skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even just purely by bus, London is night and day different from any American city. You rarely have to wait more than 10 minutes for a bus, and often they come just a few minutes apart.

Now, like the GP, I also cycle around London, and it is by far the best way to get through central London during rush hour, but bus drivers here are aggressive and they tend to be quite a bit more efficient than their sparsely populated American counter-parts who are brow-beaten into submission by aggressive American sedan drivers who've never heard of public transportation or sharing the road.
You can also (re)download the super expensive scammy ebooks.

And there is a bit more details in the URL (ZIP code):
http://hypnosiscertified.com/nlp/july152010.php?item=18&cbre...
SAVE MONEY - How to reduce your outsourcing costs
Floating pool whose walls will filter water in the East River
New title: Why backbones make the web centralized and therefore make spying easier.

From a satellite's view, the internet does not look like "mesh", as it would if it were decentralized.

It looks more like several pieces of thick rope, unravelled into many strands at the each end. The "rope" portions are the "backbones".

With all traffic funneled through these backbones, the internet is quite centralized. This make surveilance quite easy.

If you "wiretap" the internet nearest the backbones (the thick rope), upstream from where the rope unravels, where the tier 1 ISP's connect, you can get a complete copy of everything they get, and thereby everything their customers[0] get.

0. The monopolies: Facebook, Google, etc.

What could be easier? Could any network engineer say "no" to a spy agency asking to install a wiretap?

There seems a preoccupation with "direct access" to "servers" (e.g. ones receiving your personal info). But (perhaps) there's no need for direct access to any web company's servers under PRISM. (Perhaps) this is not how PRISM works.

(Perhaps) PRISM targets upstream routers close to the backbone. If so, it copies everything coming through those routers. The web companies don't control those routers. Major ISP's do (like AT&T). The web companies, the "monopolies", are their customers.

A prism deviates the path of a light beam, such as the light travelling through a fiber optic cable that plugs into a router near a backbone. If you divert the bit stream flowing out of a backbone, you can get a copy of all the bits headed for all the monopoly web companies. A company called Narus makes devices that can sort out the traffic for you. It would be quite easy.

If you want details, including a photo of the door to a room where (perhaps) some "prism" tapping is being carried out right now, read the sworn testimony made by former AT&T employees. The lawsuit was covered by Wired years ago.

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/presskit/ATT_onepager...

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/SER_marcus_decl.pdf

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/SER_klein_decl.pdf

http://cryptome.org/scott-marcus.pdf

Credit: Steve Gibson
Jeff Jarvis (quoted in newyorker article) provided a link to Gibson's disclosure:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/chilling...
No it was multiple consoles from my understanding of it, you just had to link the Xbox Live accounts into one "family"
This is quite common in large online games where accounts often sit unused, having only a few hours of total hours logged over years.
Wow. People pay a lot of money for snake oil.
asm.js is just JavaScript. It is not remotely comparable to Dart.
Yeah, but a single bus is the equivalent of many cars.

http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/02/street-cars-named-desir...
I'm no expert here and I especially don't really have a preference between the two consoles as I haven't gamed much the past few years -- but it seems a lot of fanboy personalities love feverishly being "right"

This is just an opportunity to say "HA, we won! They changed their course of action because of US!!! SUCK IT MICROSOFT"

We all know PC gamers are the master race though anyways, so any subsequent arguing is moot /s
Classy response that makes this developer want to work with you, design school or not. And I'm looking for a designer for an upcoming project. I'll take a close look at your portfolio. Is it linked through your blog? HN traffic has taken it down (I'll echo the recommendation of others to look into one of the many WordPress caching plugins such as SuperCache).

EDIT: Apologies -- your blog is back up and I see you're not a freelancer, so cancel my presumption that you're looking for contract work. Still a classy response!

