skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not really sure where you got this from...? In fact, whether or not it's pre-installed is irrelevant altogether.

Ubuntu comes pre-installed with Rhythmbox. Mac OS X comes pre-installed with iTunes.

But iTunes > Rhythmbox, still. It has nothing to do with whether or not it's easy to install, that's one small fragment of what I said about open source being hard to figure out which string of letters/numbers version to install.

Pre-installing packages so the user doesn't have the find and compile them on their own helps, but the utility and design of one program is still superior to the other regardless of whether it's pre-installed or not.
The reason your comment did little to clear things up is because it relied on spelling the agencies/organizations names out. It is clear that the rules change for acronyms and abbreviations.
That's the good part of selling themes: do the work once, get paid repeatedly.
It was more than just Monarchy versus Parliament though. The Roundheads in Parliament were ultra-conservative Puritans that wanted to reform British Culture to match their beliefs as sort of a "counter-culture" to what they considered the extravagance/depravity of the Monarchy. Of course not all members of Parliament were Roundheads, but they were stuck until the death of Cromwell in following much of what they demanded. In some ways, no different than the Iranian Revolution (if not reading too far into details).

While you are correct in that it involved 2 labels of British Society that had been around for years, the details behind each faction and the changes that the leaders of the side of Parliament wanted to bring were more discontinuous. If Cromwell's supporters and his son had been able to hold onto power after his death, I would imagine Great Britain to have changed in some striking ways over the next few centuries.
Though perhaps the perfect counter-example, here, is career politician Jerry Brown's successes in turning around California's fiscal situation:

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21579483-jerry-b...

His tenure, as many know, immediately followed Schwarzenegger's, who was less successful.

In fairness, though: Brown seems to be exceptionally good this time around, and I'd bet that most people believe Arnold's problems didn't stem from too much partisanship or a lack of good faith effort.
I think Apple could still trigger another sea-change in yet another industry: banking.

Put a fingerprint scanner on every iPhone. Let people pay for things (or transfer money) with their phones instead of chip-and-pin bank cards.

They already have bank details linked to every Apple customer account, and they have enough cash to cover all capital requirements and insurance needs and fight lawsuits from protectionist rivals etc. People are wondering what apple are going to do with its money when the answer might be in money itself.
How to get more engagement on Instagram? Must for brand owners
Exactly. Look at Apple's patent stream and tell me they have stopped trying to innovate. The author pans iOS 7, when in fact this is a good example of a company taking meaningful risks by throwing out the entire UX of the operating system for one that risks being a disaster in the name of a long term step forward. And for fuck's sake, Google is working on self driving cars and internet balloons. And lets not forget Amazon AWS releases insane disruptive technology every quarter and is on track to be the technology provider for all startups of this generation.

Basically we could be at "Peak Facebook", but to claim that Apple, Google, and Amazon's best days are behind them is at odds with reality.
I miss politechbot. I will never understand why so many discussion venues transitioned to forums from mailing lists.
In light of the whole surveillance issue, how to approach the matter of foreign balloons drifting in and out of the airspace of many different countries? Can they steer around countries that want no part of it?

It doesn't take too much imagination to envision balloons doing things like taking high-res photos and videos, collecting all manner of signals from communications equipment, radars and other military equipment, or even carrying onboard weapons. Basically the same things drones do.

How can they assure skeptical people and governments that these balloons aren't carrying something extra in addition to their statued misson?
Wall Street goes to war with hackers in Quantum Dawn 2 simulation
And that's fair, and is probably what's allowed them to actually come close to that $100k/month figure, before the network takes it's cut. But they're the only one I see anywhere near that figure, regardless of the network. And they look pretty seasoned and focused on that one product.

To even think about that figure you have to be in the top 0.4% of just ThemeForest, disregarding the whole network, because then it becomes much worse.

If you want an achievable goal in any reasonable period aim for $20-40k/month, before the network takes their cut, which goes as high as 50% when you're starting out.

My recommendation would be to follow along with tptacek, and the plan he linked to above.
Jaron's World: Shapes in Other Dimensions
OTRv3 [1] has been designed to somewhat help the problem of differing instances and has been available since libotr 4.0.0, but in practice I haven't found a good way to solve the UI/UX problem in a user friendly way. The latest beta builds of Gibberbot support the transfer of private keys from desktop to mobile, but I haven't tested it, or how well it works to transfer a conversation from one device to another.

mpOTR [2][3] is designed to solve a different problem, and I believe development has been stalled because the current design doesn't allow chatrooms to scale to large numbers of people.

1. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/Protocol-v3-4.0.0.html

2. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/mpotr.pdf

3. https://github.com/cryptocat/mpotr
Facebook (and I presume Microsoft) are including regular warrants, FISA warrants, and NSLs.

https://newsroom.fb.com/News/636/Facebook-Releases-Data-Incl...

