The telcos are running utilities and should be regulated like utilities. And they should especially be regulated this way if they are heavily subsidized build the infrastructure in the first place.
Biking in Soma is incredibly dangerous. Everyone I know who bikes there has had an accident at some point in the last few years. And I suspect its getting worse with Uber and Lyft drivers who pour in from elsewhere around the bay and have no familiarity with the streets at all.
I agree with you that most Lyft/Uber drivers don't have a sense of the environment compared to traditional cab drivers. Who decides it's a good idea to double-park on Oak Street to let someone off?
Riding in SoMa requires one to always expect cars to make a right turn on any intersection, (so pass them on the left), along with cars turning onto your travel from the numerous side streets (e.g. Rausch, Moss, Harriet). And on top of that, because of how wide all the one-way streets are, drivers drive fast.
Harrison and Bryant, the roads adjacent to the freeway, are essentially extensions of the freeway with cars easily going 50 mph. I would traverse SoMa on another street, then only bike on those streets for the very last block.
Folsom was always a mess, especially in the evening, but the giant red bike lane has made things worse. It was confusing to both drivers and bikers when it first rolled out because it was a car-sized bike lane. Had they drawn the lane as half the size of a car, I think it would've easily communicated to everyone it's not meant for cars. I know drivers now realise that, but for any new driver in SF, I can see them accidentally driving in that bike lane.
I have more problems avoiding pedestrians with their phones an inch from their face walking blindly into the bike lane, a crosswalk, or zig-zagging on shared paths.
I don't think Paul Graham owes Michael O Church a damn thing. PG has always been clear that he built this site as a place for a certain type of reasoned discourse with a certain tone. And he enforces that as he pleases, as he should. He did, after all, build this place with his own two hands and he pays for it out of his own pocket.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if people have a secret "tone score" or similar that is assigned by moderators every time they make a nasty comment. And if that is the case, looking back on Church's comments it should be pretty clear that he'd have racked up one of the highest (lowest?) tone scores on HN. His comments are full of bitterness and hatred and scorn.
I agree that who-owes-what is negotiated by the parties and not objectively pre-determined, and that we, as commenters, have a hand in deciding who-owes-what.
I ask you: would you want to secretly fail a secret grading criterion because something about you (tone, content (Church says it's content-based discrimination), et cetera) is not acceptable to a moderator?
Crucial points are: secret failing and secret grading. I wouldn't; I'd value the feedback, or get the heck out of there.
But that's what real-life is like. In most social situations, people are not going to tell you what they hate about you. This is as uncomfortable for them as it is for you.
As someone who was once friendless and unpopular, I agree that this is crazily frustrating. But it is the way it is for a reason; it is rarely a productive or pleasant use of time for someone to tell someone else why he sucks. If you're on the friendless and unpopular side, it's up to you to observe carefully and watch why some people are popular and some are unpopular.
"Tone" opens up a very ugly discussion I don't want to have here.
I don't know if Paul Graham is at fault for this, just to be clear about it.
Let's say he were. If he came out and said, "This is my message board, and therefore I assign personal penalties to the posts of those who oppose my economic interests", I would respect that.
What I can't respect is a silent personal penalty. That's ridiculous.
I've had this suspicion for months-- and I didn't voice it at first, because I don't much care-- but it's the latency difference and the looking into position of historical posts that made the case strong.
Why is this important? Why is it interesting? Because if I am being personally penalized, that means that the establishment is threatened by people like me who speak the truth about it. That would be a really positive sign.
It is very common, in both software systems and real-life social systems, to have silent personal penalties. You don't generally want to tip off abusers that you're onto them, because they will frequently adjust their behavior in non-constructive ways if they're aware of that. Similarly, if people find you obnoxious in real life, they will generally not tell you, they'll simply refuse to associate with you. Nobody owes you feedback, and it's a drain on their time and emotional energy to try and explain why you've offended them.
In both these cases, your signal is that people are choosing not to associate with you. If nobody wants to hang around you, that's a good sign you're doing something that's objectionable to a lot of people. If some people do want to hang around you but others don't, treasure the friends you have and stop sweating the ones you don't.
