Fast and steady

That's an interesting perspective that I had not considered... thanks for sharing it!

Scott Adams just posted the following article on his blog asking whether Twitter and Facebook should be regulated: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and-facebook-be-regulated-as I wanted to ask the same question here. From the libertarian (and especially anarcho-capitalist) standpoints, I think the answer is a pretty clear "no" since these are private companies and regulating them would be a clear violation of liberty. However, I think Scott makes a good point about how censorship from these platforms effectively blocks people's voices from ever being heard by the masses. To further back up Scott's thinking, since these software giants are (arguably) granted monopolistic status thanks to existing Government rules (notably patents and such) already, I am finding this particular case harder to dismiss than other cases that I have seen posed. I am, of course, aware of the slippery slope that comes as a result of accepting regulations for this 1 case. For example, if we accept regulating platforms that are used for free speech, then why not others (food, air, healthcare, etc)? Thus causing a domino effect of regulations ending in the disaster we have now. While I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this question, I feel a bit like I am lost in the fog on this one.

I noticed that, too

Thought maybe some of you might find this funny: http://www.collegehumor.com/post/7036405/heckler-gets-offended-by-comedians-jokes-about-parenting-and-ends-up-getting-destroyed I certainly got a good laugh because it's so true.

Do you do your own icons? Or do you have someone do them? I've been wanting to write an iOS app for a while now... started writing a Pilot Logbook (iOS 4 or 5 days) app a few years ago but my ability to draw icons is pretty bad. I am finding your blog pretty interesting as well. Will have to read more of it later when I actually have time...

Hey, just noticed this thread and as one of the 5 people that had cut off communication with Kotaro, I can assure him that it was not anything he did or said or anything about him at all - at least in my particular case (I can't speak for any others, especially since I don't think I ever met them). I've already been in contact with him again in the past 2 or 3 nights and have shared my reasons for doing so (which I admit was not fair to him and even self-centered of me to do). A long story short (and because I'm not quite ready to publicly share the longer story), I have some fairly strong social anxieties that are partly to blame... I should have had the decency to at least texted him back to let him know what was going on instead of leaving him in the dark. I regret that even more now that I realize that he doubted himself. I should have known better seeing as how I've had this very same thing done to me a number of times and having felt like I must have done something wrong which only helped to increase my social anxiety. I'm sorry, Kotaro. To reiterate, it was not your fault nor was it anything you said or did. What I did was thoughtless and cruel.

Partly work-related, partly side-project-related and partly just personal shit I had to figure out (dealing mostly with social anxiety). I've been putting a LOT of effort into working on a side-project of mine that I'm hoping will open a lot of employment opportunities for me in the future (not that I'm looking for a new job right now). I've pretty much invested all of my time in this over the past year or so. By the way, thanks for the tip about bootstrap - it really came in handy with my side project especially since, as you know, I'm clueless about web development ;-) I don't think I ever met James, but yea, PM me Harris' contact info so I can try to join any of their future meet-ups. How is your web dev business going?

Sounds a lot like my own story of how I got here... Although I didn't read Piketty, I read Paul Krugman's books. That said... welcome!

Hey, sorry for disappearing off the face of the earth the past 6 months or so. I'd love to make the next meetup. Any idea when that'll be?

Welcome aboard, matey! (Sorry, trying to stick with my pirate namesake) Always cool to see other Softie's find their way here - I guess it's because we tend to think more logically than the average bear? That's what I like to believe, anyway...

I know how you feel over here on the other side of the pond in Boston.

Well, they kind of have a point... I mean, the Venezuelan Government requires that people get their approval to wipe their own arses, so it's not unreasonable for the US Government to require approval to encrypt emails, amirite or amirite? ;-)

Paypal Freezes ProtonMail Campaign Funds https://protonmail.ch/blog/paypal-freezes-protonmail-campaign-funds/ That said, I'm nearing "1.0" status on my own encrypted email library that I've been working on for about a year now in my free time. I mostly just need to write some sample apps using my libraries and perferably add more unit tests, then it should be ready for prime time. 118,000 lines of code so far and counting... I've implemented S/MIME v3.2 (and older) and OpenPGP support (which can re-use your GnuPG keys if you use GnuPG). None of the other open source libraries I could find properly negotiated the S/MIME encryption algorithm - most just hard-coded an encryption algorithm (typically Triple-DES). Once I've got my email libraries written, I could use some help writing a mail client to take advantage of them. It's a ton of work and I'm burning out - plus I really hate GUI programming.

How many people actually took it seriously calling to actually end father's day, though? Couldn't have been many because I did a search and all of the posts I saw were condemning it. Obviously I don't have the patience to scroll through *all* of the posts, but I did scroll through a few hundred. Calling to #EndFathersDay is just so over the top, you have to realize that it's not a campaign that feminists would take up because it would completely discredit them by shedding light on their insanity. Instead, they need to stick to memes that no one will challenge out of fear of being attacked and having their words twisted. Notice that feminist memes are typically of the form: "do you still beat your wife?" They have to set things up in such a way that disagreeing makes you look like you hate women or some such nonsense. How would #EndFathersDay further that narrative? It doesn't. (then again... #KillAllMen was real... yea, I don't know... people are just fucking insane)

Looks like #EndFathersDay is a complete hoax, searching for the hashtag didn't seem to turn up any real calls to end father's day.

