mithaler

If what you really need is security, then I don't see how (1) and (2) can be overriding concerns. If I were in a situation where my life depended on my messages being confidential, my choice of medium wouldn't turn on the convenience of long-form messages or social conventions around reply time.

To put it another way: if I'm in a situation where being able to type an easy-to-read long-form message is more important than it being end-to-end encrypted, I'd just use Gmail. I don't see why Signal needs to satisfy both use cases; at worst it's kind of ergonomically awkward, but it isn't making false promises of security, which is worse than useless.

I have to disagree.

I'm a programmer, but I'm not good at math. I know this. And yet, the Tau Day Manifesto explained the geometry of the circle to me more clearly and understandably than any of the math classes I've ever taken. And it's not just because it's a well-written work; the concept is genuinely simpler to understand.

Pi really is a pedagogical disaster, and tau really does help.

By this logic, Coinbase basically can't win. If they do what they need to do to allow Bitcoin to become popular -- that is, make it as pleasant to use as a bank with credit and debit cards -- they essentially become a bank, thus earning the scorn of the Bitcoin community. But if they don't, Bitcoin remains a niche product that no one besides a few ideological supporters with axes to grind will ever use.

You can argue that "undocumented immigrant" doesn't capture the actual meaning, but that doesn't make jorgeleo's point any less valid: the action is illegal, not the person.

My understanding, unless I'm wrong, is that a Title II reclassification can be done unilaterally by the FCC without Congressional assent (though it would immediately be sued by all the carriers). Accordingly, I'm reading it as a political ploy to force Congress into giving the FCC a better-suited regulatory regime for it than Title II, despite Congress currently not being friendly to such a thing. He's saying, in effect: "I want net neutrality badly enough that I'm willing to use this horrible regulation to do it that no one really wants, unless you cave and give me a better way." It might be a bluff?

Without remarking on the relative rightness of the moral stands in question, the difference between being vegan and switching to a new social network is that the latter affects people beyond the person making the moral stand. It's perfectly possible to switch by oneself to a free-as-in-freedom social network, but what's the point if no one else does?

And in any case, I'm not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should be respectful of what our audience actually wants as we do. The uphill battle is the social aspect of convincing users that the change is worthwhile, not the technical aspect of building it (which is easy).

We can probably go back and forth for hours on whether I'm being "defeatist" or "realistic". :)

I would love to see positive change in this area, but we need to be aware of what's really important to our intended audience if we're going to try. I could storm off of Facebook and leave a post behind to follow me to my self-hosted Diaspora pod, but I know no one's going to do it, so why bother? My friendships are worth more than my irritation at Facebook-the-company, and I can promise you that the vast majority of users will come to that exact same conclusion. Let's be honest with ourselves about that, before we try to fix this problem. Otherwise we'll only get as far as Diaspora did.

Not just "ideally"; I would go so far as to say that the situation where the rejected person does not gracefully accept it is the point at which anyone in that situation has first done something "bad". (We have a term for further retribution against the rejector in a professional context: "sexual harassment". In an ordinary personal context, we would simply say it makes the person an asshole.)

There's a difference between an explanation and an excuse; rayiner was giving the former, not the latter.

In any case, is it a flaw of our government that our legislators write laws that the majority of people happen to want? The fact that the majority want something irrational is incidental; people want it, and that's why politicians do it.

I love Turntable, and it's sad to see this, but it's not a huge surprise; for their whole history they've offered an amazing service and charged well below the true value of the service (they only added ads recently).

I figure we'll soon see a tiered model letting users upload directly for a fee, which is probably a good move.