SolarCoin cryptocurrency pays you to go green - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25010-solarcoin-cryptocurrency-pays-you-to-go-green.html <comment><USER2> There's this other thing you can get in exchange for generating solar power that's fairly popular and can be used to purchase goods and services. I can't remember it's called, but I think it's fairly popular in places like the USA, Burma, and Tibet.

Oh and you can keep it in a physical wallet, it doesn't require an internet connection, transactions using it are almost untraceable, and it comes in a wide variety of sizes and colors.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, where I live, I'd have to move at least 40 miles away to fall under a power company that would pay me for my excess production. IIUC, they have some percentage they have to meet for various stuffs (tax credits?, funding?), once they met that, they stopped taking new customers for the program.

<comment><USER2> My sarcasm aside -- this whole idea is idiotic. Power has a market value. If the solarcoins aren't worth as least as much as the cash you can get, no-one will take them. If they're worth more, then whoever is giving the solarcoins out will be annihilated by arbitrage. And that completely leaves aside verification issues. It's a damn silly idea.

<comment><USER4> Devil's advocate: In a technological civilization, it makes more sense to back a currency with energy than with any other commodity. (USD is already de-facto backed by oil [1].) In a sense, BitCoin itself is also energy-backed, as the mining yield these days is roughly equal to the cost of electricity.

That said, while a distributed currency that is miraculously 1:1 exchangeable with energy would be pretty neat, SolarCoin doesn't seem to be that. If anything, it would make more sense to just pay people in BitCoins for contributing energy back to the grid, or to mine BitCoins in a carbon-neutral fashion.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar)

<comment><USER5> _" mine BitCoins in a carbon-neutral fashion."_

That is a very interesting notion. I'm not sure how you'd implement it, particularly with different amounts of carbon emitted from different means of generating power, &c.

<comment><USER4> I was thinking carbon-neutral for the individual miner, not for the whole network. The latter would be a very ambitious project.

<comment><USER5> Do you just mean individual miners individually going out and purchasing carbon credits? What would motivate that, when the thing they're producing is fungible (and thus it can't strengthen their brand, &c)?

I'd applaud it in any event, but it seems like something that can't really be enforced and is unlikely to be widespread without enforcement as I have no real means of converting my approval into anything tangible or even directing it where it belongs.

<comment><USER4> I'm thinking something far simpler: solar panels hooked to a battery, which is hooked to a minimalist mining rig that runs as often as it's able. Self- powered mining, other than the minimal amount used for passing network traffic, and whatever's used by the pool.

<comment><USER5> Ah, also interesting, though I'm skeptical about it recouping investment in reasonable time.

If it actually became common, it would mean mining would move East-West with the day, and North-South with the seasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't this break bitcoin's concept of no central issuer? If you have to send stuff to the organiser, that's somewhat of a central authority, isn't it?

<comment><USER7> yes.

sidenote: please stop making coins.

it sort of defies the point of it being a currency of any kind if there are millions of different yet indistinguishable ones.

<comment><USER8> Why? A new blockchain is no real threat to any existing and established altcoin such as BTC or LTC. On the other hand, it's possible that someone will come up with either a technical improvement over the established altcoins, or die trying.

Now, what would be really helpful is a wallet app that lets you have all different types of coins in one place. That way you wouldn't have to run 17 different clients for 17 different coins. It would also help you lose all your altcoins in one place.

<comment><USER9> It is a threat! If a there are a thousand indistinguishable block chains, it's (arguably[1]) as if the number of coins on a single blockchain were much bigger, which drives down the price. Since there's an infinite supply of new blockchains at more or less any price point (again, arguably), the price should be driven down to zero.

[1] Arguably, -there is, for instance, the question of whether arbitrary differentiators such as "being the first blockchain" suffice to make the blockchain market not perfectly competitive, - but this point needs to be (and as far as I can tell hasn't really been, here on HN) argued about. See [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/on-...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/on- the-future-of-dogecoin-bitcoin-and-other-cryptocurrencies-of-the-non- realm.html) for some references, though.

<comment><USER5> Not much more than different currencies or different goods devalue others as stores of value in general.

<comment><USER9> I think you're wrong, but am willing to be told otherwise. Here's why: one currency is not (generally) legal tender outside its country of origin, so there's an exchange rate determined roughly by the trade balance between countries etc. If all currencies were legal tender _everywhere_ (a much more analogous) situation, the exchange rate would _not_ be determined by the same factors, since the currency would in no way be pegged to the nation.

Then the question becomes: what _does_ in fact determine the exchange rates? I.e., would one currency be "infinitely valuable" compared to all others? Which one? The first? Or would all of the stabilize at the point where 1 of A is always worth 1 of B, because that's easiest to work with?

<comment><USER8> The value of an altcoin, the true market value, is in my mind determined by two things. First, how many different ways can I spend it reliably? For example, I can spend BTC on goods on Overstock.com. I can spend Dogecoin on a tip for a comment on Reddit. BTC is already more valuable to me than Dogecoin.

Second, is the size and composition of the specific altcoin network. For example, lots of new altcoins use central checksumming during the early stages to prevent early market manipulation. This is bad, since the coin is then for a period of time controlled by a central entity. BTC and LTC are mature enough to not have this problem anymore.

In other words, sure bring on more altcoins/blockchains. I don't care. Let's let the market decide that. In the end the total market cap of all these coins will converge and the more coins are created every day the more we approach the point of people starting to be able to tell the difference.

<comment><USER5> That determines your subjective value for the coin. Market value depends on it only to the degree that the subjective value others place on the coin mirrors yours.

<comment><USER8> Of course. Naturally, everyone places different value on these things. However, I have several reasons to believe that my criteria has some merit. Specifically, look at the reverse of each of the two criteria: imagine a coin with a very small network and a very young blockchain. This means that a player with lots of computing power can at least mine a huge amount of the coin, or even carry out a "51% attack" and double-spend.

Also, imagine a coin which you cannot spend on anything. You can mine it and send and receive it in a vacuum, but you cannot derive any other value out of it. Is such a coin in any way more valuable than a coin which lets you buy a cup of coffee, a car, or a house?

<comment><USER5> I certainly think that those both deserve to be important considerations, and probably most others assessing will think so as well, so they will certainly affect things. But there will be lots of other factors, individual (diversification, speculation) and collectively (amount of currency available), so I feel that "determined by" is too strong. I also didn't really like the "true market value" wording, but I'd have let it slide if that was my only concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think it's fair to call it a cryptocurrency if it relies on something that can't be visible to the network without reliance on single trusted party.

<comment><USER10> It technically still is a crypto-currency, just not a decentralized one.

<comment><USER11> Oh, like PayPal?

<comment><USER10> No, PayPal controls the complete funds of every individual. Even with a centralized crypto-currency, only those transactions are valid that have your cryptographic signature. The centralized trusted third party only decides on the order of transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've always thought "proof of work" in cryptocurrencies was a bit of a misnomer since the the "work" is useless.

Could resources be used for productive work instead, for example distributed computation? I'm thinking something similar to SETI@home, but with currency rewards for work done.

Perhaps this would also require a central issuer.

<comment><USER13> Making a monetary system function is important work. From the Federal Reserve chairman to the sysadmins running wire transfer servers to the crew running the printing presses to the security guards who transport cash, there's a huge amount of work involved in running current fiat money systems.

You can dislike cryptocurrencies for all sorts of other reasons, but that fact that some resources are consumed to keep it running really is going to be a feature of any sort of monetary system.

<comment><USER14> Could you give some estimates how much energy is spent on having current fiat currencies, and how much energy would be spent if similar amount of transactions were used for cryptocurrency. I always wonder why people don't discuss this, or when do, no estimates are given.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The title sounds awesome, and then I read that it's being created by a centralized company that's organizing the entire thing.

I'll bet they're organizing a hefty personal profit into their ploy as well.

<comment><USER16> "I'll bet they're organizing a hefty personal profit into their ploy as well."

Yes, I'd say they are. From the FAQ (Bitcoin section)... Largest holder of reserve currency: SolarCoin Foundation

Sounds like they've premined it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Bitcoin has been accused of wasting energy in the past because of the > computing power it takes to mine coins, but Gogerty says that SolarCoin is > 50 times more energy-efficient because its algorithm allows the total number > of coins to be mined faster...

That's not how crypocurrency mining works. Mining more coins in a shorter period of time does not make it more efficient. It just means the coins are worth less money.

</comment><comment><USER18> "While most cryptocurrencies are just themed copies of Bitcoin – Dogecoin, based on a famous internet meme, is a notable example"

I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that almost all of these themed currencies such as Dogecoin were based on Litecoin...

<comment><USER19> Correct. The writer doesn't really know what he is talking about or is oversimplifying. Litecoin clones are scrypt based. Bitcoin clones are sha-256 based.

<comment><USER20> Litecoin itself is a clone of the first scrypt based coin, Tenebrix.

<comment><USER18> Today I learned...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And who is going to _take_ a SolarCoin in return for goods or services? And what would then do with such a coin if they took one?

Issuing currency is not the challenging part.

