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Well, they did have cross licensing agreement with Microsoft back in 2007, but that didn't cover telecommunications.

http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft%2C-Samsung-in-patent-swap-dea...

Maybe the they'll choose to go to court this time, as Samsung is well armed patent wise. MS' objective is clear: to make the cost of Android greater than the cost of a Windows phone license, so the "free" advantage is no longer is valid.
So you think his other reasons for swapping aren't valid? Or do you think that there is a compelling reason not to use Live Mesh if you want to switch from Dropbox?
Sorry if I'm coming across as hyper critical, but I cant imagine why you would post that on Hacker News!
How is it better than Dropbox?

(This is not a snarky remark, I am really interested! How long have you used it? For what?)
And if the total is 0.02 then they round down. Hence the russian-roulette style game of trying to put $20.02 worth of fuel in your car... careful... careful!
Absolutely, the article is completely meaningless without that information!
I wrote this when the original Jailbreak for iOS came out. Think mitigations still apply but not implemented by Apple

http://www.rakkhis.com/2010/08/can-chrome-learn-from-iphone-...
Hi! If there are hackspaces where you live, that sounds like an awesome place to find like-minded friends! Try not to worry about being shy or frightened - a hackspace is likely a place where many people have felt that way, and that's ok.

Also, have you reached out to your friend-of-a-friend web developer? Sounds like someone you could be making your friend. If s/he's also in/around Irlam, I guess s/he also could need a like-minded friend. Either ask your mutual friend to bring you both out and socialize, or be brave and reach out directly. Tell him or her how you feel about not having someone to discuss these matters with, and ask to meet up!
More technical people like us can just use Tarsnap.
Why not just use them for payments? It's still legal tender.
If there are Hackerspaces nearby then you're in luck, just go along! Don't worry about being smart enough or anything silly like that, there won't be an entry test :) Seriously though, you can just turn up and have a look at what people are doing, that's what everyone does at first. Try and talk to people about the stuff they're working on, it'll be interesting plus everyone loves to talk about their stuff.

And the more you go along to things like that the easier it gets. You'll be surprised how soon you start to feel totally comfortable with it.

Lastly, considering widening your interests. There are loads of very interesting and nice people who aren't into tech. Just because that's (one of) your interests doesn't mean you can't mix with people for whom it isn't a focus.
So that they can peggle a Windows phone license as the better, cheaper alternative.
Firstly, suggesting dial-up ISPs failed because they had a centralized business structure makes no sense. That's like saying horse & buggy manufacturers went out of business due to their centralized business structure rather than the introduction of the car. Also for the record AOL is still around & those companies were successful for their time.

Second, I was speaking about things like ICANN, root DNS servers, Tier 1 providers & Client/Server architecture as being non-decentralized. Additionally some of the biggest services on the Internet are indeed centralized. Google, Facebook, iTunes. ISP options have also been drastically reduced over the last two decades.
People simply use helicopters to escape from prison:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_helicopter_prison_escap...
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The Learning Lab develops and runs simulations for use in the curriculum. We are open to using a variety of technologies. Time is split between project management, in-class support, working with instructors, and development. For more information, see: http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu/learning/jr-sr-developer/
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Not a single one of my friends is tech savvy. We have a music guy, a general knowledge guy, a sports guy and me, the tech/biz guy. As well as a few other unspecifieds.

I don't agree you need them instead of your old friends. Get a few web contacts, go to a meetup, its not like you live in the Scottish Highlands or something!
I have used both Dropbox and Live Mesh, both work fine for me.

Advantages for Live Mesh:
* Free quota is 5 Gb
* I can choose the folder I want to sync, so my existing folder structure need not be tweaked

Advantages for Dropbox:
* It is more popular so it is easier to set up a shared folder with someone.
I would say the smaller the group the better.

With a larger group there are already smaller groups of people talking together and it is hard to approach and invade their discussion for an introvert. And the discussions are also more likely to be presentation style where everyone sits and listens to an expert.

With a smaller group, e.g. meeting around a pub table, you are almost forced to take part, and are a part of the discussion from the beginning.

I greatly prefer the two groups I belong to that have less than 15 people and meet up in pubs, compared to the larger ones, that have good information but are less useful for me for meeting people etc.
Aristotle and Aquinas have informed my thinking significantly. Much more so than math and physics.
Samsung has bada, but that's for mid, mid-low handsets

Did you know that Samsung sold more Bada phones in 2011 Q1 than all WinMo 7 phones sold in that same quarter?

Personally I think Microsoft is acting stupid.