This is certainly kind of legislation that could come down to a close vote, especially if IV throws around some lobbying dollars against it.
A little advocacy will go a long way, and it will be very interesting to see if the tech industry gets their act together enough to support it in any meaningful way.
I tutored teenagers in physics and math for a while to make ends meet. And they love snapchat. They are also basically ready to be done with facebook.
There are two reasons they prefer snapchat to facebook and texting, respectively, both of which basically come down to privacy:
1) Their parents are on facebook
2) They know that what they say today might look stupid tomorrow, and facebook (and the phone companies) save everything, forever.
Basically, they have figured out that what they say when they are 13 will look ridiculous when they are 17. And what they say when they are 17 will be really cringe-worthy when they are in college. They also know that facebook's track record on privacy is awful, so even if they went through the trouble to create different types of friend lists, with different access settings, etc., facebook could just change everything tomorrow.
I could easily see snapchat expanding to build an entire social network built around the "only see for 10 seconds and its gone" feature, and droves of teenagers moving onto it. If they do, facebook could be in serious trouble.
Conceivably they could build out the address book/friends list features to create a persistent profile, and then all the other media content is temporary.
Have to interject here on the off chance that some gmail engineers are paying attention. That's nice that you like it, but forcing the new compose on users is just plain inexcusable. It breaks a number of things for me that I actually use in my work on a daily basis.
Here are just 4 things that it breaks for me (note: copied from elsewhere):
1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.
2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?
3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.
4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.
1) I just turned it on, and it is not customizable at all. You cannot create custom tabs, and you can't even pick what goes into the tabs they have created.
2) When you turn it on, it disables Gmail's multiple inbox. Multiple inbox is the only thing saving my email from being a complete and utter disaster right now.
3) Judging by how they are forcing the new compose on everyone it is reasonable to expect that they will force us to use this as well. (The new compose screws up at least two workflows for me, btw. For example, sending a form email to several people is now a pain because I have to manually click "edit subject" to remove the "Fwd:"). If they force this on me, it will completely destroy my ability to use gmail. If they want me to leave gmail for good, that would be the way to guarantee it.
I wish they would have taken more time to better support tabbed browsing instead of implementing their own floating compose windows in javascript.
Now they've implemented their own version of tabs.
Just support native browser controls, please. People understand them. They're simple. They work. The more stuff they add, the heavier Gmail becomes... and the more of a pain it is to load in multiple real tabs.
I'd like to once again recommend trying the Basic Html view. You can middle-click the compose button (or any link, really) and it opens in a new tab. It's super helpful for keeping multiple emails open to reference while writing a new one (which is what the floaty javascript compose window is supposed to solve, but it doesn't really)
"...and you can't even pick what goes into the tabs they have created."
Sure you can. Just drag an email between them. It gives you the option to permanently move emails from that sender to a specific tab. Presumably, it also adapts to your selections, much like their priority and spam filters.
The new compose has at least 4 things that are broken for me:
1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to delete the "Fwd:" from the subject line. Especially when sending a form email. This resulted in a couple of embarrassing emails before I changed back to the old compose.
2) I often want to create a big list of emails that I want to review before hitting send. The new compose replaces each email address I type with the persons name! For a lot of people I do business with, I have both their business and personal email address. But now I can't tell which one I'm about to email. What the hell Google?
3) Attachments are now an object within the email. But often I want to forward something with an attachment, but clear out the text in the email. Well now when I do select-all, it deletes the attachment also.
4) The compose email doesn't cover my screen, even when I pop it out as its own window. When I'm drafting an email, I don't want to be able to see distractions. If other emails pop up while I'm editing it, that can make me lose my train of thought. Worse, there are no options that I can set to change this.
No can do. I refuse to turn shortcuts on because there are at least 2 (and maybe more I'm not aware of) ways to send the email I'm currently drafting. Command + Enter, or hitting shift, then enter.
I've learned from past email programs that's a recipe for disaster. Turn those two off and I'd gladly use keyboard shortcuts.