<comment><USER22> The same objection was once made to bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Darn it, I had this idea last year and was going to call it GreenCoin.

Oh well, laziness wins again.

</comment><comment><USER24> On encouraging decentralized home-based solar power in general, wasn't there an issue with the grid not being optimized for this sort of thing? Has that changed?

<comment><USER25> No necessarily. It depends if storage is done by using batteries installed at the person's home or by sending the current back into the power grid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That would be great but can I only mine if the solar panels are working? That would not work out here in Michigan, atleast during this winter.

</comment><comment><USER27> While a laudable initiative, this looks more like a way to get new cryptocurrency in the market by riding on solar community good will.

</comment><comment><USER28> So the people who made this coin have the ability to mint an arbitrary amount? Seems legit.</comment>


Healthcare Perks - <AUTHOR> I just read a job ad of a big company. Like all companies, they offer "perks" to their employees. The top of the list is routinely "health, dental and vision coverage".
In a modern society, healthcare is not a perk. Its basic Human decency. Its a commodity.
Making healthcare an employment perk is like making running water an employment perk. Imagine a world in which running water in your home was default turned off and really expensive but if you found a job, the company would turn it on for you, almost free of charge. This sounds really ridiculous, doesn't it?
People won't quit thinking of healthcare as an optional goodie that comes with good jobs unless you quit calling it a perk.
Quit calling basic healthcare a perk. Words are powerful. <comment><USER2> Things are even worse than your water analogy at most US employers:

\- Even when the water is turned on, it isn't free. Depending on your employer, some percentage of your monthly water plan bill is deducted from your paycheck. Furthermore, for many water uses you have to pay a set per-use fee. In some cases, you have to stick coins into a slot to actually get water. Of course, in an emergency, you don't have to pay in advance, but you also don't really know how much you are going to be charged after the fire is put out.

\- There are often strange restrictions on what you can use the water for, with many uses triggering higher rates.

\- there is a cap on how much water you can use. No, not a per month cap, a _lifetime_ cap. Once you go over the cap, your company sponsored water plan is cancelled, and you have to pay for everything yourself at _much_ higher rates.

\- Your water bill is almost certainly going to increase every year by 10-15%, and possibly quite a bit more.

\- The more water you use, the higher rate you are going to pay if you ever have to negotiate your own (non-employer-sponsored) water plan.

\- Oddly, your water plan is in effect even when you aren't at home, but the rate you will have to pay at a water fountain will depend on whether the vendor operating the fountain has a prenegotiated agreement with your water company. If there isn't an agreement in place, the percentage that you (rather than your water co.) are responsible for paying _and_ the rate that is charged both go up considerably. This is true even when travelling to another state, where finding an "in-network" water supplier to keep your costs down can be a very frustrating experience when you really just need a cool drink to rehydrate.

In short, the jury-rigged, patchwork, inconsistent and hugely expensive "water" system in the US is completely screwed up, and the employees who have to rely on it get completely screwed _over_ at the time they most need it. _" Best in the world my ass", he mutters..._

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You may have guessed that I'm not from the US. Some additional thoughts:

I'm the last guy to want to pay high taxes, but I believe that some form of minimalist government is generally not a bad idea.

What government is really good at is making sure that new transformative technology, that generally turns into some form of monopoly along the way, because there was precisely one inventor, gets properly commoditized along the way.

Examples:

Telephony, Electricity, "Water on demand" like in your shower, THE INTERNET, healthcare (affordable access to doctors), etc.(?)

None of you would argue that at&t, spring and whoever else is part of that oligopoly should be able to collude and turn basic telephony into a luxury. Maybe not so valid anymore because voip, but think 20 years ago.

Same goes for electricity and The InternetTM, which is basically a goddess that we nerds pray to.

No one in their right mind, except for some legislators and billionaire idiots, would argue against net neutrality. Theres way too much at stake there. This is one of the very few true government functions, in my opinion. Ensuring access to utilities (and at this point, the internet is a utility. it is cheap to provide and runs the world). I have no problem with a couple actors getting really rich providing internet access, but that privilege should come with some rules, because the implications for society would be immense.

^This is a natural monopoly.

The same goes for healthcare. Healthcare is immensely important to society as a whole. Even ignoring the personal hardship of slowly withering away, having large amounts of people die for decades costs a lot of money (because we don't really let them die, there are all kinds of other subsidies that absorb some cost of the dying, like social security).

Providing Healthcare is easy. Maybe not in absolute terms, but given where we are at as a society, treating common ailments, even acutely life-threatening ones like pneumonia, is pretty simple. In fact, we've gotten so good at healthcare that we are continually driving up cancer as a leading cause of death, simply because there are not many other causes of death left.

Healthcare is a monopoly in that who gets to practice medicine is strictly regulated. Government agencies decide who gets to be a doctor and who doesn't. The process that promotes people to doctors is probably somewhat fair and efficient, but that doesn't change the facts. Beyond that, there is a weird kind of monopolistic process to getting sick. People who get sick are routinely not responsible for getting sick. A sick person NEEDS healthcare. There are no effective alternatives to dealing with sickness (other than suffering through it). Therefore, all hospitals hold mini-monopolies over their region, and it has been shown that hospitals do not engage in market mechanics. Where there are multiple hospitals to choose from, they are usually being acquired by companies to cut out the price competition.

A very small percentage of people who've got access to healthcare pay for it themselves, anyway. Companies pay for it, establishing a clear rift between those who work and those who don't. And people who are sick can't find work, for obvious reasons. Companies who are serious about the health of their employees view healthcare as a necessity. But they don't bill it as a necessity. They call it a perk. People who work are inherently better than those who don't.

Last point: Opponents of regulated healthcare claim that it rewards inefficiency. I agree with government fucking a lot of programs up in terms of costs, but the american healthcare systems is one of the most expensive in the world, even when just compared to those that are operated entirely by governments. It seems to me that the government staying out of it rewards inefficiency, in this case.

I hold a health insurance policy from an international healthcare provider, that is not tied to any single one jurisdiction in particular. It costs me about $1.5k per year, for state of the art healthcare, anywhere in the world, except the U.S. (means that wherever I am, if I get sick I can walk into a healthcare facility of my choice and receive treatment. If the countries' healthcare standards are deemed too low, they will fly me out to a first world country when necessary). They have no problem covering the U.S. as well, but the plan that includes that would be $5k per year.</comment>


Angel Investments See Early Stage Pre-Money Valuations Climb - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/angel-investment/halo-report-angel-investment-2012

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder how the rising valuations (many on AngelList are over $5m) will be affecting expected returns for angels.

Expected angel returns circa 2007 were described here:

[http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/returns-of- angel...](http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/returns-of-angels- investors-in-groups.aspx)

Unless today's higher valuations are tied to a commensurate rise in company quality and/or exit opportunities, it would seem that these returns are going to come down significantly from what they have been historically.</comment>


A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/bulletinc.dat <comment><USER2> Why don't we just switch from UTC to TAI and put the leap seconds in our localtime offsets? It makes all the problems go away, or else reduces them to problems we've already solved for handling daylight saving time.

If you think about it, leap seconds are no different than daylight saving time. The only differences are that daylight saving time usually has 1-hour granularity and is occasionally redefined by your government, where leap seconds have 1-second granularity and are occasionally redefined by Mother Nature.

We already know how to deal with repeating seconds and minutes (alternatively, with minutes or hours that are too long). Those happen during daylight saving time changes, but the ambiguity disappears when switching to UTC. We already record timestamps and communicate with UTC, applying a localtime offset for display or user input. That's a solved problem.

Further, we know how to change the localtime offset. Most timezones do that twice a year. We also know how to handle timezone definition changes because ignorant legislatures sometimes modify when the daylight saving time switches occur.

So, why don't we switch from UTC to TAI as an underlying time standard? When UTC leap seconds occur, we can treat them somewhat like a government redefining its timezones. US Eastern Time then changes from "TAI-05:00:35/TAI-04:00:35" to "TAI-05:00:36/TAI-04:00:36".

If two UTC clocks are synchronized, then one accounts for a leap second and the other misses it, the clocks will no longer be synchronized. If they were TAI clocks, they would still be synchronized and both would still record and communicate correct timestamps. It's just that one would display localtime incorrectly. But, you would immediately know that was the case when you see that the offset is a second behind. Missing a leap second would be like having your computer is set to the wrong timezone, and would be just as easy to fix.

<comment><USER3> Because humans. Remember how confusing and difficult to find those bugs are where you forget to convert timezones that are, say, <3 hours away from one another? This must be very familiar especially to all African and European coders, where we're caught by this every time we forget to convert to/from UTC somewhere. It's easy to not notice it, while coding with some test data, when your software displays a time only one or two hours off. I bet many UK coders only notice their bug when summer begins. I'm not sure whether you valley people recognize this as well, but I'm sure you can imagine.

Now, instead, imagine things being only a few _seconds_ off, instead of entire hours. How big is the chance that the bug would be caught before things hit production? What if, in some cases, seconds actually matter?

I think it's just asking for trouble.

To me, this is a bit like proposing binary protocols and not text protocols because it's obviously technically superior. It's a good idea until you factor in that software is made by humans.

