rvkennedy

It's very simple, when you privatize something, it magically becomes cheaper. Because of "efficiencies". The way this works is you can always get a private company to pitch a service for a lower price than you're currently paying. Then it's up to them to squeeze a profit from that service by providing a lousy service. This is called "the power of the market". But because the service is lousy, and the public doesn't like that, the government has to step in and bribe the private company to make their service better. This is known as "a public-private partnership", or PPP.

It's similar to the likes of elance, or oDesk - sites that commoditize IT skills with ill-paid, mal-specified projects to the point where you'd be better off working at KFC. Maybe someday someone will get this right - I suspect that will require a lot more granularity in the specs.

This should really be a wiki - tricks, techniques and shortcuts for all kinds of social situations for the autistically spectralized.

That doesn't matter. If you want normal people to use Ubuntu, you don't start on at them about Unix conventions.

The quote from Newton is particularly apt. Open Source contribution is a lot like the collaborative/competitive model of scientific discourse that we've had since the Enlightenment. While that may make it sound academic, much of pre-20th Century science was carried out by amateurs, even by entrepreneurs. OS the new form of something quite old and very well-proven.

Yes... for hackers.

Here's a thought: instead of dealing with crap like this, what about a service for mailing lists that collects email addresses, and stores them internally. Companies wanting to reach customers can put the signup form as js on their websites, but never get the actual email addresses. The mailing list service passes the newsletters on to subscribers, who are free to click links and form a more direct relationship with the client company, but guarantees to users that:

1. It will never directly pass email addresses to the client company or any third party.

2. All unsubscribes will be respected immediately.

So you can sign up with confidence. The downside for the client company is it doesn't get those sweet, juicy email addresses. The upside - lots more signups, and no fake addresses.

That's a really good thread, thank you!

The question specifies client communication. Replacing SMTP in the network is also a valid issue, but it is not the question that was asked here.

HTTP is used for a lot more than just web pages - as I mentioned above, it's a de facto standard for a great many internet applications that are not web-based. The benefits - well, Gabor Cselle summarizes these quite well (http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2010/02/how-to-replace-imap.html) - so many problems have already been solved with HTTP due to the massive interest in the web over the past 20 years.

But I take issue with the idea that replacing IMAP with HTTP would in any way upset the email infrastructure. Changing the client protocol does precisely nothing to the infrastructure, unless you choose also to replace SMTP completely. I could write my own server for my own email account, with HTTP for the client, and as long as it used SMTP to send and receive in the network, no-one would see any difference.

Hmm. I don't recall what I'd call "lambasting" - most viewers came away with a very positive impression of the Tesla - especially as it outperformed the Lotus in some areas. The bit about pushing it into the garage was obviously staged, and for humorous effect.

And to claim that providing two cars to the TV crew invalidates the point about range is a little bit outrageous. It's like saying "they cheated by not letting us cheat."

It would probably be a mistake for him to actually use twitter to contact these people. But I can imagine for corporate customers this will tell you which companies will be more amenable to a cold call by telephone.