to load all of the above crap

The amazing thing is how often I can't even begin to read the page for what seems like much of a minute as the page takes so long to render, or various pieces of the page jump, and shift and scroll.

I find that tools that localhost various ad servers help, and other tools that load the crap but keep it off the page help like adblock plus, but even more so, adblock plus' filters that let me shitcan all the crap.

One of these days I want to write an extension similar to adblock plus that seeks out and removes jquery crap. A lot of the reasons I can't read pages anymore seems to be jquery slideshows, jquery toolbars, jquery popups and the like.

I am pretty sure that graphing this out and we find the end of the web occurs sometime in 2018 when page designers and their bosses and engineers and marketing pukes have so larded down pages that the net runs out of available bandwidth and any page takes 4:33 to load.

Any implementation must accept that you will lose users this way. You can't implement every 'trivial' feature possible in order to avoid shedding users; implementing one way precludes a different way that also sheds users. Overall, you try to maximize the number of users that you don't shed, but that's it. And in fact, you're frequently better off shedding users willy-nilly, iteratively finding what the core features are that build a userbase, and forgetting about all the rest.

This post is a prescription for paralytic featur-itis.

The group that poses the biggest threat to civil order in the US are the elites who are looting the country as society collapses around them.

And how exactly do you call yourself a "libertarian" and then support a national intelligence agency monitoring the non-violent political activities of private citizens? If the FBI was monitoring libertarian party members and events that would be kosher with you too, or is it just hippies that deserve the police state treatment?

What kind of idiocy is this? This is the FBI's job -- to monitor both foreign and domestic groups of national scope that might present some kind of threat to civil order.

They're not like the fire department, where they sit around waiting for something to happen. They're supposed to get out there and get proactively involved in all kinds of things from white supremacists to greens.

As a libertarian I enjoy a good rant about state security as much as the next guy, but I prefer to do so from an informed position. There's enough real things to worry about without going on about the FBI doing what they're supposed to be doing.

(I work for EFF.)

This article is a quick end-of-year summary of two issues that have been active during the year. The description of what Kirtsaeng was doing was likely omitted for brevity, not as a cover-up. (The person who asked my coworkers to write these end-of-year posts specifically asked for short, broad summaries instead of detailed analysis.)

If you follow the link given in the article (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/parade-horribles-supre...), you'll see another article from October by my colleague Parker, where he writes:

"Wiley claims that this doctrine only applies to goods that are manufactured in the U.S., and that the defendant, Supap Kirtsaeng, was infringing its copyright by purchasing books at a reduced rate in his native Thailand and selling them below list price in the States."

This description appeared on the same EFF blog (Deeplinks) where the item that you're concerned about did.

One of the most important aspects of the Kirtsaeng case that we've tried to get the Supreme Court to appreciate is that the plaintiff's theory would limit first sale in a wide range of situations. (One example is artworks, like paintings or manuscripts, that were produced outside of the U.S. and that were brought to the United States by their legitimate owners, who are not the copyright holders. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, there is also a question of whether publishers intending to sell works in the United States can choose the location of their manufacturing operations to make first sale a dead letter.) So even people who think that parallel importation as practiced by Supap Kirtsaeng is bad or should be restricted by law may have cause to be concerned about the Kirtsaeng case. Those consequences and concerns are the focus of this summary post.

I'm a big fan of https://www.google.com/flights/explorer, since it gives me an immediate picture of how far in advance I should book to get the lowest prices.

As someone who sells software online, the most horrifying thing about this scenario is that the user is very unlikely to ever tell me why they moved on, and so I'm terrifyingly unlikely to ever know that this trivial feature is missing.

This literally keeps me awake at night.

Statistic: it takes roughly 200 non-converting free trial downloads of my software to get one data point of feedback telling me why they decided not to buy.

Collective bargaining rights was developed to counter exactly this power imbalance with minimum government involvement. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any programmer unions.

Lately, their primary job seems to be creating fake terrorist plots and finding 16-year old illiterate Somali immigrants to execute them, and than applauding themselves.

Never once have I heard of a similar sting operation being done for insider trading or other kind of financial crime.

> Micro kernels are very hard to debug.

Microkernels are not harder to debug than monolithic kernels. I'd even say that they are easier to debug, much easier. (Personal experience in debugging both.)

The problem with microkernel-based OSes is, as Linus Torvarlds aptly put it, that they turn well understood memory-protection problems into not-so-well-studied IPC problems. (The actual quote is «They push the problem space into communication, which is actually a much bigger and fundamental problem than the small problem they are purporting to fix.»)

The microkernel is not the real problem here, the big issue is debugging faulty IPC sequences between the servers that implement the OS services. A problem that is almost non-existent in monolithic kernel.

HOWEVER, current monolithic kernels are facing growth problems now because of two aspect: we want fancy remote storage accessed as easily as local storage (do you want to mmap a file stored in a RAID setup implemented with SATA-over-ethernet disks?) and the fact that the process model is too leaky and so we need stronger containers like VMs (that are becoming as much leaky abstractions as the current processes). All these new features require communication between various components that were previously though and implemented as independent. This means that the IPC problems are now creeping into the world of monolithic kernels.