<comment><USER4> Almost joking, but in my experience europeans (also not coders) are stronger in language-localization and currencies, while americans (also not coders) are strong in timezones ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Last time we had a leap second in 2012, it crashed a whole lot of web servers. There was a bug in Linux kernel threading that MySQL and Java both triggered. Please forgive the self-link, but lots of details from the time on my blog: [http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/leap- second-2012.htm...](http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/leap- second-2012.html)

Leap seconds are a fact of timekeeping. Google's approach of slewing the clock seems like a robust way to implement it if you don't trust the operating system to do it right. [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time- technology-and-l...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology- and-leaping-seconds.html)

<comment><USER6> >Last time we had a leap second in 2012, it crashed a whole lot of web servers.

That exposed a bunch of underlying bugs, didn't it? It may be a good thing in the long run than without it, especially with a one year's head start.

<comment><USER5> That's the optimistic view. But leap seconds also caused problems in 2008 and 2005. It seems more likely we'll just find some exciting new bugs. Hopefully not one that b0rks the whole kernel though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Daniel Gambis

> Head

Daniel is clearly missing out on an opportunity to have the coolest title ever.

'Head of Earth Rotation', or 'Earth Rotation, Director of' would sure look nice on a business card.

<comment><USER8> Being able to address, in all seriousness, the "authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time" seems like a good second place to me though.

<comment><USER9> Daniel Gambis, Time Lord would go well on a business card.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This leap second business seems like a pretty dreadful idea. Considering timezones are way off-base all around the world as it is[1], it seems a lot simpler to just let the clocks drift for a while. One less weird thing in our operating systems, much less opportunity for bugs in all kinds of code that deal with times.

The set of people who really care about solar time "down to the second" is smaller than the set of people who'll be put out by 23:59:59 not being immediately followed by 00:00:00, and most of those people probably want sub- second accuracy anyway. Astronomers complaining about the clock time being wrong is exactly the same as farmers complaining about daylight savings.

1: [http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/index.php/2014/01/how-...](http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/index.php/2014/01/how- much-is-time-wrong-around-the-world/)

<comment><USER11> i for one vote to a base 10 system that takes all that into account.

imagine splitting time not exactly in seasons begin/end (what was the last time you synched your clocks with a solstice?). no leap seconds. no 28-31 months. no 365+-1 years. even daylight saving time benefits can be worked in the system if we don't sync 100% with the solar day but skew it just enough that you get the drift to align things on daylight saving benefits and still can tell the time by simply looking at the sun.

it's not hard. just nobody has the balls to even suggest this seriously out of math circles.

<comment><USER12> Ever since I was a kid, the concept of a seven day week threw me. Way back then I came up with a ten day week, three weeks a month, 13 months a year, and five non-month "holidays" calendar in my head. The five non-month holidays were (if I recall correctly) summer and winter solstice, spring and fall equinox, and New Year's Day.

I never could get around the 1/4 day problem, and still had to account for leap years with a sixth non-month day every four years. It was a fun thought experiment as a teenager interested in math and science though.

<comment><USER13> FYI, you have reinvented the French Republican Calendar[1], only you missed out on decimal time (1 day is 10 hours, 1 hour is 100 minutes, 1 minute is 100 seconds; 1 second is 0.864 conventional seconds)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar)

<comment><USER14> Why are you all looking for base-10 hours, when it's rather the base-10 which is wrong??? Numbers should be switched to base-12. I mean we often need to divide 1kg by halves, quarters and thirds, and it should fall even.

<comment><USER15> We should do base 16, though, so it lines up with binary.

<comment><USER16> Not divisible by three, which comes up a lot. 12 is superior.

60 is probably best, tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> At least this one is in June. Whenever they do one in December, you have to suffer through a terrible explanation of what a leap second is from a TV newscaster, explaining why the ball isn't going to drop for an extra second.

</comment><comment><USER18> This will probably resonate with people here[1]. A brilliant video by Tom Scott for Computerphile, where he starts to explain what coding timezones correctly is like and by the end of it is in full polite-mini-rant-mode :D

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm- gesOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious to see how this affects Spanner (Google's new database that seems to rely on extremely precisely synchronized time to coordinate transactions).

Anyone on the Spanner team able to comment?

<comment><USER20> There was a post in the past that google have their own custom timeservers for their servers, slowly adapting time over multiple days and months, so they are not affected by this.

<comment><USER21> In their databases that depend on time, they repeat that they use an external source of time.

It seems like some of their designs are constrained around always non negative deltas between events, making things append only so their trees or hash tables are only balanced once when written to disk.

<comment><USER22> I haven't read about Spanner, but wouldn't it be possible for their clock to measure time based on an epoch, instead of using the system based on physical factors (the rotation of the earth around its axis and around the sun) that we use?

<comment><USER21> It is probably easier in the long run if the servers had the same time as the machines that people use, which are regularly updated by their OS's choice of NTP server, since people run reports and react accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My personal opinion is that leap seconds have no place in civil timekeeping. I love them as geeky trivia but in practical terms they are a disaster. They do solve a real problem of keeping solar time roughly in sync with atomic time due to the slowing rotation of the Earth, but in today's computer-dominated and interconnected world inflicting a one-second discontinuity every few years on millions of systems individually rather than handling it in a central place is a bad idea. It's like a mini-Y2K several times a decade.

The core issue is we have two different needs: a hyper-accurate count of elapsed SI seconds, and a day-to-day date/time system that roughly tracks the position of the sun in the sky. UTC tries to combine these into the same thing, when they would best be left separate.

For the former, we already have a pure atomic timescale -- TAI -- to handle this. I would go a step further and not even present TAI as a date and time, but rather a raw count of seconds like unix time. This is to enforce that TAI is _not_ civil time, but rather a standard to benchmark and calibrate against.

For the latter, I propose a new time standard that is a transformation function applied to TAI. The IERS, instead of decreeing leap seconds like they do now, would instead declare an offset and skew rate that smears the leap second out over a longer period. Something like: at date X, civil time will be Y seconds ahead of TAI, and will tick Z% faster/slower until further notice, where Z is expressed in a simple unit like parts-per-billion or milliseconds per day. Instead of leap seconds every 18 months or so, with this scheme the IERS could probably get away with making adjustments once every five years, and still stay within the 0.9s of true solar time as mandated by UTC.

Any modern microprocessor could handle this transformation trivially. Most would not even need to as the internal clock resonators in 99.9% of the world's computers and clocks are less accurate than the skew rate Z. They need to periodically resync with a master clock anyway and the drift would be indistinguishable from noise.

To be clear, no one would be changing the length of the second. An SI second is and always will be an SI second, and high-precision computing and science will be done with reference to SI seconds. But the elapsed time between consecutive seconds of civil time will be not quite an SI second, and will differ by an amount so small that for the purposes of day-to-day timekeeping is in effect indistinguishable.

<comment><USER23> Adding to my original comment:

Getting rid of leap seconds and being done with it -- effectively setting civil time to atomic time -- may seem like an attractive alternative that achieves the same effect without the complications of transformation functions and skew rates, but it ignores that since the Earth's rotation is continuing to slow down, the offset between atomic and solar time is going to increase quadratically. While the first leap hour is 900 years out, the next one after that is only another 400, then 300, then 250... Someone is going to have to solve this problem for good eventually, and that will either involve applying the correction continuously as in my scheme, thus eliminating the quadratic compounding of the error, or eventually re-defining the second at some distant point in the future to match the Earth's rotation (and thus starting the situation over from scratch).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This really messes with some of the stuff I do at work with test instrumentation since we use GPS time in the field but our computers use UTC. We had a problem late in 2014 when one of our instrumentation techs was using an old instruction manual and he was converted his data using a 14 second offset between GPS time and UTC, instead of the correct 16 seconds. Now we'll have to issue all new instruction manuals to the technicians-- or maybe we can just fall back to a 2011 version that had a 15 second offset.

<comment><USER25> > or maybe we can just fall back to a 2011 version that had a 15 second > offset.

Won't the new offset be 17s? The offset would only diminish if a negative leap second was enacted which has yet to happen.

<comment><USER24> I must have misread the article. I thought a positive offset was different from all the other ones. In that case, it's still a new manual version, but much less unusual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If folks are (reasonably) feeling nervous about this, I've got a test program lets you insert leap seconds to test your application behavior. Would love to hear about anything folks see that might point to any remaining kernel issues.

[https://github.com/johnstultz- work/timetests/blob/master/lea...](https://github.com/johnstultz- work/timetests/blob/master/leap-a-day.c)

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there an NTP command to see if NTP was informed about the change?

<comment><USER28> It's not quite that simple, but I think this is a good explanation: [http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/ConfiguringNTP#Secti...](http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/ConfiguringNTP#Section_6.14). (TL;DR: don't worry about it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Everybody's talking about the time situation here, but what about the fact that the world's clocks will gain a second and the site announcing the fact isn't even signed and secure. It seems like the message should definitely have a cryptographic signature and that the site should be reachable via https.

</comment><comment> micro-ram [http://www.leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm](http://www.leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm)

A cool realtime clock that shows the offset the GPS satellites work from, which do not include leap seconds.

