That doesn’t mean the “they” here isn’t unclear. I wasn’t sure whose Mastodon handle Paul Graham shared. I certainly didn’t think OP meant he shared his own handle.
To be perfectly pedantic, this should only be confusing if referring to the Mastadon employees. Otherwise, if referring to the non-person entity, singular or plural appropriate syntax would be “it”.
They originated around the same time, but singular you was initially only used for addressing superiors/showing respect (using the plural second person pronoun as a singular for this purpose is still a thing in a bunch of languages), a few hundred years later “you” became the standard second person singular pronoun while “thou” fell out of favour.
> how does it not make more sense to go with MacStadium?
If you're already in AWS, your deployment infrastructure and tooling is already configured and tuned for AWS. Deploying a Mac EC2 instance is just adding another target. Whereas deploying to another provider is an unknown amount of work to integrate with their API (if they even have one). The wall-time cost of people's time and effort vastly outweighs the marginal savings you'd get by going with a low-cost provider.
* A protocol that leaks metadata, including some message content, at the envelope layer.
Could you elaborate more on this? I don't really understand what you mean.
He means:
EHLO your.mx.example.tld
MAIL FROM:<bob@example.tld>
MAIL TO:<alice@recipient.tld>
DATA
From: Definitely Not Bob <bob@example.tld>
To: Probably Not Alice <alice@recipient.tld>
Date: Mon, 12 June 2017 16:02:43 -0500
Subject: Super Secret EMAIL! Don't let Eve see!
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
...
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
.
QUIT
Thereby leaking at minimum the sender and recipient, as well as any intermediate hosts that relayed the email. Depending on how your MTA handles email, you can also leak subject and other metadata.
Speaking as one of roughly fifty founders thereof, and also the founder of a (now acquired) startup in the space, it really isn't. The point the OP made about needing an Ops team is magnified by the introduction of OpenStack, and the existence of Rackspace as a (not-quite) provider of OpenStack won't help because their public cloud is going away and there isn't really a replacement as the field consolidated and the consolidated players have shed their OpenStack investments (or are laying off and trying to get away from it).
If your goal is to avoid the lock-in to a particular IaaS vendor while avoiding ops overhead, your better bet is to go up-stack and lock yourself into either Cloud Foundry or OpenShift. At least then you'll be able to migrate from IaaS to IaaS semi-transparently, but you are locking into a platform.
You could leverage the TPM and some version of remote attestation and only permit key-requests from attested machines. Alternatively (or concurrently), you could PXE boot all devices with a parameterized shared-secret individualized for each node.
With very constrained exceptions, in most jurisdictions of the United States, it's entirely legal to take a photograph of an individual in a public place and post it to the Internet without their permission.
Bear in mind they were not in a public place, but a conference venue - which would almost certainly be private property. It is totally legal to prohibit photography in such cases.
However, normally this has to be made explicit (through signs, or the like) - it's assumed it is allowed unless otherwise stated.
I wonder if going forward conferences will consider banning photography in future, for better or for worse.
If the resulting synthesis is something new, why wouldn't we want to protect it legally? To make a literary analogy, any book written in an established genre necessarily synthesizes work that went before it… are these new works less worthy of legal protection because the ideas and tropes (and in the case of works synthesized from the Commons characters, setting, etc.) are things we've already seen? In the technology fields, it is common to base new innovation on that which came before. So long as the prior art is referenced in the claim for protection, aren't the useful arts strengthened by legal protection in exchange for continued disclosure of innovation, even in the case of innovations synthesized of prior development?
aren't the useful arts strengthened by legal protection in exchange for continued disclosure of innovation
No, they're not, at least not in software. Nobody reads software patents, for two reasons. First, the majority are either non-novel or written in a way that they are not useful to others. Second, by reading patents you increase the damages in a possible infringement suit since at that point you knowingly infringed.
I'm afraid you misunderstood my point, as I never mentioned software patents at all. The iPhone is a synthesis of prior research that (in 2007) encompasses advances in both hardware and software. That is the synthesis that I think advances the useful arts, and it's beneficial to society for us to provide a legal framework to protect it.
I think what I said about software patents applies to hardware patents as well, if less so. There is this idea that patents are a compromise: I file a patent, and I get a temporary monopoly on the idea. In exchange, the world gets full disclosure of my idea.
The point I'm making is that the full disclosure is worse than useless. Nobody ever says I wonder how I should implement this? Let's go check some patent filings to see if someone else has figured it out...
The book written establishes a copyright, not a patent.
Bringing this back to technology with an example: Palm synthesized the smart phone and color LCD screen in ~2004. I'm pretty glad all smartphones have color screens today.
I did say I was making an analogy, not establishing a direct link between patents and copyright. Patents protect a specific method of implementing an idea, so Palm synthesizing a smart phone with a color LCD (controlled by a stylus) does not prevent Apple from protecting the synthesis of smart phone with a color LCD (controlled by fingertips). If there was no innovation in bringing multi-touch to smart phones, why wasn't everyone doing it in 2007 when the iPhone was first released?
Patents are time-limited not eternal. The first company to build a laptop most certainly obtained a patent on it, as did the creator of the first flat-screen.
Patents last for 20 years in the US. To give you an idea of how rapidly the personal computing/internet boom has progressed, Mosaic is not 20 years old yet, Mosaic being the browser that marked the start of the www era.
If Netscape had been smart (and evil) enough to patent the hell out of their browser and then stick all those patents on a shelf for a while... they'd probably be more valuable than Apple is today.