What will happen if Google wins the Oracle lawsuit? I'll tell you what happens - Android phone makers will grow big balls. And I don't think pissing off Samsung is smart.
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It's not the reading or even the submitting and commenting that worries me. Reading affects no one but the reader, and HN has pretty effective self-regulatory mechanisms for maintaining the quality of submissions and comments.

What worries me is the voting, which is anonymous and hard to self-regulate. Take a recent, heavily-technical article that made the front-page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730286 How qualified is someone (who just learned that something like Coffeescript is even possible) to judge the technical content of a blog post about how GCC shuffles references between the stack and registers, or the discussion around said blog post?
Dang ... there goes traffic to the First State Tourism Board's http://www.visit-delaware.co.cc
Same problem, but I live in hellhole, in Manchester you should be able to find many contacts...
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I wonder how far we can go with placing all value on the short term at the expense of long term. I hesitate to make any predictions because I would have expected to see serious fallout before now. Looks like people like Mr. DuPuis want to find out though.
Only in the hugely unrealistic scenario where doing such a thing suddenly pauses all of his cash-generating assets. Which it doesn't.
> their organization name was being used in lieu of
> a circle when they tried to share something.

I think there are two types of Google Apps users: (1) the Large Organization and (2) the Guy Who Wants Gmail At His Domain.

(1) is okay if their users don't get the quickest rollout of new services, it's just a nice hosted email/calendar/docs solution. Users of (1) probably have personal GMail accounts they use for personal stuff, anyway.

(2) is confused whenever their me@mydomain.com email account doesn't act 100% like a regular GMail account.

Google has to cater to (1) because that's the whole point of Google Apps -- but that means that (2) gets slower rollouts of features that (1) might not appreciate. Perhaps if there were a different product, aimed toward the individual rather than the organization, this type of confusion could be avoided.
Pretty crap what MS is doing. The $10/15 per handset seems so high, what exactly is this patent that they're referring to?
The Google search results are still extremely spammy. For anything with commercial potential and especially anything which could lead to an immediate purchase, the noise is just overwhelming. I recently looked into getting a VPN provider; it is simply impossible to research them without being showered in pages that are either outright spam or merely search-engine-optimized out the wazoo (pardon my French). They've learned to imitate user participation, reviews, blogs, anything that you care to name that you used to look for to ferret out the really good pages.

I'll be more specific: about a century ago, in internet years that is, it was a good idea to add "review" to the search terms to see what actual users were saying about a product. This has become an extremely bad idea now, since SEO specialists (I am using neutral language here) noticed this, and have registered 1.5 quintillion domains along the line of best-barbecue-reviews.com and reliable-handbag-reviews.com and what have you; and these domains are the last places to contain actual reliable reviews of anything, being paid advertising in disguise, instead. And Google loves to find search terms in domain names.

And that's just a tiny, tiny part of it.

P.S. Please don't turn this into a thread of recommendations for VPN providers - it will probably get flagged as off-topic.
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Well, first off, people who're shopping for a new phone will hardly care whether Samsung is paying MS patent money or not - lay person will see phone ad, not someone's press release on a completely unrelated matter.

Second, whether you like it or not, but Microsoft has had a lot of "firsts" in smart devices and tablets (whether brewed inside or acquired) and in the world with its existing patent system I can hardly hold their desire to leverage these firsts against Microsoft.
Oh, sure, the current email is compromised, but not the key (since the encryption/decryption is performed by the card itself). The advantage is that you can use a public machine to check a non-important email without giving them the keys to all others or letting them email faking your identity.
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Yeah. It's pretty whack
Bada is in a different segment of mobile devices - not sure how you can compare WP7's sales with Bada's.

"And I don't think pissing off Samsung is smart."

Just see how it worked out for Apple.
Is this post for real? I think this account should be banned, it has to be a troll.
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None of my regular or close friends are programmers. A couple who are live quite far. I know how you feel. So I started going to the local Hacker News meetups and have met some fun people.

I know I'm not as good or smart as most of the people I meet there but I find people are quite helpful. So, it's best to think in terms of how much you can learn from them and get better.

In fact, I've arranged to meet a couple of hackers tonight just to help each other out with projects and hang out.

The only way to stop being lonely is to go out and seek out new friends and do fun stuff together.
One thing that springs to mind in your example is the difference in social status. So I'm generalising (isn't all of psychology generalising..) but a person who has their laundry done for them by their company seems important and valuable; a person who pays for it just seems lazy / inept.

For example, I was once told a business suit gave status because it prevented the wearer from performing physical labour. A person in a suit was displaying that they did not have to perform physical labour in order to survive, unlike others who did - thus elevating their status. Perhaps there is an element of this psychology in the domestic perks of modern day tech companies: the perks are displaying that they are important / smart enough to not have to perform some domestic duties or obtain their own sodas.