Google is, and has been for some time, including regular warrants and NSLs but not FISA warrants. They could have gone along with the same agreement Facebook and Microsoft made, but that would've required them to group the NSLs and FISA warrants in with the regular warrants. Instead they kept doing what they currently do, which is to show NSLs separately but not include the still forbidden FISA warrants.

https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/U...
sooner or later, random chance produces a majority coalition consisting of people who are willing to horse trade for corrupt programs that specifically benefit their own friends and family

Something that a "professional" would never do, and something that is much likelier to happen by randomly selecting 1000-2000 people, than if people are able to work towards it. It clearly would be nuts to take away the ability to deliberately commandeer a country and swapping it with the so much higher risk of that happening randomly.
What?

The thing about Obama 2007 was that he was, in fact, giving Obama 2013 all tools he needed.

Candidate Obama promised law enforcement "all the tools they need" as much as he promised an end to all the wiretapping. President Obama is, in fact, right that there are choices between the powers of the police and the rights of the citizens. If candidate Obama had ponied up and said sometimes you do have let one guilty man escape, let one cop feel like their "hands are tied" to protect the liberties of Americans, then he'd have an argument. If candidate Obama had said "yes, there are tradeoffs but the seesaw had clearly moved in a dysfunctional and unbalanced direction that we have to correct", then you could honestly say he's shifted now. The candidate Obama I saw, was promising anything and everything and thus it's not the least bit surprising he is now just doing what's convenient. Course, the candidate Obama had a great ability to say things in a way that made people think he's saying what you want.

Just consider the beauty of candidate Obama's, uh, "languaging", President Obama still opposes illegal wiretaps, right? What President Obama is defending here is legal wiretaps, of course.
Every Man a Dyna-byte
Safe browsing works by download a bloom filter into your browser, checking sites you visit against the bloom filter, and on a positive hit, making a call to Google to get the full (not bloom) list of matching URLs.

Safe browsing does not transmit your browser history to anyone.
Sure; on the other hand, you're accepting much less risk.
I'm glad you agree with my conclusion.

What you said about drivers is defensible; it was just the first thought that popped into my head. Nowadays linux has progressed enough to bypass that usually - but what about being required to use the terminal just to install?

Most users don't know what sudo, wget, make, or apt-get commands are, just to start. Most users don't know what commands are, in fact. They don't care about root access or custom options. They need and expect a graphical wizard to walk them through the core basics of their programs, and even then they shouldn't try to perform anything other than the checked box "basic installation". Perhaps that's a better example?

Now, you can blame this on third party developers not packaging their applications as handily as they do for Mac or Windows, forcing people to gather and compile sources themselves. But this doesn't change the bottom-line - linux is not convenient (which we agree on).

And I have used iTunes on Windows, and I found it wasn't bloated. It seems to be more or less on par with my Mac to be honest, though frankly I haven't used it for that platform except to help other people in the past year.
On the same day he signed an order to close the detention facility in Guantanamo, if memory serves.
I've been running the numbers for myself, while looking into moving to SF. With current tax rates (state and federal) considered, for me as an individual being able to save/invest $50k/year would be around $100-110k salary mark.
Sadly this breaks down horribly the moment you have multiple clients open in parallel (e.g. desktop and laptop).
There's a vast difference between a state whose agents sometimes use torture illicitly and a state whose policies officially sanction and prescribe torture.

There was probably a gradual shift towards the use of torture in U.S. intelligence culture such that Bush's policies were just a rubber-stamp after the fact. The use of techniques such as the "Bell telephone hour" during the Vietnam war were heavily encouraged by pressure from above on intelligence agents to gather confessions and enemy troop positions in quantity, veracity being heavily undervalued. However, even during this period, being caught (by the wrong people) was a danger. It was very much a situation of, "I don't care how you do it so long as you do it, but don't tell me how you did it and, for pete's sake, don't get caught!".

The knowledge that torture was not officially sanctioned, even if routinely ignored, still served to restrain its use. That's why Bush's rubber stamp is still a truly heinous and evil thing. It's the difference between agents re-purposing telephone equipment in the field and permanent torture facilities. To a prisoner, it's the difference between hours of torture and years. That's why I'm still upset with my own government for handing over prisoners to U.S. forces in Afghanistan despite knowing full-well what treatment awaited them.
RSA: The Signal and the Noise
Basically, you're looking for connections to already known groups of terrorists. If you find that terrorists X and Y communicate with each other, and that immediately after, X always calls Z, W, and Q, then you might want to engage in deeper surveillance of Z, W, and Q. If you find that Q always calls P, M, and N, and you also find that Y regularly calls N, that might suggest that N is somebody important within the terror network.