</comment><comment><USER30> It could be worse. They could have leap tenths of seconds ten times as often.

<comment><USER31> That would arguably be better, the smaller distortion would be less likely to break things and the frequency would make it much more likely that things were tested against it.

(Of course best would be to have none at all, and accept that several thousand years from now people-- if people still exist then-- may choose to slip the timezones by one hour to correct the drift.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yay, more sleep!

Wait... ( _very_ briefly thinking about broken assumptions, date calculations, month-end assumptions, 0:59 versus 0:60 vs. 0:00, ...) dammit, I just lost more than I gained! Thanks, France!

</comment><comment><USER33> Ugh not again [http://phys.org/tags/leap+second/](http://phys.org/tags/leap+second/)

Quantas crashed last time. I mean their computers, not the planes.

<comment><USER34> There's no 'u' in Qantas - it was originally an initialism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thanks for the update. Writing a Go program now which is pretty sensitive to these, and it's pretty annoying to have to consider them in your tests.

</comment><comment><USER36> Incidentally, time.nist.gov is down. It hosts a list of leap seconds at ftp://time.nist.gov/pub/leap-seconds.list.

</comment><comment><USER37> Remember when we'd have one of these almost every year? Those were the days.

Kids today... Get off my lawn.

<comment><USER10> They really have dropped off since 1999: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Insertion_of_leap_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Insertion_of_leap_seconds)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hurray, time to see NTP screw up hosts everyone on the internet yet again.

(Oh wait, the last leapsecond event didn't even involve an actual leapsecond)

</comment><comment><USER38> Does this require a code change?

</comment><comment><USER39> They did say that 2015 would be the year we got time travel. One second is a little less than anticipated though.</comment>


PS4 3.55 Code Execution via Webkit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Fire30/PS4-3.55-Code-Execution-PoC <comment><AUTHOR> Just another example of modern video game consoles being exploited through an outdated Webkit browser version.

I suspect that this will be the last generation of consoles that will include a browser built in. I suspect no one is using these browsers much anyways, and they're such a massive target for exploits. The major security researchers aren't focusing on exploiting video game consoles, but their work in exploiting web browsers is being used by others.

That being said, I'm all for this kind of work being available. I like being able to run my own code on the devices I own. The exploit for 1.76 that has a kernel exploit allows for users to install Linux, which can also run SteamOS, which is amazing.</comment>


UK at risk of losing Freedom of Panorama - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2015/06/uk-at-risk-of-losing-freedom-of-panorama/ <comment><USER2> > It becomes even stranger in some cases. For example, you can share a photo > of the Eiffel Tower because of its age – but only if it is taken during the > day. If the photo is at night, the lighting is considered a separate > installation and falls foul of Freedom of Panorama.

Wtf? what is the justification for this?

<comment><USER3> I read somewhere that it's because of the lights on the tower being done more recently.

<comment><USER4> Yes, artistic lighting installations can be copyrightable, and that on the Eiffel Tower is newer than the tower. Somewhat similar situation to a mural being painted on an old building, or a new statue being installed on its facade. Without freedom of panorama, in that case you could photograph the building, but only if you're careful to crop out the mural/statue from the photo.

<comment><USER5> Which leaves a loophole then, tourist locations can prevent photography from including it by adding a copyrightable work to a building.

Also can shops not sue Google as their window displays have been copied by Google's streetview photographers (and copied and recopied many times over by Google).

Based on such a draconian interpretation of copyright law I imagine a large company could successfully sue Google with this (eg if new owners were asset stripping anyway and so didn't need to use Google for advertising/location services).

<comment><USER6> _Also can shops not sue Google as their window displays have been copied by Google 's streetview photographers_

On that note: [http://streetghosts.net/](http://streetghosts.net/)

<comment><USER5> Love it, street art using images of blurred out people from Google's Streetview pasted in the real life locations where the original images were captured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So since this is widely misreported currently, here is how I understand the situation:

* Freedom of panorama is the freedom to take a picture of a building or environment that might be copyrighted. The EU currently allows countries to restrict this right because of historical context.

* There are a handful of countries that restrict that usage (France, Belgium etc.)

* They now want to add a new rule in place that allows to make a distinction between commercial and noncommercial usage.

* There is no push to reduce the Freedom of Panorama in countries that do not have it restricted.

<comment><USER8> > There is no push to reduce the Freedom of Panorama in countries that do not > have it restricted.

This is not true. European copyright law would not allow individual member states to introduce exceptions beyond what it explicitly permits.

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Panorama_in_Europ...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Panorama_in_Europe_in_2015/Learn_more)

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Panorama_2015_EVA...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Panorama_2015_EVA_GESAC)

> They now want to add a new rule in place that allows to make a distinction > between commercial and noncommercial usage.

Yes, but "non-commercial usage" and "commercial usage" are poorly-defined terms, particularly in the Internet age.

<comment><USER7> > This is not true. European copyright law would not allow individual member > states to introduce exceptions beyond what it explicitly permits.

Maybe I did not make myself clear: a country that does not have a restriction on freedom of panorama will not have a restriction after those rules. This only tries to harmonize the restrictions between the countries that have such restrictions already.

<comment><USER9> That's wrong! The new law would add those restrictions for ALL the countries. That's why everyone is in such an uproar.

The changed proposal would make it illegal for a nation to allow the freedom of panorama.

Read the blog of the MEP who wrote the original proposal (which had a clause saying that the Freedom of panorama should apply everywhere): [https://juliareda.eu/2015/06/fop-under- threat/](https://juliareda.eu/2015/06/fop-under-threat/)

<comment><USER7> > That's wrong! The new law would add those restrictions for ALL the > countries. That's why everyone is in such an uproar.

Can you link to where this is written?

<comment><USER9> Read the blogpost I linked? It's from the MEP who wrote the original proposal, and explains why it would add those restrictions for all the countries in the first few paragraphs already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> End of day is nearing and my imagination is not at its daily peak, but I'd really like to know - _why?_

EDIT:

Appears to 502 right now. Cached version for your convenience:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6Zb24tu...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6Zb24tuGB38J:https://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2015/06/uk- at-risk-of-losing-freedom-of-panorama/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER11> Apparently it's a misguided attempt to protect creators by preventing others from profiting from their work. Most of the professional bodies being "protected" are actually opposed to this, as I understand from an article I read on the topic a few days ago, by the guy who wrote a report that has been quoted in the debates around this law.

<comment><USER12> so exactly who is pushing this and how would actually be profiting from this? I don't see any reason why anyone would gain anything...

<comment><USER13> The entire report is about harmonizing EU copyright, to make one set of rules instead of 28.

Countries that already have this restriction (such as France) are interested in keeping their customs and traditions, and lobbied to make this part of the report where before, it would have called the EU Commission to write EU law to forbid it EU-wide.

"Think of the artists" was a great pitch given that the report is penned by a Pirate Party MEP (and so it's easy to believe that the entire report is pro- consumer/anti-artist), and so that change slipped in.

[edit: As a funny side note, Google Street View is available in France, where such a law is in effect, but very limited in Germany, where there is no such law. It's not strictly enforced right now in France, except for night-time Eiffel tower photographs, but they want to keep it. ]

<comment><USER14> I object to calling this "harmonizing".

This term is used quite a bit in reference to copyright laws, and it's always bullshit. When two countries have differing laws and they want to "harmonize", wouldn't you expect that at least once in awhile "harmonization" would mean that the country with the stricter laws would adopt the more lenient laws of the other?

This never happens.

<comment><USER15> The proposal contains several such instances. For example it shortens the copyright of war heroes by 30 years in France, simplifies reuse of government works and provides libraries more rights to digitize and e-lend books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A couple of counterpoints:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/02/wikipedia_jumps_on_b...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/02/wikipedia_jumps_on_bogus_photo_scare_to_tell_us_the_internet_is_breaking_again/)

[https://fullfact.org/factcheck/europe/eu_freedom_panorama-46...](https://fullfact.org/factcheck/europe/eu_freedom_panorama-46045)

So, serious question: is this actually a problem, or just scaremongering?

<comment><USER6> I like how The Register uses an unnamed "campaigner" to call the MEP "a cheerleader for the freetards". Classy.

<comment><USER17> The Register is the Daily Mail of IT news.

<comment><USER18> Sad isn't it? el Reg used to be more the Sun of IT news, so at least there was a cheeky sense of fun. Now it's just wild-eyed and scary.

Also it amuses me how obsessed they are with "Storage," a concept we on this site _never_ talk about. Different worlds...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _not the onion_ \- had not heard of freedom of panorama. I just assumed it was part of the commons social contract - you can put something in public view and others are free to see it.

I can understand copyright protections preventing someone from copying a building's design or aesthetics, but can't imagine how it would extend to holiday pictures were the building just happens to be in the background

</comment><comment><USER20> Does this mean that I suddenly can't post any picture made outdoors because I'll get sued by some City Architects Association which happen to "protect" the "rights" of a random architect which designed that block of flats I have in the background?

<comment><USER21> Only if you live in specific countries in Europe.

<comment><USER13> The amended section of the report asks to extend that provision to cover the entire EU.

