I'm very much not a fan of RMS, but here's one way you can square that circle:
He and you could both live by the principle that you do as much to fit your principles as you feasibly can.
If you have someone to help you get online anonymously for free, you do that. If you need to pay to be online, you do that instead.
If you can get by in life without buying things and being tracked, you do that. If you can't do that, because it's not the life you can imagine living, you don't.
The more important the principle (to you), the more you sacrifice to implement it.
Low-to-no military spending is important enough to me that I won't work for a defense contractor. It's honestly not important enough for me to purposefully earn less than the taxable minimum (and thus pay no taxes, and thus pay no military money).
And of course by evidence, "Anonymous internet" is important enough to RMS to live an ultra-hippie life, but not important enough to use no internet at all.
Ayo! I'm making a game engine and writing a tutorial about it!
Whyyy?
Unity makes painfully clunky games, good languages like Python and Javascript are only good for making smallish games, and C++ is still super unpleasant to work with.
C++ is my least favorite programming language, but it's also still the best way to make professional games, the kind you can put on the Switch and in the Steam store. I'm not good at C++ and neither are most of the people I know, especially in the game making community.
I figure we could learn together and make something really nice. So I give you Honey, a free open source C++ game engine with a focus on simplicity, cuteness, and smoothness. Honey is a work in progress and always will be. Every piece of code ever committed to Honey will come with a teaching blog post.
I'm about 12 commits into making Honey, so it's still preliminary, though I can use it to make simple stuff like http://friendsonmountains.com/ABearCs/. But I'm making decently speedy progress, so some time later this year, it should be something people might want to use.
Join me, and let's learn to make a horrible thing into a nice one!
I work for Google and I use Facebook regularly. It's still used by over 90% of my friends and acquaintances, in all (especially tech, academia, medical) spaces.
That's way too simple. Many people on that list belong on that list, but...
The American people overwhelmingly approved the Patriot Act, and the idea of surveillance, and the war on terror, and the actual wars on place.
The Obama administration resumed surveillance programs which had been previously shut down.
The military industrial complex has been growing steadily larger since the 1950s.
Congress people from both parties repeatedly approve the growth of the defense budget, and especially parts which gain them money and jobs for their own states and districts.
There are certainly people to demonize, but sorting them out from the well intentioned would be incredibly complicated.
>especially considering that Microsoft can significantly reduce expenditures by integrating the company into the web group
This is a business truth generally, but Microsoft has proved a very strong exception. Historically their attempts to integrate their web and communications acquisitions into the web group (or at least the Microsoft frameworks) have resulted in stagnation and/or collapse. Whatever they gained in operating costs, they lost many times over in value.
Hotmail, Mesh, TellMe, Groove, Colloquis, and Danger all experienced terrible stagnation as they integrated into Microsoft. Yes, even Hotmail, which has never recovered as a brand from the three or four year period where they moved from unix to windows servers, producing no new features and allowing Gmail to gain rapid traction.
"Yet he doesn’t answer the question that really concerns us: why is it better to knock information into your head than to get it off the web?"
Because you still have to make the connection between things which constitutes a thought. How are you going to connect "What that seventeenth century philosopher Locke said" to "What's been happening in Egypt the last month" if Google is the one that remembers them both?
Addendum: I don't feel like it's as important to take classes in computer science. More important is to take classes in math, because math is a lot harder to teach yourself.
Once you learn a little math (say discrete, number theory, and linear algebra), I think you will probably have the mental toolset to think scientifically and learn a lot of the computer science on your own.
A basic class in data structures and algorithms might be nice because it will give you homework and fill in some gaps you might have from teaching yourself, but after that, computer science learning can be largely self directed. Automata is a really nice class to have if you can find it, because it ties in with the math, but it's not necessary for most industry programming.
I never took classes in optimal search algorithms, computer vision, or statistical programming, but I've done work in each of these three things. I taught myself as much game programming, graphics and user interface stuff as I learned in classes. I had classes in compilers, languages, automata, AI, robotics... these were all great, and not things I could easily have taught myself, but they were also specialized, and haven't been so directly relevant afterwards.
Linux is all experience; I haven't been on the job long, and I'm still learning it. Earlier this week I found out that I was running some of our servers to max CPU usage because I left greps running on them (didn't know the difference between suspending a process and putting it in the background)!
Quitting is also totally cool if you can manage it. I used to be a graduate mathematician. It was very hard to figure out that this wasn't what I was supposed to be doing with my life... but figuring it out and leaving was the best thing I ever did. I would have been very unhappy. Now I'm happy! I was also extremely fortunate to have a father who was happy to support me switching fields. Your post reminds me how important that was, and makes me grateful enough that I think I should go call him.
It's exactly like the signal for a positive response; in general, click through rates for various things are around one or two tenths of a percent. If Ad A is getting a tenth of a percent and Ad B is getting two tenths of a percent, Ad B is clearly way better.
If 99.5% of people give negative feedback for Ad A, and 99.8% of people give negative feedback for Ad B, then Ad A is clearly way better.
I have a Macbook, and I love it to death, but I also know a guy who had this happen to his thinkpad, and it was actually fine. It turned out the keyboard was hermetically sealed from the rest of the machine, and it had drain holes through the middle of the laptop. He let the water drain, let the whole thing dry, and turned it back on, and it was in perfect shape.
... but I would still encourage you to continue asking if this is what you want to do with your life before thinking too much about how you would go about doing it.
You're right. What you're doing is not sustainable.
Your wife has stayed with you through 84 hour work weeks, a car crash, brain damage, and pills. All indications are that she's an amazing woman and that you're lucky to have her.
So, do what your wife wants. Stop worrying about entrepreneurship. Just... do whatever she wants. She's much more important than any business you've ever had, have now, or could have in the future.
I think a much bigger problem is Wikipedia. It's a much quieter but much stronger monopoly, and the people who run it are known to be prone to cliques, drama and manipulation. Google is professional, and for the time being, not dangerous. Wikipedia is still somewhat unprofessional, and is rapidly becoming the world's source for encyclopedic knowledge.
He and you could both live by the principle that you do as much to fit your principles as you feasibly can.
If you have someone to help you get online anonymously for free, you do that. If you need to pay to be online, you do that instead.
If you can get by in life without buying things and being tracked, you do that. If you can't do that, because it's not the life you can imagine living, you don't.
The more important the principle (to you), the more you sacrifice to implement it.
Low-to-no military spending is important enough to me that I won't work for a defense contractor. It's honestly not important enough for me to purposefully earn less than the taxable minimum (and thus pay no taxes, and thus pay no military money).
And of course by evidence, "Anonymous internet" is important enough to RMS to live an ultra-hippie life, but not important enough to use no internet at all.