This excellent article was on the HN front page a few days ago:

http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metada...
i've done it consistently for the past 10 years.
if you have some discipline, set up automatic investments, it's easier than it sounds.
http://d6673sr63mbv7.cloudfront.net/archive/x1912985327/g000...

(via http://www.eagletribune.com/latestnews/x1912985329/NASA-Ames...)
I too hate the hyperbolic bullshit in these political discussions, but it's perfectly possible to point strictly to the hyperbolic bullshit itself and call it what it is without getting personally offensive towards the author.
What exactly is Guantanamo if not being locked in isolation without due process?
I dunno, the Trail of Tears was pretty bad. I would hope the patriot act doesn't lead to a genocide of 60,000 people.
nope, grand empire of austria. and that's not even my heritage, just born here.
not a us citizen, but one from a neutral country. i am quite fine on my high horse, thank you.
For Snowden, a Life of Ambition, Despite the Drifting
The Science Behind Lift
I feel quite ashamed to admit this now, but when I was much younger and had less scruples, I had a consulting role with an elite private school in a well to do suburb of Melbourne in Australia that had chronic problems with students accessing material that violated the school's internet usage policy.

They had experimented with many, many blacklists and blocking solutions before, but with little success. The problem was that the kids were smart enough to know that they could just keep trying random sites until they got through the simplistic measures that flat blocklists were taking, and it was just a matter of time before they'd finally find something that wasn't in a list and get through.

I came up with the bright idea of turning the blocking off, and turning the blocklist into a honeypot regex matcher in the squid logs and deep packet inspection on accessed urls. Now any attempts to circumvent the rules would invisibly tripwire a sysadmin or staff member to take administrative and or disciplinary action on the students.

I'm told they had no more violations after that, I have my doubts mind you, but not about whether it was a more effective form of control. It forced them to self censor so big brother didn't have to do it for them, I think that's the real goal of pervasive permanent surveillance, even if you're not being watched, you can't be certain, so you'd best watch yourself.
VP Biden in San Francisco for Democratic fundraiser
Without arguing in favor of Guantanamo, which is indeed a travesty that urgently needs a decisive fix, there is a difference between detaining foreigners captured in an active combat theater because the State earnestly believes them to be an immediate, violent threat to Americans and "disappearing" its own citizens.

Also, people in Guantanamo haven't been "disappeared". They're being detained indefinitely, which is a problem, but we know where they are, and they have access to courts and lawyers (albeit hard-won access).

The "disappeared" in Central and South America were more often than not murdered.
Link is broken for me.

EDIT:

The link changed, you can find it in the comments.
I have bound it to alt+space and use it for everything.

Try binding it to a keyboard shortcut and just using it for a bit. It quickly becomes your extension brain.
Damned, this picture has been deleted through Prism already.
https://twitter.com/EFF/status/346011010819305472/photo/1
Only the most terrible of (graphical) distros would require you to use a command line to install things. I'm not aware of any. So no, it's not a better example. You open up your designated package manager and pick what you want, like an app store where everything is free.
This link should work: http://pic.twitter.com/uBEDxYKw1m
Link broken for me also, I thought the non existence thereof might be a subtle joke.

Apparently not;

https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/images_insert/Genera...
What Periwinkle Looked Like
Most large companies don't have the financial flexibility that Google's near-monopoly on search offers. Lots of ten-billion per year in revenue companies are eking out 5% margins in extremely competitive fields and can't afford to be distracted by ambitious projects. AT&T is locked in tight competition with Verizon in a very capital-intensive market, and can't afford to divert capital to blue-sky projects.

Back when AT&T was a monopoly, we did see innovative projects like this come out of them. At the turn of the century, linking everyone in the U.S. with phone lines was a pretty blue-sky project. The AT&T phone network was a marvel of engineering of the time. And of course Bell Labs gave us tons of innovations.

That's the beautiful thing about being in a market where you're not scraping around in the dirt trying to claw out the eyes of your competitors.
As long as you don't choose a particularly hostile machine, nowadays GNU Linux distros don't require almost any manual driver installation, and even restricted drivers can be installed with a couple of clicks.

But is it the software you really want? That's the problem.

Freedom Zero isn't just about avoiding lock-in. It's about software that does what the user wants, not what the designer thinks the user wants. The problem (and I know this is going to sound offensive to some people, but I can't help that) is that most users don't know what they want, because most users have no idea what is actually possible with a computer. Their sense of what is possible is dictated by what comes with the devices they're used to.

What makes hackers different is that we do have an idea of the possibilities. We understand that you don't have to be stuck with what the vendor gives you. But that's because, if push comes to shove, we can program it ourselves, so we don't feel bound by what the vendor gives you. And that also means we have an alternative when the vendor does not give you what you want.

