antidoh

That's going to be an interesting question. If you host on linode or google apps or pair.com, is that a server under your control, or a third party.

I would call it a server under your control, the same as a store in a strip mall is under your control, not the mall owner.

But which way does anyone think that's going to go? Not the right way is my assumption.

However, if all your data is encrypted once it rests on the box, you'll at least know you're being probed when they subpoena your keys.

I tried to watch a movie rented from Amazon over Roku last night (not Prime) and it was unwatchable. It would get stuck on some scene for seconds to minutes, occasionally letting loose a bit of audio.

The movie was Inception. Maybe there's some irony in there.

This reminds me of my favorite joke:

Man has progressed to the point of rivalry with God. Man talks to God and brags about his accomplishments. God agrees that Man has accomplished a lot.

God reminds Man that God made him from dirt. Man says "Oh, we mastered that long ago." God says he'd like to see that.

Man smiles, and reaches down for a handful of dirt.

God says "Ah, no, you go get your own dirt."

For many of us, watching a movie on TV is anything but just another evening.

Everyone is different, and no one needs to justify their time to anyone.

Amazon movie rental over Roku is cutting in and out, and I can't watch Netflix (over Roku) at all. Colorado.

We may wish we're doomed to space colonization.j

"The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand." - Carl Sagan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

What he's saying is that anything viable is too far away. Forget about the Moon or Mars, we cannot protect a population against radiation, and if we could we may as well build that same habitat here on our then presumably inhabitable planet that we're already on.

Don't just use the planet up and walk away from it, because there's nowhere to go.

Benefits are easy: don't offer them, or make sure you structure the work week so the employee doesn't get enough hours to qualify.

People deal with unplanned for interactions with people better than a machine, they're much more flexible.

Liability, you can go either way on that.

I think it's an open question still, when you get down to low enough skill and pay.

Edit: People are the ultimate low skilled contingent worker. A pre-programmed AI-equivalent in every box.

Interesting question: is it cheaper to use a low-skill, uneducated workforce for low-skilled work, or a smaller but somewhat higher-skilled and educated workforce to maintain the mechanized workforce replacement machines, as well as the smaller set of workers to design and program the machines? It's usually easier to point a guy to a corner and tell him to sweep, than it is to program a machine to do it and to get politely out of the way when a customer walks by.

Who pays for those higher skilled workers?

Can you get enough of them?

Everyone's big deal is different.

"I made this" is always welcome here.

They just run things on a net-365 basis is all.

As we all argue over whether this is powered by gravity, or food, or nuclear fusion, somewhere in a dark hut someone is lifting a weight to attend to the baby that just woke up in the middle of the night.

Beta.

Agreed, I don't think they could have been any more plain that they were claiming the right to license your photos to anyone for anything. I think people understood that clearly, including National Geographic, who put their account "on hold" due to the TOS.

Paying an employee enough to keep him from leaving, before he declares that he's leaving, could be seen as a form of early optimization.

We don't like early optimization, for good reasons. "They" probably don't like it either, for similar reasons. No reason to fix the employee machine if it isn't making noise.

"just selling ads"

"Just?" That's their whole business. If they're selling ads in a country, then they're "doing business" in that country.

In addition to whatever you find and think up (and it would be nice of you to post what you find later) ...

Set your Dad up with a blog - blogger, wordpress, posterous, tumbler ...

Discovery is very different when you're a participant rather than a mere consumer.

There might be something in here: http://dblp.kbs.uni-hannover.de/dblp/Search.action;jsessioni...

Probably my lack of understanding of how vagrant fits and works. But you wouldn't use vagrant to manage a production server, so there's an inevitable difference there.

If I recall from previous experiments, vagrant's ruby is in its own directory, somewhat but not entirely compartmented off.

What is the problem that vagrant solves, that can't be done without virtualbox on its own, or virtualbox and chef/puppet on their own?

Or lacking that, what does vagrant do so much better than the base tools on their own that you would never want to do without it?

As far as I can see you can do all that vagrant does with vboxmanage, vboxheadless and cloning. I generally ssh into my virtualboxes already.

You could even make an argument against vagrant - if you want to maintain the same deployment tools for vboxes and production boxes, so that you can rehearse/test initial deployment, deployment and recovery on a vbox configured as much as possible as a production box.

I'm more than open to correction or persuasion ...

Or maybe this is a coded message.

"The Petreus incident is sort of crazy for this reason. Here is the head of the CIA, doesn't even use PGP."