Even the parties that voted for the change (because protecting artists can't be a bad thing, right?) aren't sure any more after artists (incl. architects who are the most obvious beneficiaries of such legislation) complained.

And it only covers buildings that aren't out of copyright (ie. if it's personal copyright, the original artist not yet dead for 70 years, for corporate copyright 95 years IIRC).

<comment><USER22> > The amended section of the report asks to extend that provision to cover the > entire EU.

The entire EU is still "only certain countries in Europe."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This kind of law isn't even at the level of those laws that reduce people's belief in the importance of laws. It is the kind of law that people aren't even aware of because it is so far outside the realm of something anyone could possibly legislate or enforce that it never enters into their mind that someone could have tried to actually write a law about it.

<comment><USER8> > it is so far outside the realm of something anyone could possibly legislate > or enforce

No, it's a real, existing thing in some European countries that actually does get enforced, and it's scary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why isn't Greece now suing everyone who's ever taken a photo of the Acropolis for damages? That's the only vaguely useful application of this silly law i can think of.

<comment><USER25> No, no, the Acropolis is too old. What they need to do is install some dramatic lighting, and claim that the new combination is copyrighted. See also: Eiffel tower

<comment><USER26> So all the old monuments will now get fancy lighting and other extra decoration on them in order to reclaim copyright on the monument?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's not just the UK, it's the entire EU, right?

<comment><USER13> Except France, Greece and a bunch of other countries that already have this restriction.

The fight is now if that restriction is lifted EU-wide (original proposal in the Reda report) or established EU-wide (what the amendment made of it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's next with these corporate shizzles? Do I need to pay a cent each time they detect me just looking at their buildings?

<comment><USER29> More like $10. Plus you must wear the special goggles which record where you look and automatically deduct the price.

<comment><USER30> Wow. i think you finally found the business model for Google Glass...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here is another view of the situation: [http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/europe-is-not-banning- to...](http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/europe-is-not-banning-tourist- photos-of-the-london-eye/)

<comment><USER6> That post is talking about people taking personal photos and sharing them privately; it doesn't address Wikimedia's concern that sharing those photos on their sites might be construed as "commercial activity".

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Google cache/mirror as the site seems to be down: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6Zb24tu...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6Zb24tuGB38J:https://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2015/06/uk- at-risk-of-losing-freedom-of-panorama/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

</comment><comment><USER33> The film and tv industry should get on board. I can't imagine they want to pay extra licensing fees when filming in public.

Is there going to be a body like PRS (which collects a fee from people playing music in public, and distributes some of that money to performers) but for buildings?

How would they work out the fee to charge? Per metre of height? Percentage of screen taken by building?

<comment><USER6> I don't think you'll ever get the film and TV industry to campaign for a reduction of copyright authority, even if it benefits them in that particular instance.

<comment><USER13> Just propose a retro-active extension of copyright so that all the Disney movies based on fairy tales (which aren't actually _that_ old, at least the versions they based their movies on) require licensing of the original story.

That probably produces quite an outcry (given how hard it likely is to identify all constituents of the estate).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There is a petition against it on Change.org .. currently 192,000 signatures.... Now 193.... [https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-save- the-freedo...](https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-save-the-freedom- of-photography-savefop-europarl-en)

<comment><USER6> Seems weird to use that site instead of the EU Petitions platform: [http://www.petiport.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/](http://www.petiport.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/)

<comment><USER34> Agreed, it would make more sense to use the EU apparatus. The change org was promoted through German pirate party (according to link I followed from here [https://juliareda.eu/2015/06/who-is-behind-the-attack-on- fre...](https://juliareda.eu/2015/06/who-is-behind-the-attack-on-freedom-of- panorama/) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Note that this isn't necessarily something especially new. Stock sites already require property releases based on various (ill-defined) criteria.

See e.g. [http://www.istockphoto.com/help/sell-stock/training- manuals/...](http://www.istockphoto.com/help/sell-stock/training- manuals/photography/legal-requirements-art-architecture-performances)

However, unlike model releases for people required for commercial (as in non- editorial) use like marketing and advertising, it's a very fuzzy area.

<comment><USER36> Model releases are also a fuzzy area.

"The legal issues surrounding model releases are complex and vary by jurisdiction."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_release](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_release)

<comment><USER35> Fair enough although that link isn't exactly one of Wikipedia's finest efforts. This link is more complete: [https://asmp.org/tutorials/property-and- model-releases.html#...](https://asmp.org/tutorials/property-and-model- releases.html#.VZVlHThViko)

It's generally pretty well established that a properly executed model release provides a pretty wide latitude of commercial usage--although one can always come up with corner cases, e.g. use of a photo in a context that implies the subject is a drug addict or something similar.

By contrast, there's very little legal precedent around the scope of property rights in commercial photography.

<comment><USER36> The analogous question is what rights you have to use a photo for which you don't have a model release, and that's where I think things are pretty fuzzy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It would have been nice if they had linked to some explanation that gives some more details on what "Freedom of Panorama" is. I had never heard of it before today.

Here's the Wikipedia article on it, to save others a few seconds: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama)

</comment><comment><USER38> Risk may be overstated: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/02/wikipedia_jumps_on_b...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/02/wikipedia_jumps_on_bogus_photo_scare_to_tell_us_the_internet_is_breaking_again/)

</comment><comment><USER39> The horse blinders industry must be behind this.

Insane!

</comment><comment><USER40> So if I own some land, can I copyright the landscape so no one can sell a picture of it?

<comment><USER15> Not if you don't put any creative work in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Eventually, remembering something - a movie, a song - will be considered copyright infringement.

</comment><comment><USER42> Countries have the right to be forgotten too!

</comment><comment><USER43> TIL The UK has still freedoms to lose.

</comment><comment><USER44> haha. I find these laws quite amusing.

In India, there "could" be a lot of ridiculous laws, but people generally violate all these laws. I think with such a huge population, a law that is quite unpopular is never followed.

</comment><comment><USER45> Realizing the article is about the UK, it smells fishy...

Us Copyright law has the "personal use" exemption, which is entirely separate from commercial and non-commercial use. Taking a photo of ANYTHING and using it for ANY PERSONAL PURPOSE, such as sharing it among family and friends is perfectly legal, as long as no commercial or non-commercial entity profits from the situation.

Posting said photo to an online service where it is exhibited publicly has not, as far as I know, been tested in US courts yet. I'm sure the lobbying powers of Facebook and Google will prevent that case of ever taking place.

That article smells of ignorant sensationalist journalism to me.

<comment><USER13> As soon as ads are shown on the page, it's typically considered commercial, at least in Germany (but probably throughout the EU).

Also, Facebook, Google et al usually have ToS that allow commercial re-use. So sharing your personal photos is possible - so posting images with any kind of copyrighted scenery to such services (likely includes Twitter and Instagram, too) becomes a legal minefield for the user, because they may be liable if the platform operator ever chooses to use such an image.

<comment><USER46> So does that mean that you're not allowed to use the images in places where other people would make money?

Most copyright laws assume there are just 2 players: Aki who owns the property and the copyright, and Ben who takes & monetizes the photo and then pays royalties.

In my scenario there is a 3rd: Aki owns the property and copyright still, and Ben still takes the photo and posts it. But then Caro monetizes the page that the photo is on.

Does Ben owe royalties to Aki? Does Caro? Do both? Neither?

<comment><USER6> _Most copyright laws assume there are just 2 players: Aki who owns the property and the copyright, and Ben who takes & monetizes the photo and then pays royalties._

Usually it's the reproducer who has to pay, so Caro would have to pay both Ben and Aki, for the photo and property licenses respectively.

<comment><USER46> But Caro isn't reproducing the image, merely hosting it, as part of a larger image-sharing site. The site has ads, which is how the image is monetized. Ben uploaded it without getting permission from anyone.

So Caro is getting money because Ben is using a copywritten photo for private use.

<comment><USER6> _But Caro isn 't reproducing the image, merely hosting it_

A private backup service would be mere hosting. If Caro sends the image to third-parties, it's reproduction. Now, in the US, the DMCA law grants Caro a safe harbour, which is to say, a pardon for the infringement if Caro takes it down rapidly after being notified. But it's still an infringement.

Ben is also infringing, of course, assuming he knew the image was to be shared by Caro.

<comment><USER46> Well, I guess you could say that Ben is requesting Caro send the image to third parties - Ben's friends Darius, Esmre, and Fae - by linking them to the page on Caro's site that holds Aki's copywritten photo.

Also we'll assume that Ben waived rights to the photo on upload (as is common) and that he's one of those "No copyright intended" fools that also seem relatively common.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Arm Accuses China Venture Ex-CEO of Blocking Its Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/arm-accuses-china-venture-ex-ceo-of-blocking-its-business <comment><USER2> Companies should think twice before risking their IP by doing business in China.</comment>


MIT's Guru of Low-Tech Engineering Fixes the World on $2 a Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4273674.html?page=1 <comment><USER2> Why does this make me feel like they are children who need to be helped by their more intelligent overmasters?

Is there no way to teach them how to come up with these ideas? I don't mean school, I mean the mindset of coming up with solutions for problems.