Interesting side note, that now the hoodie is becoming like the reversal of this display: it says the wearer is important / smart enough that they dont have to wear a suit

Anyway, just a random though stream. Good luck with your post!
How about the Mozilla project to do PDF in js? http://blog.mozilla.com/cjones/2011/07/03/pdf-js-first-miles...
Worst part of this is that you can end up sounding and feeling like you are/could be a far better programmer than you actually are; you know all of the ideals, philosophy and lingo about how to create clean, amazing code but actually turning this into real programs that solve real problems in real budget & time constraints is a very, very different thing.
Does neuroethology tell us whether neuroethology can account for all of the human mind? Probably not, and if we just assume that is the case, then we waste a whole bunch of time if we're wrong.

Philosophy has only been displaced if physics can account for all of reality, but whether it can or cannot is a philosophical problem. So, since you can't appeal to physics to determine whether physics is a comprehensive answer, it isn't.
I like Alex's concept of "sponge learning" and reducing "unknown unknowns". I've actually been doing this unconsciously for quite a while.

Let's say there is a debate about the best VPS provider on the HN front page. I have no need for a VPS right now, and I sadly don't have the time to read the whole debate.
Instead, I skim the discussion, bookmark it (on pinboard) with appropriate tags, and know it will be there when I do need to choose a web host.

This also applies to "unknown unknowns": a month ago, I saw the discussion on CloudFare ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2631019 ). I made a mental note that some services might actually help mitigate DDOS attacks, and made a bookmark for later use.

I could make an analogy with a database: I don't have enough time / memory to learn and remember everything I read on HN. Instead, I use my brain like an "index", the database being my Pinboard bookmarks. I think it's time to expand to other databases, too: I should try out EverNote or Workflowy to store free-form thoughts and other "non-bookmarkable" stuff.
I can't vouch for the Manchester hackspace but I can say that the London hackspace has been one of the most friendly and welcoming groups I've ever visited. Admittedly I did go with a friend the first time, but everybody there was happy to stop and chat with me and tell me about what they were working on, and there were several ongoing group projects which welcomed extra people (one of which I have now joined). So, I would say that it's worth mustering up the courage to drop in one evening.

You are certainly good / smart enough to go. Like anywhere, each project has a wide range of people, from domain experts to complete newbies. Try to visit with the mindset that a) you will be friendly and interested in what people are doing, and b) you won't be intimidated. :) In practise, I don't think (b) will be a problem.
Kinda sad that a lot of graphics manufacturers are either out of the picture (Tseng, Voodoo) or just do embedded work (PowerVR). I think a bit of competition would be good for the desktop market…

(Still remember my S3 Trio. First card I had with decent X11 support.)
Actually, they don't have an impartial system at all; that's the concept, but not the practice. Journalism isn't just 'we report everything everybody says', true journalism means digging to find out the actual facts and report those, and then possibly include the opinions of those who have a vested interest in interpretation.

And saying 'just some guy with a blog' is not an argument. That's just the old trick of 'shoot the messenger'. What, exactly, qualifies someone with a television camera or a printing press as more credible than someone who is writing for a blog? Why would that make any difference as to the whether the content is true or not? It doesn't. When studying journalism in college, you learn that when someone tries to discredit the source of an article rather than attacking the article on merit, then it's a near-certainty that the content in the article is true.
No.

A fair summary would be: Dropbox has had embarrassing security failures, plus Live Mesh has a few extra technical features and comes with more free space.
It is interesting how synonymous "hacking" and "programming" has become with "web programming" all of a sudden over the last few years...
I don't think it would eliminate spam - the system would probably use PGP key servers to avoid the hassles of key sharing.

But yes, it's an usability nightmare now that everyone is using webapps. And even with native apps, having to copy the private key from your computer to your smartphone would be over most people's heads.
Regarding the idea of going to Hackspaces i'd say that the idea is nice and that you should just go and see if you like it (lucky to have one nearby).
If you are referring to this: http://hacman.org.uk , they seems to have an irc channel, chat a bit with them about what they do and i guess that you'll feel way less frightened.

Afraid of not being "good" enough? Not a problem, more things to learn for you and i don't see why "less experienced" people should not be welcomed.

You didn't say in your post if you are interested in a particular technology, in addition to hackspace i'd search for local usergroups (ruby,python,etc...) and check if they meet in RL sometimes.