He's just a bureaucrat, hired after retiring as an Army general. I seriously doubt if he had any personal spy craft training beyond "use this secure computer and this secure phone when you're working on company business, sir. And don't talk about Fight Club."

I'm not throwing up my hands and saying do nothing. I'm suggesting that we address the fundamentals, which in this case is mental illness.

It wasn't meant as a straw man, it was meant as a way to identify a boundary. The most restrictive regulation possible would be a total ban, and only a total and successful ban would prevent people from using guns in massacres. So "regulation" while well intentioned is practically meaningless. Those people would still be mentally ill, and outlawing guns or some lesser regulation would not have addressed the actual problem.

And yes, a knife in the situation is less dangerous. But the person is still mentally ill, a danger to themselves and those around them.

It's medical treatment that's needed, in the worst cases combined with confinement.

Gun regulation is not medical treatment. Gun regulation is a separate issue, admittedly related, just as knives and baseball bats are related.

Outlaw guns, knives and rocks, and wink them out of existence, and these people are still there.

Treat them, and some of them will come back.

Outlawing guns doesn't solve this problem. But outlawing guns is the kind of "solution" we like, because a) there's a clear, specific action to argue over, and b) we can focus on it long enough to get the law through and then fool ourselves into thinking we've done something.

Hacker News recommends content to me. It's the only site that I look at every day. I don't worry if I haven't seen every HN headline, the site just isn't good for keeping up and the only way to win that game is to not play.

Once in awhile I'll look at a more news oriented site, like news.google or rarely my region's newspaper's site.

So yeah, I like having things recommended to me, and I like the way HN does that for me.

I'm not one, so I don't have a good answer.

In the worst case, if no one provides a good answer, I would approach it starting with the following. Refine as it makes sense to you.

web development: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+development&t=canonical

web development tools: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=web+development+tools&t=canoni...

(Your browser, Safari, Chrome or Firefox, has good to excellent front end tools and debuggers.)

(And, since you said complete newcomer, be sure to use a text editor (vim, emacs, notepad++, etc), not a text processor like wordpad, word or libre office.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_developer

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22web+deve...

http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=web%20development

Go broad at first, not deep. Eventually you'll get a feel for what's most interesting to you; then go deep.

Identify the major pieces of web development. Decide where you want to start. Don't ignore the back end as a possible area of interest. Identify tools and languages. Decide which ones to focus on. You can't learn everything at once, you just have to choose, and it doesn't much matter which among the major choices.

The best way to learn something is to do it. Once you've decided what to focus on (for now, your career is never cast in stone, so don't worry too much about it), then build your first portfolio site or project. Keep it simple and narrowly focused.

You'll want a place to develop and host.

virtualbox, a virtual machine, is widely used by individuals, it will give you a place to experiment and develop, without messing up your physical machine's environment and without paying (yet) for hosting.

Linode, AWS (Amazon) and Slicehost are frequently recommended for VPS (Virtual Private Server). Linode's basic is more than enoough for a first portfolio site, at $20/month. AWS can be cheaper, but I don't understand the pricing model very well, nor the various offerings. [Anyone?] My impression is that google's app server is fading out of favor, but lots like it.

There are many more hosting services and options.

If you host a site somewhere you'll want a domain name. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=domain+name+registrars&t=canon...

I use pairnic.com, they're not the cheapest but they're not expensive. Don't use godaddy for anything, not hosting, not domain registration, nothing. They hate elephants, people and the internet.

Depending on the nature of your first portfolio projects, you may not even need a host and domain, it may be enough to put whatever you've done on github. But if your project is a site and pages, you'll need some sort of hosting.

People make sites and entire businesses on WordPress. You could look at that if it turns out to be interesting. I might not call that web development, others probably disagree. It doesn't matter what you call it, it just matters if it's interesting and you can make a living at it, and some people do.

Good luck, have fun.

Rather than talk about gun control, yes or no, why not talk about gun control as opposed to something else. That something else might be mental health.

If you manage mental health, you have guns that aren't going to massacre people.

If you restrict guns, you still have mentally ill people who are a danger to themselves and others and who are leading miserable lives.

Go to the root cause, not the symptoms. This is a public health issue. Medical solutions are going to be more effective in saving and improving lives.

github? They're gonna use it eventually anyway.

3.) The CIA knew, and were ignored.

4.) The CIA knew, and didn't know that they knew.