What is missing? Is there something special about Europe that made them pull themself up, or is it just a matter of time?

I look at history (>500 years ago) and I see two areas of the world that consistently created technology. China and Europe, and China always managed to forget the ideas after a generation.

It's like that drive to improve the world just doesn't exist in some cultures. It's not the land, american indians had the resources to do it if they wanted. But they didn't. Almost no cultures did, except Europe.

Now of course it spread, and most parts of the world do that, but not everywhere. Why is that?

(If you don't understand what I mean - take that example of the ring that shells corn. It's simple - but why didn't people who had been shelling corn for thousands of years ever try to invent something like that? That article doesn't say who invented, just that she found in it zambia. Do they manufacture plastic in zambia? I know very little about them.)

<comment><USER3> The popular book (and television series) Guns, Germs and Steel (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel>) addresses the reasons why technological advancements tended to occur in particular cultures and its title provides the short answer to your question.

You may also find it interesting to read up about colonialism -- some of the statements you've made represent attitudes that are considered somewhat dated by modern standards; it's almost as if they were cribbed from "The White Man's Burden" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_man%27s_burden>).

<comment><USER2> Thank you for those links. I don't fully agree with what Jared Diamond says, but it's interesting nonetheless. In particular he says that genetic differences had nothing to do with it without actually showing so.

But even more in particular it doesn't explain why nothing has changed _today_. All his arguments fall to the wayside today, and yet nothing has changed.

For example: both china and japan stopped progress because they were isolated. Fine, and it's a reasonable argument because today both those places have plenty of progress. So that makes sense.

But it doesn't answer about any other parts of the world.

As for your second link, I had never heard of it before (or even of that concept before), I cribbed from reading a book on the history of technology and nothing else. I just kept noticing the same countries over and over, and started wondering why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Print version, easier to read,

[http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4273674.h...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4273674.html?do=print)

</comment><comment><USER5> Amy Smith's TED talk: [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/amy_smith_shares_simple_l...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/amy_smith_shares_simple_lifesaving_design.html)</comment>


A globally distributed stateful data layer for AWS lambda - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrometa.co/blog/macrometa-aws-lambda-geo-distributed-stateful-data-for-serverless-functions-a-step-by-step-guide <comment><AUTHOR> Try it - [https://4uiu9z43qj.execute-api.us- west-1.amazonaws.com/defau...](https://4uiu9z43qj.execute-api.us- west-1.amazonaws.com/default/addressbookFunc)</comment>


Feedback for my new site - Netflix/Rotten tomaotes mashup. - <AUTHOR>

I have just put together a new site in my spare time.  I would love some feedback about features, design, and ways to drive traffic (seo improvements, etc..)<p>www.whatsoninstant.com <comment><AUTHOR> here is the full link <http://www.whatsoninstant.com></comment>


5th December 1978: Acorn Computers Ltd Formed in Cambridge, UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/936/Acorn-Computers-Ltd-formed-in-Cambridge-UK/ <comment><USER2> I highly recommend watching "Micro Men" which focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair, who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry of Acorn.

The original script was called "Syntax Era" which is still a much funnier name :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM)

<comment><USER3> In which the proprietor of The Centre for Computing History (hosting this thread's target webpage) had a cameo.

<comment><USER4> As did Sophie Wilson (barmaid at the end)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In many ways Acorn was more important to computing than Apple. The hardware was super elegant and each successive machine improved on the previous generation tremendously and the software was absolutely world class. Just studying the firmware of the BBC Micro made me a far better programmer.

<comment><USER6> You've described why Acorn may have had better technology than Apple but not why they are more important.

<comment><USER4> I guess Acorn inventing the ARM chip might give some credence to the GPs point. Acorn were definitely more important in the UK because of the impact of the BBC's Computer Literacy Project - I sit here as a CTO of a software company because of that project. I suspect a large number of the UK's software companies can trace their routes back to that. For the rest of the world I guess the question is open

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you own a Raspberry Pi you can actually boot up RISC OS. Definitely recommend you try it out.[1]

But one thing to keep in mind, the fast boot up, super responsiveness and anti-aliased fonts are not because you're running a 90s operating system on 201X tech, it actually ran that nicely back in the day too.

I often wonder what computing today would look like if different operating systems had gained dominance.

[1] [https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry- pi](https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi)

</comment><comment><USER8> The people that designed and built the first ARM processor (in 1985), for those that dont know. Among other things.

ARM originally meant Acorn RISC Machine.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Acorn Atom, its successor, the BBC micro family, then the Archimedes, the first 32-bit RISC personal computer (for which the ARM was designed)...

Their impact cannot be overstated.

<comment><USER9> But wasn't the Atom a copy of the MIPS? I was under the impression MIPS did it first but ARM did it better?

<comment><USER8> You mean ARM not Atom? I dont think the ARM was a copy of anything, but ARM and MIPS both use a RISC approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> If anything, I remember hearing a presentation where they claimed the ARM was influenced by the 6502 they used in the Atom an the BBC. The 6502 is an absolutely delightful machine to program for.

The jump delay slots, I think, are something they share with MIPS, but I'm not aware of anything else.

<comment><USER10> It influenced their decision to do their own, first and foremost. Basically Bill Mensch at Western Design Centre provided them evidence by example that a tiny team could build their own CPU.

<comment><AUTHOR> > a tiny team could build their own CPU

I almost did that in college. It was a beauty - a stack based CPU that could run an almost decent FORTH on metal. I wonder if it would have worked if actually built.

Of course, ARM is a much more complex thing than my toy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A good excuse to break out the link to the BBC's Computer Literacy Project, including the back catalogue of "Micro Live": [https://computer-literacy- project.pilots.bbcconnectedstudio....](https://computer-literacy- project.pilots.bbcconnectedstudio.co.uk/programmes)

</comment><comment><USER11> And a generation of British childhood programmers was born.

<comment><USER5> European. The BBC Micro was a smash hit all over Europe.

<comment><USER12> Western Europe, at most. Behind the Iron Curtain, it didn't exist. Among the Western machines, Commodore got a foothold, C16, C64, Plus 4, ZX Spectrum and somewhat the Atari ST and by the end, there were some Amiga 500s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the first computers I ever used was an Acorn, the only thing I can really remember about it was its odd mouse - it had three buttons (no scroll wheel) and both the middle and right buttons provided different context menus!

<comment><USER14> Middle button provided a context menu, and right button an alternative form of a left click. The kind of thing a shift-click would get now, like adding to a selection of icons in a file dialogue.

RISC OS can run on any Raspberry Pi very easily, or emulators like Arcem.</comment></comment>


Apple's vision of the future - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tech-talk/195ba342fa2c

<comment><USER2> But isn't iBeacons just Apple's branded name of Bluetooth LE? And therefore, isn't this the same vision of the future as all the other manufacturers building Bluetooth LE into their devices?</comment>


Microsoft PowerToys for Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerToys <comment><USER2> I don't want to wait for these to be released in the summer, I want them NOW! Especially the window management parts.

</comment><comment><USER3> i3 for Windows please!</comment>


Steve Jobs: Love What You Do - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-love-what-you-do/

<comment><AUTHOR> Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

Words to live by. Here's to a life well lived, Steve Jobs.</comment>


Tesla's Touchscreen UI: A Case Study of Car-Dashboard User Interface - <AUTHOR> https://www.nngroup.com/articles/tesla-big-touchscreen/ <comment><USER2> People are using these gimmicky car displays on the tiny instrument cluster for changing lanes? I sure as fuck hope not. That just seems like extra data from their vision systems, which is also why cars randomly disappear in it or swerve wildly.

No, the Tesla implementation of this is lazy. Every other car with lane assist has a warning light in the corresponding side view mirror. This forces the user to look into the mirror, which also means a failure of the system to detect an obstacle is not a big deal.

<comment><USER3> I think the best solution is Ford's blind spot mirror. Use your own eyes and look where you're used to looking.

[https://thefutureofthings.com/5963-ford-blind-spot- mirror/](https://thefutureofthings.com/5963-ford-blind-spot-mirror/)

<comment><USER4> Better yet, learn to drive on a motorcycle, looking over your shoulder becomes a natural reflex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I only skimmed the article, and I've only driven a Tesla (Model S) for a day, so my review/comments might be incomplete, but _I almost completely disagree with this article_.

1\. I love the size and quality of the touch screen. Nothing in other cars compares. Usually screens are small, low resolution, require forceful touch or aren't touch. (Recent issues with screens failing in heat are a big minus, but I'm sure technology will improve soon.)

2\. I barely use any of the "buttons" (or other controls) while driving. I almost always use the same temperature, and usually set it when I get in. Same with navigation destination. _Edit:_ In any case, I think the big safety risk is using central controls _at all_ , regardless whether they're touch-screen or physical buttons.

3\. Most controls that you use while driving should be placed on the steering wheel - things like music/radio and cruise control. I don't recall how it was in Model S, but many other cars have this, so I consider it a solved problem.

4\. Reverse video camera, in most cars, automatically starts when you start reversing (I don't remember reversing in Model S so maybe they didn't do implement this yet). As this requires the car to come to a stop, even pressing some obscure button can't be "unsafe", at most a nuisance.