Shyness in some cases can just be a question of habit and perspective, both things can be changed/altered.
No APL? Now that would be an awkward marriage…
I would bet on this being one of the outcomes of the class action lawsuit against them.
i.e communicate, keep an open mind and challenge yourself
Your post suggests you have little objection to college students and soldiers living in dormitories. Do they not deserve human dignity?

Incidentally, apart from the fact that the parents would have lower status, how is raising a child in a dormitory (shared with the parent) different from raising a child in a home paid for with vouchers?
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<blush> It's true, it is.

This is a tangent, but an honest question. The biases and agenda of an argument's author are often essential to evaluating the argument. In the human world, a person would be pretty naive to not "consider the source".

Is it always invalid in written discourse to raise the issue of the author's background, or is there a way to do it that isn't ad hominem?
I got in dropbox very early and they initially gave out 5GB of space, so I have that. His other points are not very interesting.
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:) It's nice to hear we are appreciated.
Could hacking be done in the public interest?
The most upvoted comment on the post (Martin Doms):

Everyone on hacker news is motivated by money. It gets old. There's a huge vibe of "I don't care about this technical mumbo jumbo any more than I have to to make a quick buck". It's VERY trendy/hipster culture there. They jump on all of the silly buzzword bandwagons and distrust tried and true technologies.

I'm not saying I don't read the site - some of the articles are very good. But I don't like to be around people primarily motivated by money. Those kinds of people make me very uncomfortable.
http://www.wuala.com/ hits all 3 and much better security.
Or wait for iOS5 and apps to add all types of file sync on iCloud.
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Not really, but I do remember people making this complaint in 2008, 2009, and 2010. :)
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To create an interesting blog is a pretty difficult job but to maintain it at a high level is incomparable more difficult. Sometimes a whole team stays behind a blog, but sometimes it could be a single man. The frequency of posting is a major factor in determining the number of bloggers who post for a blog. However, there are also others key “players” as: the quality and the length of the posts, the topics debated, the target public and so on.
Given your comments, I'm would recommend W.V. Quine (staunchly realist, writes wonderfully clearly, very rigorous, a logician at heart). A good collection of basic essays is Quintessence, and a good first essay might be 'On What There Is'[1][2]. (Arguably his most important book-length work is Word and Object, but I wouldn't recommend starting there.) Here's the first paragraph (complete) to give you a sense of how well he writes:

>> A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—‘Everything’—and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.

[1] Online: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_What_There_Is

[2] Original source: http://www.jstor.org/pss/20123117
A question...lets say at some point the MS patents under the royalty agreement get invalidated can than Samsung ask for its money back?
If you're ever in London, feel free to drop by Picklive in White Bear Yard for a hack and a coffee :)
I agree with google on this one this kid needs to get away from the computer!
As suggested recently by 'How To Geek' I have installed Boxcryptor in my dropbox folder.

Boxcryptor was obviously inspired by Dropbox's limitations and as far as I can see solves them perfectly with encryption of every file at the client end.

Dropbox simply stores and syncs these encrypted files.

The linked article says :
'Ultimately, I’ve come to the conclusion that scale matters in the cloud. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have the experience and the engineering depth to get operational and security issues right.'

Until a little while ago I wonder if the author would have objected to Sony being added to that list?
Well, meditations wouldn't be a bad place to start. And philosophers differ a lot in their views of teh significance of philosophy. I regard it as self-indulgent, but interesting to those so inclined. Like Mathematics, it's an a priori subject anyone can do from an armchair. Unlike Mathematics, it isn't that useful for science. But unlike mathematics, it will help you achieve understanding about the structure of how you ordinarily think about the world (if not the world itself).

You can construe the cogito as an argument:

P1 I think.

P2 If I think, then I exist

C1 I exist.

P1 and P2 are premises, C1 is derived.

The interesting point is that P1 is not arbitrary, in the sense that if one grasps it, then it is true.

That's a really interesting property for a claim to have - especially for a contingent claim to have (e.g. 2+2=4 is necessarily true, and so if one grasps it, trivially it is true, but that's not interesting in the same way).

Further, D thinks that if one grasps it, then one knows one grasps it, (and that it is true).

So for D we have a priori certain knowledge of a contingent claim.

If course, you can question 2, and some people have. Quine is one person to read on that.

Re 'what does it mean to exist' - what do you mean by that? Your criticism demonstrates some ignorance of Descartes, as Descartes makes substantive claims about the nature of his existence as revealed by the reasonining in Mediations. For example D would say he knows that he exists as a thinking subject - a substantive claim about his nature. He goes on to make lots of controversial claims about his nature (some of which get us to Cartesian Dualism).
I think Orwell's closing advice to writers in his essay "Politics and the English Language" applies here:

> Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
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