189 karma · joined October 24, 2013
The NSA has overreached because after 9/11 congress demanded that they start overreaching. The AUMF was sweeping in its breadth.
They will have to be reigned in...but the idea that what they are doing is "evil"... if we aren't going to hold people accountable for torture it doesn't make sense to call privacy invasion "evil".
I worked my way through SICP last year and it really changed the way that I think about code...while also not making me a lisp nut. It seemed to me that lisp could have been anything else and the techniques would still be there.
These vehement kinds of slashdotty style articles about MS's being this controlling conspiracy...you would almost think that...gasp...its a large corporation doing everything it can to make money for its shareholders. I mean, if the roles were somehow different and Apple were the market leader for the most popular gaming platform they would be all sweetness and light and no one would have any reason to complain. (Oh wait...)
It turns out that businesses in that position tend to make "lock in" plays. This post kind of glosses over SGI's history with OpenGL as if they were only ever kind and loving shepherds of an open standard that was created to help children.
Don't use directx cuz "evil" is stupid. If you were writing an application that needed to be cross platform...like a 3D authoring environment...you would probably want to look at opengl. (instead of writing your own...) If you were targeting the windows ecosystem directx has some platform integration features that are interesting. Tooling and developer experience also matter.
This kind of breathless nonsense is boring and silly.
Has anyone else noticed a pattern here?
Some of these SV companies are better than others at this kind of thing. Amazon, Google, and Apple have this ability to make otherwise skeptical journalists just turn their brains off...Google's "death stunt" was the cover of Newsweek for god's sake.
Just the idea that markets pre-date states is so ingrained.
EDIT: He is the go-to OPSEC guy if you are new to computer security writers.
I have to be honest though, I'm not an expert on the subject. Also, everything about the critique presented doesn't have to be false for the successes that bitcoin has had to be real. I think that bitcoin really serves as a form of regulatory arbitrage... its real value, the value that people are placing on it, represent gains that can be made by avoiding fees and oversight. Its an alternate currency that couldn't exist without a state system.
As for the inflationary ideas...I find it really very similar to gold or maybe some other more rare natural resource... don't all of the ideas about hoarding and "de beers" (sic) style monopoly still apply? I'm genuinely asking not trying to be a prick...
It's a business that has a fair degree of social responsibility in its business plans.
My point with this isn't to be pedantic...I'm trying to say that referring to them in this way plays into the larger picture where it is in all businesses interest to have us refer to them as a person. They aren't.