EDIT 2: Ah, you're the one behind the Exec mobile design that generated all that buzz. Well, now I'm doubly embarrassed.
No, not lazy. Being lazy would have been doing a simple session check and then redirecting to a login page if the session user id did not match the user id in the order. The developer had no idea what he/she was doing. Brutal.
>Richard Stallman and the whole idea of copyleft, is borrowed from the works of Hakim Bey (which is where I read about it first).

>Richard Stallman...is borrowed from the works of Hakim Bey.

I find it somewhat funny that Richard Stallman stole the idea of himself from someone else.

(Also, who you're referring to as Hakim Bey, is in fact, Peter Lamborn Wilson, or as I've recently taken to calling him, Peter Lamborn Wilson plus anonymity.)
My main concern is integration with existing manned aircraft and the dangers associated with that. Just the other day the news broke about a close call in Afghanistan between a passenger jet and a German Luna UAV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_NOar...

The privacy issues have been the same issues brought up about manned aircraft surveillance. IMHO it's just a larger hill to mount a camera on. They could just as easily sit outside and watch you, or in a helicopter, or via remote sensors, or using one of the millions of cameras that watch us everyday. It's a much broader issue than just "should they use drones".
And this customer support ticket shows a customer complaining about the fact that their order information is visible on the internet. This was back in 2011.

ClickBank has to have known about this hole for years and hasn't addressed it.

https://www.clkbank.com/viewTicket.htm?key=01.2C096591B7E11E...
The quick summary:

+ No more needing to connect in every 24 hours to validate your game. It connects once the first time you run it.

+ You can now lend, share and sell disc-based games exactly as you can with PS3 and Xbox 360 discs

- All other advanced sharing features have been dropped (share with 10 friends/family, virtually lend to a friend, etc)

- Discs will need to be in the tray to play
this is horrible! I can even download ebooks (probably there is "Download Now" button for digital products) from certain orders :(
This isn't surprising at all, Microsoft is just giving gamers what they are asking for to head off the bad PR.
In the meantime they will start pushing game sales for the xbox in the direction of digital downloads.
Now you can see why it is so tempting for companies to reach out to their competitors and say "so... we want to make this change, you want to make the same change and we both win?"
It's not really legal in the UK.

True it's legal to pay for sex, but it's illegal to offer sex for payment, or to live off immoral earnings.
> serve their goals by diverting effort away from improving JavaScript

No. JavaScript has some warts that are more easily fixed by going a different direction, hence Dart. Diverting effort away from improving JavaScript isn't serving their goals, having a nicer language to develop in is.
I may have misremembered the details of the game, or conflated it with another game.

What I remember clearly is that the game was equivalent of tic tac toe on a torus -- one could win with a "diagonal" of the form

.|x|.

x|.|.

.|.|x

as well as any of the traditional tic tac toe win conditions.
Spindle Acquired by Twitter
What's nice about that one is it appears to fulfill their obligation to show that they are policing unauthorized uses of their trademark without causing any real harm to anyone else.
The real winners get paid to facilitate transactions.
Let's not forget https://infraprint.com. They're the Stripe for printing.
The official comment from microsoft had not been made when I made my comment. Overall, this is a clear step backwards so that Sony has to change their bullet-points, which were disingenuous to begin with.

This makes me sad.
How does one “gooey”?
Hosted eCommerce Website Software from Amazon
Which is why SILC over Tor hidden services is such a wonderful thing.
I suggest hitting the Hidden Wiki for server addresses.
Used games IMHO are a menace. How many software companies give away transferable licenses? (apart from Open-source licenses)

It isn't fair to the publisher/developer. I'd rather have seen a price change to facilitate more ownership rather than used games sales. EA's implementation sounded a bit practical to solve the used games market.
You could argue that this is the only arrangement in which YouTube can exist; is having the site with overzealous copyright enforcement worse than having no site at all?