"now that she's a little older, she'll try to reason with us, 'but I did this because...' or blah blah blah. There's no negotiating..." @ ~4:56 Oh. My. God. Have a little fucking empathy!

He can't defend himself in private either, because she could just call the cops.

Awesome! I just bought tickets.

It looks like Tom Woods will be speaking in Boston at Cheers. Will anyone here be going? I'm thinking of braving my social anxiety and going with the hope that I might meet some other liberty-minded folks.

@papatree84 you'll want to learn more than just HTML. At the very least, look into learning some javascript and if you feel comfortable with that, then you'll probably be ok switching majors. How much math you need to know depends on the type of programming you end up doing, but it's still good to have a pretty good foundation in math no matter what. Web developers are likely going to need to learn at least some Linear Algebra for 2D graphics programming as future websites are more likely to be come fancier and fancier (and thus becoming more and more demanding mathematically), having images and other things animate into view and such. I'm sure you've noticed that websites are getting more and more complex, so I probably don't need to point it out. I suspect you've already had algebra, geometry, and trigonometry in high school (which are all important), so for mathematics that I'd recommend for you as a minimum would be Linear Algebra (matrix math, etc) and Discrete Mathematics. You can probably find decent online material for both, so whether you take courses in them at your university or if you do them in your own time depends on your own personal preferences, but they are both likely to be important for you to be successful. Good luck.

I dropped out of college and have been pretty successful. I haven't started my own software business or anything, but I don't seem to have much trouble getting jobs and I'm considered pretty top-notch by my employer. I can hold my own fairly well even though most everyone I work with has a degree. I will say, however, that I've been programming since I was 6 (learned a bit of 6502 assembler when I was 8) and I am (was?) apparently (according to my high school math teachers) really good at solving word problems, which is what prompted several of them to suggest software engineering to me as a profession I should consider (although that's not what I started to go to college for). You don't say how confidant you feel in the math and sciences, nor do you mention any experience writing software, so I don't know how viable it is for you to go into the field. Maybe it's a good idea for you, maybe it's not. I will say that I have worked with graphics artists who have been able to teach themselves programming and are pretty decent at it (not as good as me, but then again, they haven't spent nearly as much time as I have at it). I've also known people who majored in journalism who have, for whatever reason, ended up in software development and been pretty decent at it. How much do you know about web development? Have you ever designed/written web pages before? How sophisticated have they been? I don't do web development myself, so I'm not 100% sure where I should point you, but I think the technologies de jour for the web development right now are jQuery and ruby (on rails?). You might want to checkout open source projects on places like https://github.com and study the code for projects you find interesting and, I would suggest, trying to contribute to a few of them in order to learn. Contributing to open source projects is a really great way to get into the field regardless because it can also open doors for you as far as getting a job. Perhaps someone else working on a project you contribute to will like your work and want to hire you. Employers have also been known to try and recruit developers based on seeing their work on open source projects. It's a great way to learn at the very least. Taking web development courses at a university can also be a good idea. I might suggest taking some summer classes at a community college (do you have community colleges near you? They are usually *way* cheaper than other universities). Community colleges are vastly underrated, imho. You can learn the basics there and, if you discover that you are passionate about the subject matter, can learn the rest on your own and save yourself a ton of money. BTW, I'm not sure the web development market is growing... but I can sure as heck tell you that the mobile development market *is*. And that's where I am (I was doing desktop software development before).

You can read their summary here: https://protonmail.ch/pages/security_details.php This is actually something interesting to me because I've been working on writing an email client from scratch with both OpenPGP and S/MIME encryption in mind, but the one thing that that was always an unsolvable problem using the standard email encryption protocols was that header metadata cannot be encrypted. ProtonMail seems to solve that by being a web-based solution that doesn't really follow the standard email protocols. In order to interoperate with existing email clients, what they do is send the client a URL where they can read the encrypted message by decrypting it in their browser.

I wish I had thought of it sooner, but I probably should have asked if anyone else was going to see them speak last night before going so it would have been possible to meet up. That said, did anyone else go? I was hoping for more discussion, but was still glad I went.

FWIW, I had similar concerns as Jetrpg22. Thanks, cynicist, you make some reasonable points in addressing my concerns, at least. I don't really expect that the Government will ban it, for me, that was more of a worst-case scenario. As an aside, since you mentioned illegal mp3 downloads, once Amazon started offering them at $0.99, I felt no temptation to pirate them. I still hesitate to invest in bitcoin, but at this point it's more about considering risk as if it were a normal stock. The way you deal with that, of course, is to invest small amounts here and there and see how it pans out. I think that as more retailers begin to accept bitcoin (a few already do), the value of bitcoin will rise because it'll become more useful and also more mainstream. As it becomes more mainstream, it'll be harder for the Government to discredit it and/or ban it. Just my thoughts...

Yea, good point.