...As opposed to all of the other media outlets with their stellar records of truth-telling.
The "publication of record" ship has sailed and we're left with competing agendas and increased need for personal vetting, which many have done on this leak--a fact which is easily searchable.
I believe this article references the Unabomber. If it doesn't, then Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" definitely does.
It's a fascinating line of thought--though I obviously don't support the actions taken by its author.
To clarify a little further, Bill Joy in this essay refers to Kurzweil who refers to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind." I became a technological utopian until reading Naomi Klein's "No Logo" later that year, as well as the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.
This ultimately led me on a sort of existential quest that led to the book "Waking Up in Time" by Peter Russell and then I began to have a much more spiritual orientation towards life and reality and now try to be as practical as possible while working towards a positive technological future.
I was 19 when this came out and this essay single-handedly changed my life and led me to Ray Kurzweil, Minsky, the Unabomber Manifesto, Naomi Klein, and then ultimately to spirituality through Hawking-trained-physicist-turned-cave-dwelling-monk Peter Russell's "Waking Up in Time."
The rest of my life quite literally flows from reading this essay over and over when it came out. Genuinely happy to see it here.
alternate theory. people who have money are desperately looking for things with potential for big returns. if you are one of those things or create one of those things there is more money looking for you than has ever looked for anyone in the history of the world.
If it's a paid Linux though, then you can get a team that:
-Appreciates design.
-Makes choices.
-Supports the most powerful and popular hardware.
-Yes, focused first and foremost on tinkerers and geeks, who are the main people losing out in the current environment. It's all a group that's increasing in size and will likely continue to for the foreseeable future.
I actually think that this is likely to happen over the next 2-3 years. Every single one of these companies is now going in the wrong direction in a specific way--which opens up a real desire for a real alternative.
We all used to love Mac, we all see that Apple has lost its way and seems to be heading more and more confidently in the wrong direction, and that may be just the push the community needs to actually build something.
And what an amazing achievement it would be--an actually open alternative that runs on lots of (powerful) hardware with the beauty of Mac OS (before Lion lol).
I really think it's going to happen because I think a very large percentage of the community now realizes that there is no existing private company heading in the right direction. So we now have to take the steering of the ship into our own hands.
Since no one else had chimed in, I will report that yes I too am flabbergasted befuddled stupefied and completely amazed at the magical time we live in, which as you said gets better on a seemingly weekly basis at this point.
And VR hasn't even gone mainstream yet. What a wild ride we're on indeed
many people have a 15-year old view of Los Angeles, and downtown in particular.
LA is one of the (imo the) great cities of the future and
will be the biggest benefactor of the transition to self-driving cars and multi-modal transport, when it's collection-of-villages-like-nature will flourish.
The city will be like living in many cities all at the same time that you can easily shuttle between (Long Beach, Pasadena, Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu, Downtown, Burbank, Noho, Manhattan Beach, Topanga, mid-Wilshire, Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Thaitown, Hollywood, etc.) The list goes on and on.
I know of no other place where each "neighborhood" feels as though it is its own city. Right now, due to the nature of transportation, this has MAJOR downsides. In the future, these will be massively mitigated and LA will become perhaps the most desirable place in the world to live.
To add one more example, LA has the best weather of any of the world's major cities. As the global population becomes increasingly mobile, weather will play a larger and larger factor of where people choose to settle.
On top of this, there is major investment in making sure LA sustains its role as the world entertainment capital as entertainment shifts to VR and is increasingly tech-based.
LA is also at the very forefront of the global shift toward increasingly healthy living. It's a city that may as well run on green juice. While at the moment this is trendy and cliche, soon it will be just how more and more people around the world eat. And much of this is invented and perfected in LA and SoCal in general.
And I have yet to hear from pmarca or anyone else an answer to this puzzle that is even slightly convincing.
Which gives me pause.