Google may prevail in court if sued for the millions of instances of infringement it hosts, but it'd still have to become the largest US employer of lawyers to handle and fund the dozens of major lawsuits it'd face every year. Is it profitable enough to do that? Does Google want to dedicate so much of its resources to court battles instead of its core competencies? Even with the DMCA, they still get sued.
I don't quite understand why you attribute the mistake to "being too greedy," especially since this decision is a response to public outrage and thus will likely make Microsoft more money/profit. One could just as easily attribute Microsoft's desire to satisfy angry customers to "greed."
Most of the cost of traffic congestion isn't in road wear, it's in lost productivity to those stuck in it.
Thank you for providing this real world feedback. (I am not fond of hot air type remarks but often I do not quite know how to sort the wheat from the chafe.)
if cloud processing is an essential feature of the game then it would make sense to require an internet connection to run that game. Same as how nobody complains you can't play WOW offline.

What I think people objected to was a requirement across the entire console.
Do you ever think though that flying aircraft holds a special place in the fears of men? I think that if it flies people are automatically scared of it. I might just be biased.
I went to sign up for Twitter and found that my usual username was taken by someone with exactly one tweet, from 4 years ago! It's definitely frustrating.
The source of the above lawyer letter was headsurfer.net a site poking fun at Robert Marsh, thin-skinned Houston internet magnate who often referred to himself as "teh HeadSurfer" and employer of last resort for many college students at U of H http://web.archive.org/web/20040103044611/http://www.headsur...

More details: http://web.archive.org/web/20031017004205/http://www.headsur...
grats :)
Nothing initially. This is the mess we got ourselves into. It will take time to sort itself out. Though perpetuating the problem isn't the solution.
It's simple, not everyone has the same opinion.

People like myself preferred the system they designed because you didn't need to use the disk and could play a game you owned on any system that you logged in to, just like steam.
Well Ubuntu doesn't ship aptitude by default any more which would explain parts of it.
Before the days of Steam; most PC games were transferable.
The requirement was only that the console had to be connected to the internet once every 24 hours so I don't think that impacts their cloud efforts one way or another.

Not being able to play games without the disc in the tray is a major downside of the new policy though. Of course at least for me that means I will buy all Xbox One games digital going forward.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out given the immense amount of damage done already by their out-of-touch policies. It's like the SimCity debacle was just somehow ignored over there. Guessing the numerous PS4 pre-orders and the telling Amazon poll finally convinced someone "Hey guys, turns out that DRM policy is killing us, can we please disable it?"

An entity that only does the right thing after being publicly ousted is not an entity deserving of the public's trust or business.
Why should games be different to books or DVDs or CDs?

Why is it fine for me to sell a book second hand, but not to sell a game second hand?
It would be relatively trivial from a technical perspective to allow virtual game licenses to be gifted from one XBOX ID to another, or even transferred to a serial key which could then be sold/traded by individuals or third party retailers like GameStop.
The Creepy Side Of E3
Jitsi would be fantastic if it didn't use twice the memory of Skype under linux. it's (slightly) less bloated under MacOS and Win7, but still an enormous Java app.

I've never been able to make Jingle/XMPP work right in Jitsi over localhost:9050, but this might be PEBKAC.
NSA Secret Database Ensnared President Clinton’s Private E-mail (2009)
True, I did one - "Mastering the skill of Blah Blah.."
Hopefully the gaming "journalism" industry will stop jerking off the PS4 after this. Any pragmatic-minded individual saw this coming after their E3 fiasco. Not doing so would have been akin to pouring money down the drain.
From the horse's mouth: only 6 out of 53 "landmark" oncology studies were significantly reproducible [1]. Bayer did a similar study, found that they couldn't reproduce the results of about 2/3s of the papers they tried to use for drug discovery R&D [2].

This is a near universal consequence of academia's incentives and extends into many of the sciences (although biology is most susceptible due to its complexity).

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...

