motters

As a long time C coder I checked this out, because I have my own malloc replacement. The source code is nonsensical garbage.

It's not embodiment that's important so much as situatedness. An agent can be situated without having a physical instantiation.

An agent which does not have a place or time is not recognisable as being autonomous, or capable of recognising others as such.

I hope that this will also apply to mobile phones.

The answer is quite likely to be yes. But then when you consider who is the primary typical user of a spreadsheet and ask yourself "are they likely to learn Lisp?" then the answer is no.

For software I've written while working at companies I didn't have control over the license choice, but for that which I've written voluntarily nearly all of it (and there's quite a laundry list now) is under GPL or AGPL. This is because, as some other comments have mentioned, I want any other users of the software to have the same capabilities to change it as I did. I don't want there to be secret proprietary versions which then get distributed in closed form denying the potential for participation.

The ability of users to have genuine control over their systems has been under sustained attack for a long time. I may be only one developer but at least I can make a small ding in the dark empire of bad software practices.

"If you live here, even if you are the poorest person in the country, you are rich beyond the dreams of half the population of the world"

Really? Have you ever been in The Work Programme? Have you ever visited a food bank? Have you ever had neighbours pleading with you for food for their children because they have no money? You can prefer to live inside of a cosy bubble of ignorance if you wish, but this is the UK in 2016.

As someone who has always been a UK citizen and is old enough to remember decades past I can say with confidence that this statement is not accurate.

The BBC is very much a state run organization. The people who ultimately decide what happens to the BBC - The BBC Trust - are appointed by "queen in council", which in practice means government ministers.

I think GNU Social should be pretty scalable, and that's because it's not a centralized paradigm with all users in one titanic database. Currently I'm running my own instance (one user on the server) and then federating with the rest, so that kind of setup should be scalable to the size of the web.

Again that may just be the wrong paradigm. If you are especially concerned about disappearance of a server then just run your own installation. This is partially why I'm making debian packages for GNU Social, to make that process easy.

There isn't really any "different federation". You just follow whoever you want to follow, regardless of what server they're on.

It's just not a centralized paradigm. Joining an existing server means you'll be subject to whatever moderation policy the admin has. Or you can just run your own server and then federate with the rest, as I do.

Although I dislike capitalism in general I think that message should be changed to something more neutral. Maybe some capitalists might want to have their own GNU Social site where they can boast about swindling, exploitation and their beloved centralization of everything.

In my debian package for the qvitter plugin that message already gets replaced, but I can also submit a patch upstream.