As a BBQ loving Texan, I find this fascinating. On the one hand, it does seem kind of creepy, on the other, this could be some cool resilient community-building technology to create a real alternative to the current food economy.
I don't think this will ever be a complete replacement for real meat. There are such subtleties to how an animal lives and what it eats that affect its taste. Wild hogs and domestic pigs are the same animal but taste entirely different (I prefer the wild variety).
Still, I'd prefer higher quality lab-grown meat created under safe and open conditions with some free range/hunted organic on the side to the factory farmed meat we're stuck with today. I drive 35 miles out of my way for groceries every week to avoid that stuff.
False dichotomy. You can't "pay $20/mo to stream as many as you want". The available selection from services like Netflix and Hulu is extremely limited.
Many in the "15-25 set" pay about $20/mo to download through an offshore VPS, private trackers and servers. This money would go to the content holders if they didn't cripple their "precious content" with bundling packages, intrusive advertisements, DRM and region restrictions.
I would not have a hard time saying no to this at all. There are limits which you can assert without being rude or coming across as paranoid. What's next, access to all your private emails?
Some private content like facebook could add to their liability for discriminatory hiring practices. Imagine if they figure out your sexual preference, or veteran status. Seriously, recruiters would be foolish to pry like this into the personal lives of recruits.
There is no hacker news problem if you realize that all sites up to this point in internet history are either heavily curated for quality and limited in scope or self-moderated with a one-dimensional, imperfect karma game, and thus chaotic and ephemeral.
Such is the nature of suchness until someone figures out a better game that more properly engages human nature.
Crying over the demise of HN is like crying over a naive hill-climbing algorithm when it gets stuck.
Yeah, but I would download a loaf of organic bread if I could. And I'd copy that loaf whenever I needed more for a sandwich, and I'd upload that bread pattern to all my friends, and give away free slices to any hungry people I came across.
Reject here. Pretty discouraging at the time, but in retrospect, best thing that could have happened to me. A year later, I landed a great job at a local startup, and the Google branch closed up shop.
All in all, it was decent self-learning experience. I say apply anyway. Even if you don't get it, it might sharpen you up enough for somewhere else.
I found a better solution: set your browser to forget all its cookies when you shut it down. Use different providers for webmail, feed reading and search.
I use them, but I don't trust them. They've got my email and feedreader (for now), but not much of my search.
I hate instant search, and I don't want to authenticate myself to them just to turn it off. My browser is forgetful of cookies, and I shut it down regularly to get shit done.
DuckDuckGo is a refreshing alternative and Google now gets but a meager fraction of my search, where they used to be almost exclusive. I'll check DDG first, then elsewhere if I'm disappointed. Subjectively, DDG result relevance seems to be improving lately.
I also block Google's Javascript analytics and ads, as I do all other third parties. As a user how can I trust let alone know what all these ad networks and doohickies in a page really are? If you want to advertise or analyze on your site, fine, back it up by serving it out of your own domain if it matters that much to your bottom line.
More importantly, why? If governments are doing their jobs and serving whom they are meant to serve, people as a collective group are well cared for and have no reason to do such harm to themselves. The few who would threaten it are the odd pathogen, quickly and easily dealt with.
OTOH I can see people as a collective group deciding they don't need large corporations like Bayer killing their bees, Monsanto poisoning their food, Visa and MC ripping them off and suppressing speech of those they don't like, etc. But are any of those essential and vital? Perhaps these are more like a cancer that should be removed from the body politic.
TL;DR Anonymous doesn't shit where Anonymous eats.