Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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Identity is what’s missing
Neither the Internet nor the Web have an Identity model. This means they also don’t have a Trust model. And from this fact flows nearly all the insecurity issues that are inherent to the Internet or the Web (as opposed to those coming from defective software). “What is identity?” is one of those bottomless questions…
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Classes
I assert that there are six archetypal work roles in the world: designer – someone who mostly works on novelty and synthesis to come up with a way to solve a problem builder – someone who takes a design in makes it real fixer – someone who repairs things that were once working caretaker –…
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Context Matters
Context matters. Barack Obama, regardless of your politics, was and is not an uncouth narcissistic bully who insists that all social interactions be conducted on his terms. Nor does he align himself with fascists, white supremacists, or foreign states hostile to democracy. Nor does he lie about trivial, easily obtainable facts and instruct his staff…
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Intellectually dishonest apply within
The CEO of Comcast is making the rounds talking about how his cosmically disliked unregulated monopoly should be getting less heat about their deployment of data caps on residential broadband Internet connections because “the more bits you use, the more you pay“, comparing data use to electricity or gasoline use. Except it is nothing like…
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Mitigating gun violence versus controlling gun access
Gun control is decisive. Guns salve fear. Fear is increasingly pervasive, mostly because it is an effective tool for manipulating the market or the masses, occasionally because it is warranted. Fear-of-direct-bodily-harm-driven gun violence is most hazardous in places with higher population density. More people in smaller spaces increases the opportunity for both ad hoc violence,…
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Picking your new from the world’s old
In some cases, this might be brilliant. In the case of the redditor who says, “I’m a new programmer and I chose PHP as my language”, it just seems misguided.
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I suffer from commercial-Internet-access-asymmetricitis
My upload speed is roughly 768 Kilobits per second. Assuming perfect conditions, at that rate a 40 megabyte file takes about seven minutes to upload. Light will travel over 70 million miles through a vacuum in the same time. I upload a lot. I live in the United States. It is 2015. I am sad.…
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Its stateful all the way down.
Statefulness is a pain in the ass. But it brings with it enough value to keep people interested in maintaining state. And really, everything is stateful, even things that claim to be stateless. How so? There are two kinds of state: peer state and configuration state. Peer-state is what you hold in your arp and…
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Corruption versus Corrosion
There is, in the United States, a vocal angry outrage over what is being called corruption, particularly in the context of government. As a place where corruption hasn’t been a problem for many many years, this might seem odd. What are we really angry about?
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Argument to the comforters
argumentum ad solatorem