kardashev

Aaron Swartz faced 35 years in prison for leaking JSTOR articles.

Instead of fines, the Chief Security Officer should be fully responsible and face 35 years in jail if a breach happens.

You better believe they'll care about security then.

Many companies would also rethink whether they need to track and keep personal information at all.

Imagine being able to create windows, draw, deal with io devices (keyboard, mouse, controller, etc.) and do OpenGL graphics type work with system calls.

That would allow (practically) any language to trivially create native apps with a GUI, at least trivially compared to today.

In Linux we could eliminate the multitude of complicated display servers and reduce latency in the system (making VR and AR easier to do). Windows has something similar to what I describe, but it's not very good, and has no builtin OpenGL-like system calls.

A standardized set of system calls for graphics, GUI, and IO would allow cross platform native apps to be trivially created. In principle there's no reason why MacOS, Windows, and Linux could not have such system calls added. The biggest problem is those systems have become very bloated from adhering to backwards compatibility.

I think the reason using the browser for desktop UI is because graphics and UI programming is terrible. The computer architecture and operating systems we use today are built on tech that was before graphics existed.

That's why it's trivial to build a terminal app, but god help you if you want to create a window with a button or draw a line. GLEW, GLUT, Qt, OpenGL, and the rest are just kludges to deal with the fact that we're still working with tech from the 70's. Even those kludges are so terrible that companies like Github and Microsoft have resorted to using the browser to make things like Atom and Visual Studio Code.

It can be fixed, but I'm not sure anyone has the fortitude to redesign hardware and operating systems.

You'll remember me when the west wind moves

Upon the fields of barley

You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky

As we walk in fields of green

I was at a conference once setting up a booth for a company I worked for. We ended up borrowing an electric screwdriver from a booth next door, but had to turn it by hand because only union members were allowed to use electric tools to setup a booth.

Unions may have helped once upon a time, but now they just take money from your compensation to pay union managers who work against a company being efficient (which makes pay even less over time).

Most people consider intellectual property as a given, and believe without questioning that IP promotes innovation. This book examines those types of arguments and makes a case that IP hinders innovation. Relevant considering the recent Oculus case.

I would love to see a return to simple designs where the majority of kB come from content vs ads, tracking, advanced 'design' that's annoying.

Wasn't krihelinator the same guy who was doing revision history on his repositories and making himself the only contributor? (someone please correct me if I'm wrong)

The article is a bit misleading. The minimum wage is $11/hr. in Seattle and will reach $15 for large businesses by next year, and by 2021 for small businesses.

Amazon by itself is bringing in thousands of people per year, none at the minimum wage. To attribute a good economy in Seattle to a minimum wage is a non-sequitur.

I find it curious though how some can think raising pay by fiat will help the poor. If this were really so why would there be a schedule to phase it in slowly over 7 instead of immediately? I think part of the reason is that it is expected for natural monetary inflation to cancel out the effect of the min wage increase. If we assume 2% target inflation from the FED then that would be a 15% reduction in buying power of the dollar, reducing the burden on businesses for the increase in wage price.

With phased-in increases we tend to see effects that are within the error of margin. Naturally if there was an overnight price increase on anything there would be immediate measurable ramifications, which is probably why the phase-ins are always slow. If people truly thought the effects were positive then they would push for the changes to be as immediate as possible to leave no room for doubt about the effect of the policy.

Meanwhile the homeless situation in Seattle is getting progressively worse. With the increase in minimum wage, some people are paid more, but at the expense of some poor people not being able to acquire a job at all. Certainly we could find a better way of handling things.

Your article proves my point. He deliberately altered his data.

I think the biggest problem with accounts in general, is that the accounts never really are deleted. Any DB admin will tell you info is never deleted.

From the comments it doesn't look like many read the article. Here's the tldr:

Free software won. Yay! However, what about hardware, infrastructure, and services? Oops. All those things have been become increasingly centralized. Centralization has diminished our privacy, and therefore our liberty. Time to put restrictions on corporations so we can have liberty again.

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Now the only part I disagree with is the last part. Laws and regulations got us into this mess in the first place. These companies are huge because they can sue or prevent others from competing through laws and regulations. Guess who lobbies to create these laws in the first place? (It's not the little guy) The biggest problem is Intellectual Property (IP). Because of it we have DRM and many companies have very literal monopolies (enforced by government) on things. Apple has a patent on rounded rectangles for heaven's sake.

What we need is a decentralization of power, and a turn towards distributed systems. The best way to do that will be to eliminate IP. That will take some time, but we should do it gradually. By allowing people to "copy" it will create competition and weaken the monopoly-like position many of these companies hold. Power will fragment and decentralize. That should be the goal.