[2] http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v10/n9/full/nrd3439-c1.htm...
I'm not super technical but I've always been skeptical of "cloud processing," especially after the Sim City debacle. Are there any scenarios where actually processing information on a server instead of on the user's home Xbox make sense, aside from things like WoW and Diablo III where you need to do the calculations on the server to make the multiplayer aspect fair?
That page doesn't implement the single method plugin it's supposed to be informing us about.
Original MakerBot was a pretty good example of Open Source HW. Replicator 2 steered away from that. I wonder what will happen now?
I'm pretty sure short-sighted consumers/gamers shot themselves in the foot on this one, big time. I would have liked to have seen if Microsoft's move would have led to cheaper per game pricing like we see on PC. I guess we'll never know. I actually respected them for making a ballsy change like this that may have brought the console gaming industry into the Steam era.

Also, it now looks like you can no longer share/lend/give away your games digitally to friends and family, you have to lug a stupid disc around. High fives everyone, hooray!
It looks like the top journalists are rich. The article says Anderson Cooper is making $10 million per year just from his show and Fareed Zakaria is commanding $75K per appearance.

The article says they don't count because they aren't print journalists. Isn't that like a orchestra violist asking why top musicians aren't rich, but then saying Justin Timberlake and Rihanna don't count because they aren't orchestra musicians?

It seems like the big money in journalism is in video, not print. Just like the big money in music is in pop, not classical.

I suspect this is because it is easier for the casual viewer to quickly notice the difference between two people on screen compared to two people's writing. Being easier to recognize makes it easier to gain a following.
I want an xbox1 cheaper therefore without a a toy i will never use. If you want to "hack" a kinect,then buy one separatly. Or at least MS should give the choice to buy a console without one ,at a lesser price.
Hope no one is clicking on the "Resend Receipt Email" button. Imagine a customer receiving the receipt email for something they bought 3 years ago..
During this whole fiasco, I was trying to put myself into their shoes on what they were trying to achieve. On the outside, it looks like a great idea. The ability to share games with family. No longer you need to carry discs to your friends house. You can lend them games to strangers on the Internet without worry about losing it. You can have an organized catalog on the cloud, and never have to get up to pop the disc in. Sell the disc game to X over the internet and cut out the middle man (Gamestop). etc...

However the whole, connect 24 hours to verify the ownership of the game is a big turn off. I understand that, theoretically you could sell your game and then keep playing it on a switched off console. So if it were you, how would you go by achieving all the pros and none of the cons without enforcing DRM? Not supporting DRM but genuinely curious.
It is only illegal to live off somebody else's immoral earnings (i.e pimping / running a brothel). It's also illegal to solicit in a public place (i.e kerb crawling).

It's certainly not illegal to respond to an advert offering paid sex or to place such an advert. I have no idea what the law would be regards propositioning people at random.

Edit: Paying for the services of someone who is coerced into prostitution against their will is also illegal.

Source: http://sw5.info/law/punters/
I'd love to see some numbers, but my hunch is that they taser a lot more people now than they would have physically subdued, just because it is lower risk to the officer. Before they might try to handcuff the perp first, but now if there is any indication at all in their opinion, they can just taser.
It's significantly more difficult to share resources between processes than it is between threads. There are certainly things you can do, but it requires much more effort (especially if you're trying to be portable), and the results typically aren't anywhere near as good.

The effect of this is pretty obvious with chrome vs. FF: chrome memory usage grows a lot faster with multiple tabs than FF's memory usage does. OTOH, it's easier to manually control usage in chrome by killing tabs. Which of these effects is more important depends on your needs (so I tend to switch between chrome and FF...).

Anyway, anybody claiming that chrome is "obviously" better than FF these days is on crack. They are both very good, and each has its strong points and weak points, but they're pretty much on par...
This is a way worse then just disabling unused old accounts and, say, deleting emails stored there.
Yahoo is going to "resell"(1) these accounts. This will create all kind of privacy problems, and potential for abuse: gaining access to other services through resetting passwords there, impersonating users, people receiving private communications not intended for them, etc.
And all this for what purpose? Give few lucky ones get a coveted email address like jonny@yahoo.com instead of jonny_m35@yahoo.com?