Used to have 2 (old one, and pop out), now it has 2 (new one and pop out). (there is also the look for reply, and for chatting (which i use even if other is offline sometimes instead of a quick email), and the ability to revert to the old look)
By this logic, the old one is at least as fascist. Additionally, while you might not like the new style, "real" feature was removed, but the ability to write multiple emails at once, or write one while one is open, were added.
Edit: I just tried to old one to see it again. It is rather bulky. It needed a UI update of some kind at least. (which may have been accomplished not semi-popped out, i guess)
Technically, you still have two compose interfaces, but they have promised to remove the oldest one. To get the old interface, click the little downward pointing arrow and select "Temporarily switch back to old compose".
But the goal isn't to just colonize any old planet. It's to colonize a place we can successfully terraform. Mars is the clear winner in that respect, and it's not close.
Mercury needs basically a planet's worth of water and atmosphere to be imported. Mars on the other hand could be (we hope) good to go. The only question for Mars is whether there are abundant amounts of nitrogen locked up in the soil. But even if not, the amount of stuff we'd need to import by bombarding the planet with asteroids would be orders of magnitude less than for Mercury.
I think the article makes the case that you do not need to import water, it is supposed to already be there. If you have a ready supply of hydrogen and oxygen (which indications are Mercury does) and an incredible amount of energy that can easily be converted you reduce your import burden substantially. This has always been my doubt about Mars, is the energy available that we need to get anything done over there? (I also agree that Nitrogen availability is a serious issue for any food production, regardless of the strategy, and this is likely a Mercury weak pont.)
Terraforming is not the goal, it is a means to an end of making a survivable planet that does not required resources from earth. Limiting your options to terraforming is not required and may not be desirable.
I'd say the goal is to find a survivable planet that can support billions of people. In that sense, the amount of water ice that is in a couple of permanently shadowed craters is really negligible. And on Mercury you're talking about only a narrow zone around the poles that you can support people if you excavate massive amounts of rock underground.
If you're talking about the energy required on Mars to change the atmosphere on a planetary scale, is there a source that says that would be a limiting factor? None of the research on this that I've seen considers it to be an issue. Mars receives about 1/3 the incident sunlight that Earth does, measured at vacuum. But the amount of that incident sunlight that will reach the surface will be higher on Mars due to the thin atmosphere and lack of cloud cover.
Perhaps the eventual goal is billions of people on another planet, I think the medium term goal is just a large enough gene pool to ensure survival of the species. You do not need billions for that. The truth is that even if you want billions you do not necessarily need a whole lot of space for them, if you examine the total area of arable land on earth and how many people you can pack into a city the space requirements are not as large as one might first assume if you have climate controlled growing conditions and a 100% urban population.
I have read a lot of material about the energy required to sustain some sort of colony on Mars but I have never read anything estimating the kind of energy strategy required for terraforming or building a substantial colony. This is why I have doubts about it, I do not see it being properly considered. For example most of the terraforming schemes involve the generation of greenhouse gases, creating a more opaque atmosphere and nullifying the thin atmosphere advantage. So now you have a sun-starved version of earth without the repository of hydrocarbons to dig up and burn off that earth has. I'm no expert though, this is a fairly uneducated opinion.
"Terraforming" is just a concept. We have no idea how to do it and whether it's even possible. And even if it were, it would take hundred of years and would need constant life support from Earth for that time. Hardly a good bet either...
Mars has no magnetosphere which makes it a non-starter due to radiation unless you live underground or in heavily shielded dwellings.
If you have to do that you might as well start at either the Moon or my personal favourite Europa - a vast ocean of water kept warm by tidal forces underneath a thick protective crust of ice. Power would be a challenge, but there might be a way to harness either those tidal forces or the radiation from Jupiter.
Mars is a non-starter? I think you've received some bad information.
Average radiation on the Mars surface is 10-20 rem/year. With a thicker atmosphere it will be less. And for people spending 12-15 hours a day indoors in shielded dwellings it will be a lot less. It's not a showstopper at all.
If you want to colonize Europa, you'll have to dig a lot deeper than on Mars or the moon. Cosmic ray dosage on the lunar surface is around 30 rem/year. On Mars, it averages 50.
On Europa, it's around 500-600 rem per day. That's a fatal dose.
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." - von Neumann