We had very decentralized "internet" with BBSes, AOL, Prodigy, etc.

Then we centralized on AOL (ask anyone over 40 if they remember "AOL Keyword: ACME" plastered all over roadside billboards).

Then we revolted and decentralized across MySpace, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, etc.

Then we centralized on Facebook.

We are in the midst of a second decentralization...

...from an information consumer's perspective. From an internet infrastructure perspective, the trend has been consistently toward more decentralization. Initially, even after everyone moved away from AOL as their sole information source online, they were still accessing all the other sites over their AOL dial-up connection. Eventually, competitors arrived and, since AOL no longer had a monopoly on content, they lost their grip on the infrastructure monopoly.

Later, moving up the stack, the re-centralization around Facebook (and Google) allowed those sources to centralize power in identity management. Today, though, people increasingly only authenticate to Facebook or Google in order to authenticate to some 3rd party site. Eventually, competitors for auth will arrive (or already have ahem passkeys coughcough) and, as no one goes to Facebook anymore anyway, they'll lose grip on identity management.

It's an ebb and flow, but the fundamental capability for decentralization has existed in the technology behind the internet from the beginning. Adoption and acclimatization, however, is a much slower process.

Of course, I always like to point out the foolishness of this metaphor: Bazaars in the Near East were usually run in a fairly regimented fashion by merchant guilds and their elected or appointed leaders.

This in contrast to the somber atmosphere of a cathedral where people whisper even when there are no services taking place at the time. It’s an image of reverence, humility, and monumental architecture.

The Cathedral example was actually GNU, which is Not Unix (it's in the name!).

In my case, I started on two exploratory gene knockout "fishing expeditions", both of which didn't turn up anything interesting after a year. Then I crystalized a protein and submitted it to X-ray diffraction, but the results were not good enough for a "high quality" structure, and besides the structure we did find was not particularly interesting. Then I switched to working on NMR structures, but ended up switching universities (politics...there's going to be lots of politics) before that went anywhere.

At my new university I switched to structure modeling and worked on a project my advisor suggested for about a year to optimize a modeling routine, but even the optimized version didn't turn up anything interesting. Finally, I landed on a very intriguing problem that could have had far reaching implications. I worked hard at it for almost a year, only to realize that even state-of-the-art modeling was at least a decade away from being able to begin to address the problem I needed to solve. Finally, I returned to a question that a professor had asked me in my first year of graduate school, half jokingly, assuming there was no way to answer the question. For about a year I worked hard at it, finally arrived at a very interesting answer, and graduated.

This exactly describes my own experience - 9 years for me. It was a miserable experience, but trying a lot of things that don't work, and then admitting to yourself that they won't work, is honestly great emotional endurance training to be a scientist.

Tor just isn't as common as you think nor is it widely adopted due to unreliable and the problem with that cover explanation is that you wouldn't know where Tor is widely used in the first place to be able to find "safety in numbers".

Can you predict the output of the following?

    (1..20).each do |i|
      puts i if i.odd?..i.prime?
    end

I thought I remembered Matz once saying it would be removed, But I could be wrong. Maybe someone uses it.

I've personally never used for anything else than strings, but when I do, it's very useful.

“The form of the flip-flop is an expression that indicates when the flip-flop turns on, .. (or ...), then an expression that indicates when the flip-flop will turn off. While the flip-flop is on it will continue to evaluate to true, and false when off.”

  (1..20).each do |i|
    puts i if i.odd? || i.prime?
  end

Rather, it seems the authors made a much simpler mistake: hypotheses can only be refuted by evidence, not confirmed. So, in this case, if the hypothesis is "judges act more harshly when hungry", what they should have been doing is looking for evidence disproving that statement. Instead, they seem to have presented a correlation and a suggestion, which is not the same thing as a scientific finding.

Dealerships don't make most of their money (or any money, really) selling cars. They make their money from service, and selling info to 3rd parties (ever notice when you buy a new car, you will receive mail from SirusXM for a year after). In order for this to work, their systems are all tightly integrated. When you buy a new car, the dealer will know when you're due for service. When you have your current car serviced more than a certain amount, the dealer will know you're in the market for a new car.

So, it's not possible to swap out only the service management piece of CDK or only the sales piece, or only the CRM piece. They all have to work together. The reason I know is I happened to contract with the IT department of a very large dealer network at the time they were undergoing a migration from Reynolds to CDK. A year into the migration process...they pulled the plug. Moving even from one large incumbent to another was too much work.

Good luck breaking in on that as a brand new baby startup! I think you'd probably have better luck completely disrupting the car sales process from the ground up.