5\. Some controls _are_ important and are usually _not_ on the steering wheel - things like _lock /unlock car doors_, and the _4 blinkers_ button. I think these would best be placed on the driver's door, or alternatively on the top of the center console (above the screen) so that the passenger can also access them.

6\. I don't use lane assist, and I'm not sure whether having it is a great idea... people might come to rely on it and thus become worse drivers on their own. It's often implemented as a light in the side mirror, which I personally dislike - the implementation is bad (false positives, or turns on when I'm not changing lane) and the light flashing at the edge of my viewing field distracts me from the road ahead, so I always want to turn it off. I think a useful UI would be, to change the sound that the blinkers make, if the car detects an obstacle on the side.

To conclude, I can't wait until big touch screens are adopted by other car manufacturers and most other buttons are removed.

<comment><USER6> If you feel this positively about the touchscreen, then having only a day's worth of driving experience might be a point _in favor_ of Tesla's implementation. My reflexive skepticism re: a touchscreen interface would be how unintuitive and unfamiliar (and likely obfuscated) the controls would feel in comparison to the physical interface I've used my entire life.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand I grew up with technology and I'm a total geek, so computerized interfaces are _in general_ more "intuitive" (i.e. I grokk them faster because of extensive experience) for me than for most (especially older) people... Also my vision is 20/20 so I might be less impacted by the low resolution/contrast issues highlighted in the article.

<comment><USER7> The problem with touchscreens in the car isn't understanding them, it's the fact you have to take your attention away from the road in order to use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Own a TM3, so bear with my bias.

I find the whole haptic feedback issue a bit silly. First off I went from a Chevrolet Volt to a TM3. So lets start off with buttons.

Steering Wheel TM3, two omni direction buttons. Two stalks. Volt, 5 buttons to do the same purpose as the two on the Telsa, then four more buttons for extra functions on front, three lever like buttons on back of wheel.

Center Stack TM3 - touch screen, only the quick actions menu leads to one level sub mensu Volt - touch screen with four dedicated buttons and knob below. Menus and be many layers deep, some are four or five deep. HVAC below has thirteen buttons and two knobs.

The come all the controls on doors and seats. Some cars put some items in different places meaning for each car you need to adapt. However as I will state below, you never really need to use the majority of them so it does not matter.

Most cars are like the Chevrolet Volt, there are between thirty to fifty buttons. Now tell me how that is worse than a touch screen. Lets double down on this, how many buttons do you actually use during the course of a drive. Try this, put a sticker on each before a drive and remove those you use. How many can you reach for any not take your eyes off the road. Any radio or screen will do that regardless.

The kicker is, you don't need to interact with the UI of the Tesla or the super majority of most buttons in any car these days because for the most part settings are set and forget. HVAC systems are set to maintain a temperature, radio stations or music is usually only volume tweaked plus many other items are automatic like headlamps and even wipers.

I was accustomed to my TM3 before I got home the day I picked it up. I can get accustomed to nearly any car in minutes as the most used controls are always where you expect them, from turn signals to horns to volume control over the radio. I will say this, the navigation on voice is superb in the TM3.

Are there flaws with the Tesla UI, sure. Namely you still must use your phone to change play lists. I know of no other brand with this limitation. I do think the horizontal display of the TM3 is superior to the vertical display for both information pickup and icon spacing. I agree the top icons can get hard to see when map features underlap and that needs to be tweaked to fade those map images

<comment><USER9> Same can be said for keys on a keyboard you rarely use but why not have it there for that one time you need it? I for one, don't want to be going through menus just to adjust my steering wheel - especially when I already started driving (which surprisingly happens often that someone else adjusted the steering wheel and I don't notice until I'm already driving).

As far as comparing with the Volt, the Model 3 and Volt are in two different leagues. The volt is a mass market EV that could've been had (ironically, they discontinued it ;) for well under $30k. Model 3 starts at 40k and is competing with BMWs, Audi's and Mercedes with much better ergonomics due to increased R&D spending over something like a Chevy.

<comment><USER10> Steering wheel is the perfect example.

First, the car knows who you are and adjusts the seats, mirror, and steering wheel for you when you get in. The concept is to eliminate controls which have no more need to exist. If someone else was just driving and you switch with the car still on, Tesla keeps a list of driver profiles!

You tap once to drop down the list of driver profiles, and then tap on your name. Boom. Seat, mirrors, and steering wheel are immediately setup.

This is so much better than the silly "1" and "2" buttons on the door on my wife's Mercedes, which you have to hold down to make everything move, and for gods sake they don't even work until you start the car! My wife is tiny, I can't get in the seat without moving it first, so while standing outside the car, I stretch my foot in to reach the brake pedal and then reach around to press the Start button, so that I can then press... and _hold_... the "2" while the seat moves into position. Mind numbingly stupid.

To give another example, all the headlight switches that cars have, like that big dial left of the steering wheel on most cars where you can select from 3 or 4 headlight modes. Totally gone from the Model 3. Headlights and daytime running lights are full auto. Even high beams are full auto, although the left stalk will activate them manually if you want.

<comment><USER11> Are you seriously suggesting that "look-tap-read your name-tap" is quicker, safer, or more convenient than "press one button, which always works the same way and is not going to move, or change in any way, just because Elon needed more screen room for fart jokes"? Honestly, this stretches any belief.

Granted, I can see that Mercedes implementation is stupid -- of course you want it to work _before_ you managed to squeeze in and start it, but that's a Mercedes problem, not an advantage of the touchscreen (which, of course, you also can only reach once you got inside). FWIW, on my 2011 car this is not a problem, button is in the door and works whether the engine is on or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really loved the Windows phone live tiles and the new windows start menu. Large tiles, demarcated with bold aolid colors, separated with proper whitespace.

That would be a good design for a Tesla in car screen. Large bold touch targets.

<comment><USER13> I've used something like that in the past for mobile apps for an engineering workforce working in a factory and yard. They really appreciated the high contrast and not needing to be too precise.

<comment><USER14> The annoying part is that UX design for these use cases is well known. It's old boring stuff but Tesla (and other OEMs, but none of them have as much of a need for good touchscreen UX as Tesla) just won't implement it for whatever reason.

<comment><USER13> My guess is that they UIs like this just don't have the "wow factor" that will appeal to new car buyers.

<comment><USER15> When it comes to any user experience dealing with a touch-screen in a vehicle, I don't want to wow myself into the hospital. I love my TM3 but the UI could use some tweaking and I wished we had the ability to alter it.

<comment><USER13> Agreed, I'd be quite happy if there was an option to simplify the UI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had a chance to drive the Model 3, and it threw me off that users have to swipe up on the music player to view additional functionality. In fact, swiping on a touchscreen when your main focus should be somewhere else just doesn't make a lot of sense to me in general.

<comment><USER5> Anything not on the dashboard / driving wheel shouldn't be your focus while driving. That's why many modern cars have music controls on the driving wheel. Whether the center console control is buttons, touch screen buttons or touch screen swipes doesn't matter that much... (except of course for a few important buttons that you should remember the location of, like 4 blinkers, lock car doors, etc.)

<comment><USER16> I believe that this was done on purpose. Elon clearly wants the driver seat to really be a passenger seat, in the sense that the buyer of the Tesla would simply pop on Autopilot and then be able to focus this attention on the screen. I personally think that this is incredibly wistful thinking on his part, but to his credit if he didn't think big, Tesla wouldn't have gone anywhere.

<comment><USER17> I'm all for 'thinking big' but not in a way that seems to have literally killed people in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really hate touch screens, more so in a vehicle. Physical buttons will be a deciding factor in my next vehicle purchase.

<comment><USER19> > I really hate touch screens

Do you own a modern smartphone?

<comment><USER20> >Do you own a modern smartphone?

Do you navigate your phone while driving? The implication is that with physical button interfaces you can do a lot of stuff without moving your eyes from the road.

I own a smartphone since 1 year ago and I don't like the touchscreen, I almost never type on it and when I am forced to I hate it. The advantage vs my old phone is the accessibility features in Android makes it easier for me to read my messages and when needed I can use Text To Speech.

Touchscreen input did not won because is better but because it is included in the screen so you can keep the device smaller, but keep in mind that the important functions on the phone are still done with physical button like the Power button, volume buttons, you can usually open your camera by tapping a physical button a few time, why ? Because nobody wants to waste time and open an app to change the volume.

<comment><USER19> > Do you navigate your phone while driving?

No? I don't understand why the ability to use my phone while driving is important here.

> Touchscreen input did not won because is better but because it is included > in the screen so you can keep the device smaller, but keep in mind that the > important functions on the phone are still done with physical button like > the Power button, volume buttons, you can usually open your camera by > tapping a physical button a few time, why ?

Touchscreens won because they're versatile: enough so that I don't actually have a physical button on my phone to open the camera.

<comment><USER20> >Touchscreens won because they're versatile: enough so that I don't actually have a physical button on my phone to open the camera.

Usually there is a way to open the camera by pressing say volume Up 3 times, it would open the camera much faster then you having to turn on the screen and tap a camera button that could be hard in sun light.

