I'm assuming I'm being down-voted by folks that have not spent any appreciable amount of time walking around Manhattan and have no clue to what I was referring to.
at 32, i did. best decision of my life. and not because i had a horrible job. i had a great job working at a global investment company. i went from financial district to dorm-room in 3 weeks. i took nothing but math courses for 12 months. i'll likely do this again every ten years or so. i would highly, highly recommend it. and, i'm not going to give reasons why i recommend it because the value you get out of something like this is completely case by case. but, switching from "producer" to "learner" from time to time is an amazing experience.
with quotes like "we were able to 'find' silicon valey" and findings like "the best indicators of entrepreneurial quality were characteristics like a company's name", it is surprising that the article does not discuss the role that 'correlation' and similar phenomenon might have played in this study.
GNU is awesome in the way that 'Citizen Kane' is awesome. It is awesome because of what it accomplished given the context in which it was created. The context has changed but GNU, by and large, has not. "Free Software" gave us BSD and Linux, but it is also partially responsible for the privacy issues of Google and Facebook (neither of which would be as competitive if they had to pay licensing fees to Microsoft and Oracle, and they give their services away in exchange for monetizing user data), Heartbleed and similar bugs (these projects are not properly funded for security audits and/or maintenance), and the expectation that one should work for free (if you don't have a job the first thing you do is start working on open source projects to show what you can do). Richard Stallman is arguing for the freedom of software, not people. Unless we change society such that its citizens will be provided for regardless of how they spend their afternoons open source needs a new business model. As software becomes more pervasive finding alternative models will become more urgent. And, it's already very urgent.
all this will change with the internet of things. once every "thing" is networked, then these optimization platforms won't need to wait for some human to input info about altered environments. the platform will "sense" it.
ai won't kill us, unless it does. then it will kill us quite spectacularly. anyway, the last person i'm going to listen to on this is anyone from microsoft.
i quit facebook 12/31/2014. before doing so i explained to many of my friends and family why i was doing so. every single one of them, no exaggeration, agreed with my reasons, but said they couldn't because of (reason x, y, z). now that ello is patenting their ip i think it is especially important to begin thinking about ways to create public protocols for these type of services. what do you think it would require for most people to give up fb?
from the article: "Most striking, the company said they are applying for patents to protect what they believe are innovative ideas for providing social network services."
-i would love to see ello help establish a community protocol using the open source governance model.
Since you live in a country with heavy censorship, I'll try to be sensitive to the fact that you and I have different cultural norms as relates to acceptable trade-offs between free speech and access to personal-communication networks.
In the United States also have popular, elected officials that from time to time choose to censor the citizens which put them in office. Neither the fact that we live in a democracy nor the current popularity of the elected official are popular reasons given as to why we should not protest the infringement of basic rights such as the right to free speech, the right to assemble, or the freedom of the press. The right to protest is granted by our constitution, the same constitution which determines our form of government and the grants the authority of the elected officials. Outside of elections, popularity is not a constitutional basis for authority. So that's the legal side of things.
How about the sociopolitical side of things? Well, stepping into your shoes, some foreign company coming into America and telling me what I can and can't say. Nope. Not gonna fly. Twisted or whatever, this is America, fuck yeah. There's gonna be a world governance organization? Fine, put it in Manhattan so we can keep it in line. We're gonna spy on our citizenry? Fine, but only because we must fight foreign terrorists. And, if we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it right, with contract employees. No boobs on the television, that's cool too; it keeps my super prudish mother-in-law comfortable while I still have easy access to the best porn in the world (uncensored Internet baby, because why, that's right: FREE EFFIN SPEECH). (disclosure: i actually take issue with the objectification and commoditization of bodies which serves as the foundation for the vast majority of pornography. but hey, you can't pick and choose when it comes to free speech.)
I know that at this point you're already convinced and are rushing out the door so that you and your friends can begin building your own pirate wireless mesh network with which you'll be open the flood gates to the world's miracles and evils. But let me give you a few more reasons to say: “Fuck censorship!”: David Lee Roth, Stanley Kubrick, Mark Twain, Hustler, Rambo, Deep Throat (Watergate), California, Malcom X, Will Ferrell. America. Fuck yeah.
And in the end, you just might even be able to speak your mind in public without being thrown in jail and denied due process. Ahhhhhhh, the little things.