silentOpen

What is the specific liability you are claiming these companies share? Privacy breaches? Manipulation? What does corrupt dot com look like? I don't know, I'm not sure I've really known of one. Do you know of one? What do they do that is a $1bn+ liability?

Name a dot-com with $1bn+ in liability and we can talk about regulating it.

Straw man, red herring, spotlight...

Libertarian != Anarcho-capitalist

Stop trolling.

Isn't it hilarious that Microsoft found a scheme where, even if they couldn't dominate the WWW, they are still relevant because of the ubiquity of their "embraced and extended" web browser. No, Microsoft, you don't need to actually innovate, just have the most popular operating system and shove a broken browser down everyone's throat.

Microsoft: screwing you with network effects since before the WWW

It seems that the citizenry of the United States, the carmakers, and the government have come to an agreement on the regulation of automobiles. In addition to safety regulation compliance before sale is allowed, most states have emissions standards and complex road laws.

Yes, automobiles have many negative externalities but they are distributed and stochastic. Arguably, it is actually the petrol that is directly responsible for these externalities as simply owning a car endangers no one and only has a sunk environmental cost.

In the case of automobiles, we have, as a society, agreed that this is a good trade-off. In the case of industrial accidents, we have, as a society, agreed that the scale of the potential failure should be matched with commensurate concern for safety.

BP clearly has difficulty controlling their risk and they should be held liable for that just as you or I would be held liable for causing an auto accident.

The protection of rights overrides the spectre of regulation. It is illegal for one citizen to kill another or even endanger another. Similarly, it should be illegal for corporations to endanger thousands and wreck ecological destruction on a wide scale.

Is he being satirical? I think it sounds like a good idea.

I think you'll see it come together from two separate places.

1. Standardization of browser event subscription by a remote host. This might happen via an HTML5+ ecmascript API in which scripts register user event callbacks. Think ACPI through JS. This requires aware applications but Google could make it a de facto standard.

2. In-browser identity management and single sign-on. This is necessary to achieve the seamless re-authentication to services. This may be in the form of a browser plugin that, like regularfry says, saves to cloud storage. I think we'll see browsers grow web-aware state APIs in the next 5 years as local and remote get blurrier and blurrier.

What do you think?

This is definitely something that any interface author must deal with and is very closely related to the more OO-specific skill of "good interface design". It is important to include in an interface those types and type constraints that effectively and efficiently describe your problem domain.

OCaml (and potentially Haskell, though I haven't used this feature in Haskell) ameliorates this problem by giving the programmer the facility to specify (or generate and edit based on inference) module signatures that are then checked against. With this approach, I would argue that type inference actually makes your large-scale code more robust and easier to modify than without it due to the automatic verification of module signature. If you inadvertently introduce extra type constraints to your module's interface, the type-checker will tell you and save you from releasing a module that is incompatible with previous versions of the same module.

Without type inference, you're either annotating types everywhere (looking at you Java...) or waiting until runtime (or production!) to find out you've made an error (e.g. perl, python, ruby and on and on).

I really don't see how type inference and its associated program analysis and verification is anything but good.

I don't know if I'd call that "inference" so much as coercion, precedence and propagation. The exciting thing about Haskell type classes is precisely the integration with the type system and its modified HM type inference -- if you don't think the Haskell type system is cool, you probably won't be impressed much by its fairly elegant support for an abstraction that lets you overload operators, perform multidispatch, enforce contracts, and define the very laws of mathematics.

Perhaps if you don't know Haskell, you should learn Haskell to understand what the article is saying.

Edit: This might help: http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/classes.html

Most languages with operator overloads don't have inferred static type-checking woven through them, though.

This is not true under the current ATT ETF rules. I got a 3GS in January and the rules I agreed to said the ETF dropped by $5/mo.

30% is mDNS which is multicast presence notification -- iTunes sharing, Bonjour etc. Blame Apple.

It also puts a Google resource hit on lots of pages -- Google gives you fonts, you give it usage data.

Edit: This is probably not useful to them, actually, due to caching. However, it is their prerogative at any time to change their resource behavior and start receiving every request.

That's because corporations are spoiled :P The human is free, meanwhile a zombie is a brain-eating monster so its responsibilities to its insatiable bloodlust comes first

Corporations are legal entities and they clearly have socio- and psycho-pathic tendencies. Facebook (and many other corporations) should suffer under at least /some/ legal liability to treat users' data with care.

Funny you mention video rental records... they are one of the few classes of information that has statutory privacy protection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act .

Remember kids, your privacy is only worth protecting if not having it protected would endanger the nomination of a politically influential person.

I think this has to do with an optimization by proxy http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_... error by the card issuers and the actuarial tables for fraud risk.

Amazing quotation.

Like you say, art vs. science is a false dichotomy. Programming seems like both because it is about design -- the intentional and intense, the passionate blending of art and science.

He's not placing the blame on the tools any more than you or I would bemoan the hours 'lost' to Hacker News. It's a longer view, step back.

We do need to come to grips with the social changes that are occurring and the implications of our present and future digital lives. Our man-made environment isn't the problem, it's our evolutionary memory combined with the phenomenal acceleration of information technology.

I know for a fact that real-time A5/1 has been privately available commercially since at least 2006. It is my understanding from talking to a relevant engineer that if the algorithm wasn't known-broken when released, it was broken by intelligence services within the first year.

In conclusion, don't talk on cell phones when you're talking about sensitive things. In some locations (mid east), it has compromised you for years.

What's the problem that is actually trying to be solved? The user of your implementation will inform the design choices you make.

Using functions to represent objects like this is rather silly because they are opaque and only support a single operation.

Here are a number of possibly better ways to do it:

  - Emulate objects with functions and messages like with scheme or lisp.

  - Use structural typing or polymorphic variants like in OCaml.

  - Use records with function fields.

  - Use a variant union.

  - Extend/build a list monad over your class.

Can you think of other or better ways?

Magazines will first come to tablet-like devices which will acquire e-book reader buttons. Most likely, the data format will be hypertext (if not HTML) based.

By 2015.

The ease with which you can replace "Google" with "God" in that sentence is disconcerting.

So I can buy naturally induced testosterone for only $150,000/yr? Sweet!

To be fair, you could probably do it for much less with only a moderately obscenely expensive car like something in the $75k range. Factor in resale, you're looking at driving a freaking sweet car (and getting really amped about it) for only $25,000-40,000/yr! Sweet!

Now if only we had a start-up plan... something to do with life coaches for the rich and famous?

I think culture might be a confounding variable...

Digital cash requires no intermediary like a bank. Also, it's still an active research area and not totally solved.

1: bottom 20%; 2: 20% - 40%; 3: 40% - 60%; 4: 60% - 80%; 5: top 20%

Am I missing something?

"... top 40% of beauty."

The relevant liberty here is the liberty of data. It is probably the most widely exercised form of political protest/lawlessness/criminality today (drug use being a close runner-up: liberty of body).

So, no, I don't think our apathy will allow the government to be overrun by copyright thugs -- we already have the cure and it's already prevalent.

Now, these are fairly base liberties being totally about the individual: "Copying data doesn't deprive. I want this data. Yay!" "Doing drugs doesn't hurt others. I want to feel different. Yay!"

The trick will be to maintain our loftier ideals like freedom of speech, freedom of press, and the right to privacy which I can very, very easily see being taken away.

Get a grip, the internet will win in the end. Technology is society's master, not the other way around.

Stallman and the tragedy of the commons? Irony? Or just zealots?