Do you enjoy typing on a phone or trying to hit those small buttons on the menus or in some apps? a few pixels miss would start a different action.

I hate it but it could be just me, I have eye problems and I use the phone with largest possible fonts and other accessibility features on.

<comment><USER21> I actually see that as an argument in favor of touchscreens in cars. If you have accessibility needs, physical controls crammed in a small space should be just as difficult to hit as virtual ones. At least with a screen you may get the choice to enable accessibility features that increase sizes and make tap targets bigger.

<comment><USER20> I can't drive because of my eyes, but your argument is backwards, physical buttons can have different sizes and textures, so the Ford Fiesta has a smooth round button for the radio, I can't miss it because it looks and it feels different and it is placed in the center, then switching station you press on it's left/right edge so the driver can do it directly without looking at the button or at any display. I am not saying you should remove th3 touchscreen but keep the most important and most used buttons on the wheel or on the center dashboard as physical buttons and keep the important displays like speed, LEDs for the lights and the important systems in the dashboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This wouldn't encompass everything that's been discussed here and in TFA, but perhaps the UI decisions were made to help discourage usage while driving?

The mobile-like interface, the far positioning and small buttons make it difficult to use while driving. I'm not saying that these are the proper UX choices to discourage screen usage while in motion, but perhaps that reason influenced the aforementioned choices.

<comment><USER23> Probably better to just completely disable most functionality when the car is in motion; that's what my non-touchscreen UI does in my car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I realize this is a Tesla tear down (and I agree with a lot of it, having driven different Tesla's myself) but I would like to see a more comprehensive analysis comparing different other infotainment systems on the market because there are much better ones than Tesla's.

For example, one of the biggest complaints of touch screens mentioned in the article is lack of haptic feedback. I believe Audi/Porsche solved that really well in their latest models by using (multiple) touch screens that provide physical feedback upon pressing. In addition, half of the "buttons" have a fixed placement and can be blindly operated.

</comment><comment><USER24> That's a case study on how NOT to do a car dashboard...

Plus hell of a lot of "change it for the change of changing it" (e.g. regular gauges would be far better and more reliable).

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't really have a horse in this race (I've never driven a Tesla, but a few of the points in the article seem valid), but I think its worth remembering that the Nielsen Norman Group has a few clients amongst the large automotive companies (Ford and General Motors, if I recall correctly). This was more-or- less paid for by Tesla competitors, so maybe take it with a grain of salt. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER26> A problem that Tesla has is that the current UI is built for the model 3. The layout of that screen makes a ton of sense. It doesn't work nearly as well with the S, because of landscape versus orientation.

It took me about 5 minutes to get use to the model 3s display - even without the binnacle. My Honda feels horribly cluttered on the rare occasions I drive it.

</comment><comment><USER27> It works in spite of these legitimate concerns because the actual time it takes to visually acquire the target is measured in milliseconds, and drivers already know how to assess the road and determine that 'nothing can happen' in the next few hundred milliseconds. If you're in tight traffic with drivers jockeying for position, you don't take that opportunity to skip a song. You wait until it's settled.

We do this already when we eat or drink in the car, turn to look at a passenger during conversation, read a billboard, etc.

<comment><USER28> > We do this already when we eat or drink in the car, turn to look at a > passenger during conversation, read a billboard, etc.

All of which are other things you should not be doing while driving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I really like physical buttons. I detest touch screen interfaces in cars.

</comment><comment><USER30> this thread show how teslas are the new mac in terms of blind fanboyish buyers remorse denial.

people will defend the one button mouse just because.

> study proving that the way information essential to driving (e.g. changing > lanes, checking rear view) is scattered in several disconected > features/screens.

> all threads are people defending that you should not fiddle with controls > while driving, and because of that the article is wrong and the touchscreen > is perfect.

get a grip people. at least pretend to have read the article.</comment>


The Primal Element - <AUTHOR> http://plpatterns.com/post/41369947/the-primal-element <comment><USER2> This should be cross-referenced to the earlier-posted article "How To Say Nothing In 500 Words"

<comment><USER3> Actually, it asks a question: What is the primal, natural element of programming?

Ideas, anyone?</comment></comment>


Why I'm quitting Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/25/opinion/rushkoff-why-im-quitting-facebook/index.html

<comment><USER2> This is a blogger advertising for his new book.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. "Facebook is the DEBUL! Find out why, read my book!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely using it to sell books (at a high cost, btw, if he tries to get back on FB), but he brings up some interesting points. "It does things on our behalf when we're not even there."

But my favorite part is at the bottom where we are all invited to "like" CNN Opinions on...wait for it.. FB. You'd think he demand that they not have that below his article.

<comment><USER4> I discovered this article through facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bla bla bla - show me another ubiquitous platform that let's me chat with my mother halfway across to the state from my mobile phone/computer/toaster.

I only have 49 Facebook friends, I don't add every other schmoe to my list. I laugh when I see people with 2000+ friends and then complain about privacy. Give me a break.

<comment><USER5> You know, you're probably right. I was one of those FB users who ended up with a large number of connections on FB, and then it felt like a runaway train. I tried to adjust the privacy settings but they seemed to be designed to trip users up every step of the way. Finally last week I deactivated my account. For me it has been wonderful, I don't waste time on long "quick breaks" any more. FB might be our generation's TV - a huge time-sink and a major productivity black hole.

<comment><USER6> Is exactly the equivalent of TV for this generation; is just more focus on the ego and the narcissism of every person and not just plain entertainment. Although is obvious, it would be unfair to not mention that Facebook can be an useful tool for communication; but in my opinion it seems to be becoming a less common use-case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One day we'll look back and laugh about how much we needed to check in to a black mirror every so often, like how people looked back to the 70's and 80's and laugh how much cocaine addiction, was tolerated in social settings.

<comment><USER8> Why do people keep talking about Facebook as if it's an exercise in ego- stroking? I don't sit there staring at my own profile page, I use it to communicate with people.

<comment><USER9> I think a lot of people miss the point of Facebook. They say it's a wide, shallow network with low-touch engagement. But that's just fine for what it is. Rather than comparing Facebook engagement to some hypothetically deeper, more ostensibly fulfilling form of social interaction, we should be comparing Facebook to not-Facebook. How many people were we keeping in touch with before we started using Facebook? How have our existing friendships deepened or shallowed because of Facebook? My guess is that, on balance, we have suffered very minimal (if any) "shallowing" of true friendships, while simultaneously we have rekindled a lot of (admittedly shallow, but nonetheless existent) secondary and tertiary friendships.

Most important, we have probably increased our _frequency_ of engagement with all friends -- close and not-so-close -- on a daily basis, and no doubt by a dramatic margin. Facebook gives people a great way to engage in social interactions at low social cost, so to speak. There's minimal risk of non- reciprocation, the way there could be with SMS or email or phone calls. Thus, the barriers to initiating social contact are drastically lowered. Frequency increases accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Read my book, I'm cool - you're not</comment>


Kernest is public - @font-face service - <AUTHOR> http://garrickvanburen.com/archive/kernest-com-is-public

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to go straight to the site it's <http://kernest.com/>.

(Not sure if it's bad form to post a direct link to another developer's project, in case they might want to post it later themselves.)

</comment><comment><USER2> The current link has a menu with a huge list of drugs links in it, presumably why they didn't link direct. Perhaps the site was hacked or maybe not. I'm using a text based browser, I'm guessing those links are hidden normally.</comment>


Free: It works, it cries, it bites. Review wars over "Free" - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/ <comment><USER2> Yes, there's a lot of heat over Chris Anderson's "Free: The Future of a Radical Price". I had no idea how much - nor had bother to look at the occasional link here, so I appreciate RWW pulling together the players:

\- The book: [http://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris- Anderson/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris- Anderson/dp/1401322905)

\- Gladwell's NYTimes rev: [http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/09070...](http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell)

\- Mike Masnick's TechDirt take: <http://techdirt.com/articles/20090701/0422125421.shtml>

\- Fred Wilson at AVC: [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/freemium-and- freeconomics.ht...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/freemium-and- freeconomics.html)

\- Mark Cuban at BlogMaverick: [http://blogmaverick.com/2009/07/05/the- freemium-company-life...](http://blogmaverick.com/2009/07/05/the-freemium- company-lifecycle-challenge/)

\- Brad Feld's thoughts: [http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/07/would-you- want-it-if...](http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/07/would-you-want-it-if- it-were-free.html)

I especially appreciate the tip look where I might not have bothered: Wilson's post, who "identifies the two instances when Free actually works. The first instance is the service or software that offers a free trial and then converts users into paying customers. There are different flavors of this approach, the most popular being, give the basic version for free and charge for the advanced version."</comment>


The Non-Voter - <AUTHOR> https://americancompass.org/the-commons/the-non-voter/ <comment><USER2> >That isn't surprising since the poorest Americans are the least likely to vote.

And right there is the biggest reason of the state of the US. I wouldn't even call it s democracy with such a low amount of votes for the ones winning. But I don't see much want for change in the two ruling "families".</comment>