Free Software is not as convenient as proprietary software

As long as you're doing things that the designers of the proprietary software anticipated, I more or less agree with this. But no designer can anticipate everything. With any piece of software, sooner or later there comes a point when a user wants something that the proprietary software can't do. What then?

If you're a programmer, and the software is open source, you at least have a chance to do something with it. Or, if its API is at least open, and its data is in an open format, you can write something that's functionally equivalent.

If you're not a programmer (or can't convince one to help you, either for love or money), or if the software is proprietary, you're screwed. That is why Freedom Zero is important.
That's funny, I've got a VM of OSX that I keep around for...actually not sure why I still have it, but it's there, taking up 10-odd gigs of disk space.

However, agreed, for the general user, Macs are a great call.

"There's a "feel good" euphoria that occurs in an intellectually superior sort of way when you install linux"

Actually, as a programmer, the euphoria is more in shedding over priced hardware with application crashing spinning beach balls and a cluster f*ck of layered windows for a PC (of your choosing) with a Linux distro (of your choosing) with/without a Desktop Environment (of your choosing) and Window Manager (of your choosing).

The notion that shit is all broken in Linux and a bed of roses in OSX is nonsense. Spent 3 years on OSX, was great at first, but over time I grew to detest: iTunes, that spinning beach ball (bullshit, it just works, my a$$), flaky VPN, Finder, layers upon layers of non-maximizable windows and the Mickey Mouse-reliant interface in general.
General Alexander wearing EFF shirt
I don't really get the argument that President Obama and Candidate Obama were somehow different people.

In 2008, Candidate Obama first promised that he would not vote for retroactive immunity for telecom companies that had opened their networks to the NSA. And then, a matter of weeks later, he did so anyways [1,2].

This vote was inextricably linked to the issues we're discussing today. In 2008, companies were on the verge actual accountability: they would have had to pay millions and billions of dollars in fines to their customers (or at least their customers' lawyers). If that had happened, it's easy to imagine those companies' modern incarnations being more adversarial with regards to new surveillance laws, court orders, and appropriate process.

It was clear then that Candidate Obama would easily cave on core issues for political expedience, just as it is now. I'm not saying that there were better alternative candidates. I'm just saying that if you'd really have followed "2007 Obama anywhere." you either weren't paying attention or willfully deceived yourself.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9982898-7.html
[2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9986716-38.html
5 Reasons That Shows You Are Also A Lazy Blogger | Onenaija Blog
Have you tried recently? libotr version 4.0 (released last year) added handling of this very issue. Both parties need to be running >=4.0, but it shouldn't break down horribly in this scenario.
> These are all software problems, all imposed by artificial restrictions, and all violations of Freedom 0.

Those problems can not be separated out and analyzed independently like this.

> Wanted to rip a video DVD

> Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another

Without those two limitations you wouldn't have either DVDs and iPods, as the economics of these technologies wouldn't made sense for companies which created them.

> Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in

This sound like an accidental technical limitation.

> Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television

This is, again, the limit that allows you to have those movies in the first place.

I'm all for the open source and Freedom 0, but please don't forget that it's not about Freedom 0 being violated or not. It's about it being violated or not having anything at all.
That's a great link and interesting story. For complex scenarios I can see where they're might be many things people don't know about that changes their position.

In the case of such a broad surveillance system, I'm having trouble coming up with good secret reasons. Perhaps I'm being unimaginative. If, for example, this system was preventing hundreds of terrorists, what damage would be done by stating that it has unequivocally stopped major threats?

What's the damage in revealing what's going on and why?

Is the plan "if we're quiet enough, bad guys won't bother using encryption or cover their tracks?

I'm curious to know, what information, in theory, would change someone's opinion, and must remain secret in order to keep things safe. Aside from breaks on popular ciphers or mass collusion with major hardware/software vendors.

Edit: I'd trust a president stating for sure that this is entirely necessary, and stating there is secret information that'd even change the EFF's opinion. Obama's speech doesn't give that perception at all. It feels like he's stumbling around to justify something he knows is bad, using nebulous threats.
Then what is going on? What did Snowden risk his life for? Is he just a silly person?
I never thought of this, but this is a brilliant observation. From the presidency, we get issuances forth like Carmen Ortiz, heads of FEMA like Mike Brown, etc. The possibility of cronyism writ large, with decades of consequence. This has to change.
But that's not true, what if I want to install third party applications not listed in (for sake of example) Ubuntu's app store?

Sure, Firefox and popular community apps will always be either pre-installed or easy to install with a GUI.

But what about fringe applications that not enough people use to merit a spot in the repository of available apps?