4k

May be that person felt embarrassed/stupid after asking the question. Personally, it wouldn't compel me to write a post about it.

I am really looking forward to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization:_Beyond_Earth

Its supposedly spiritual sequel to Alpha Centauri.

Interesting. Thinking about what computers can't do now or in any foreseeable future, I wouldn't be surprised if spending time with people in need of human interaction becomes a huge industry in coming years. I first laughed at ideas like Awesomeness Reminders etc, but I can see there's a future in that direction!

I think the problem with privacy violation is twofold.

1) Protecting Citizen's data from snooping attempts of foreign intelligence agencies. Which is state's responsibility imo, which in this case it's carrying out. In this regard, this is good news,

2) Protecting Citizen's data from the state itself. This is a particularly tricky one, since there's no government agency which acts as counterweight to the intelligence agencies. In this regard, I am not so sure if its good news. What if this law was only passed to enable Russian intelligence agencies to gain easy access to all the citizen's data? Which seems plausible and predatory (nobody spies on our Citizens but us).

It will probably take a combination of Technological and Legal changes to really ensure privacy of the people. I can see how it could possibly come about. There's a small set of people (read Big Government) who want to maintain control over Citizens by compromising their privacy. There's a big set of people who stand to get harmed by privacy violations. But there is a third set of people who has influence on first set (read wealthy class in all its forms), but who also stands to lose from privacy violations, and who also has means to fight it legally and legislatively. The third class would probably be the drivers of privacy reforms we'll see in coming years/decades.

This could have been something. First social network I joined was Orkut in 2004. Back in 2006, it was all rage not only in Brazil, but also in lots of other countries where facebook was virtually unknown (iirc the MAU was over 100 million). In fact, facebook didn't overtake orkut in India and Brazil until 2010 and 2011 respectively.

If google had nurtured this social network instead of ignoring it for years, it might have become credible rival to facebook in markets outside US/EU. Instead, years of negligence and atrocious design decisions turned it into a ghost town since around 2011 or so. One has only to blame oneself.

Sorry for being critical here, but are we all so easy to please that any random easter egg from google becomes top story on HN?

   Warrentless cellphone searches are reasonable if only it falls within a specific exception to Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. See Kentucky vs King.

I looked up Kentucky vs King on wiki. TL;DR warrantless searches conducted in police-created exigent circumstances [0] do not violate the Fourth Amendment so long as the police did not create the exigency by violating or threatening to violate the Fourth Amendment.

So, does that mean if police knocked on my door suspecting I might delete sensitive data on my phone before they get to it, are they still allowed to do warrantless search of my cell phone?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_...

EDIT: DO not start fucking downvoting just for the heck of it. May be I didn't understand it well, does that mean I can't ask a question here?

Hardly anybody would want to learn all of the features ofcourse. There are advantages of using vim which other editors can't compete with (imho):

- A just booted VM with with no window manager installed. You have very few choices, but can always count on vi being there.

- Abstraction: One builds up the knowledge of different things over a period of time. For exaxmple, once you learn 'w' is next word, it can be combined with the new knowledge of 'd' for delete quite intuitively. Not saying other editors don't have that.

- Each popular editor I know of has a VI mode built in (or easily available). So, being comfortable with vi means being able to use any of the mainstream editors with vi mode, but not the other way around.