(1) "Resell" is the not quite accurate word here as they are going to give it for free, but I can't come with a better word.
It's interesting to see how the massive backlash elicited such a fast response. I'm curious as to how such a task is being undertaken at MS headquarters, with developers working overnights, dropping current work to support this pivot, etc. Personally I think it's very encouraging and a step in the right direction.
I've met Matei in passing through programming contests (where he is also a star) but even in those brief moments, his brilliance is pretty apparent. Good on him for the recognition---he deserves it.
I think that governments in Western society do use a lot of fear, force, and violence, and I also think that the government in 1984 used entertainment and distraction (drugs not so much, unless you count the rationing of cigarettes and victory gin).
It'd be a slight step ahead for anyone with a persistant, reliable connection, but a drop-off-a-cliff for anyone else (a large part of the world). And that isn't even counting the implications for used games. I don't think they were ever going to be serious about that share plan either; there'd be too many abuses.

Edit: and also, as mentioned, reliable cloud processing was never in the cards since they were only ever going to require check-in once per 24 hour period.
You hit the nail on the head. This is nothing more than innovation being held back by the masses. Allowing customers to share their ENTIRE game library with up to 10 people is extremely generous but all people could see was the 24 hour online check.

It's sad how even ignorance can spread so easily through a mob mentality.
In the same way that used books and public libraries are a menace?

There is no intrinsic social contract that stipulate media creators should/must be paid per-consumption.
Ok these are fair technical reasons for them doing this. Nevertheless Google's strategy also happens to leave them in control of resulting language and platform.
Win a Recon Jet "the sporty cousin of Google Glass"
Important to note that the sample size here is 603 businesses.
they might be shocked by the responses on youtube for the PS4 sarcastic video of sharing games.. LOL..
Scribd is a parasite.

EDIT: oh look, the document is viewable again. I'm guessing someone paid scribd their ransom fee.
Does not beat "How to pull your ex (Female version)"
Classy operation.
And a great favicon to boot.
I think the hidden gem there is that all games will be available digitally. Once they figure out how lucrative their equivalent of Steam sales can be, that should start driving the cost of games down and also really hurt the used game market (which Microsoft and publishers are still eager to kill).

When you download a game, you can't lend it. You can resell it. Yet no one seems to care (status quo and all). But I think it's the natural progression of things, the next-next gen will be all download (well, we all said that last time too..)
Wired agrees with you ("a spectacularly bad idea"):
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/yahoos-very-bad-ide...
Yes, super annoying. Fixed width is one thing but fixed width and height (easy way to see that a designer comes from print) is absurd.
No, they looked at a problem and found an utterly despicable way of "solving" it. There is absolutely no technical reason why the terms had to be so anti-consumer. As long as the system has to phone home every time a game is bought or traded, that it enough to keep piracy at the same level it is now. It wasn't design by committee, it was design by greed.

EDIT: Parent has deleted. Originally read:

"This is too bad. These engineers/marketers imagined a world where you don't have to deal with the crappy experience that lost, scratched discs provide, but bent over backwards because a few loudmouths can't imagine a digital future. Sometimes even the customers don't know what they want. These engineers identified a true problem and took a pretty good stab at solving it while juggling a huge number of stakeholders, but marketing's awful communication about this vision for the future puts so much of that work to waste. This is design by the biggest committee."
Deactivate on the first console before allowing sale?
I was actually looking forward to a console that made sense in an always connected environment. No more need to deal with discs.

As a steam gamer, this would've been the console of my choice. I don't think I'll be getting any of this generations consoles yet.

There really aren't much differences between current-gen consoles and so-called next-gen consoles besides a spec bump and revamped controllers.
Exactly how is it the consumers fault for Microsoft deciding to restrict lending/sharing/etc of digital copies?
You must admit, 24 hour online check was pretty bad. Also they said that they're removing region restriction on games, which is another thing that people (including myself) were complaining about.