Sure, ISPs are known scumbags. But what makes VM providers so trustworthy? Are they outside the government's reach? If anything, it's easier to monitor them - they're all in a few buildings. A gateway-VM model would by nature require the VMs to be more distributed.

It wouldn't; surfing would be unaffected. It's also the least interesting thing the internet can be used for.

This brings to mind something I'd really like to see: it should be standard practice for ISPs to offer VMs that act as the gateways for the actual last mile connection to the user's home. It's cheaper for ISPs to offer bandwidth at their facility than to send data all the way down residential lines just to come right back. I think this could revolutionize the internet by making p2p viable for more applications and much more efficient for what it already does; how much more usable would Tor be if all three hops didn't have to loop pointlessly to someone's house (over whatever shit connection that may entail) and back? If course, I don't see this happening any time soon; customers don't know they want it.

Edit: this is actually much more doable now than I thought, because it doesn't necessarily require ISP cooperation. I looked up my CenturyLink IP and it's consistent with a Qwest datacenter that offers colo; that's all I need for the "computer in the webs, interfaces at home" model I was looking for.

[SFW]

The PNAS abstract doesn't say anything about the degree of correlation, but that scatter plot looks ridiculous - the correlation between the variables looks much smaller than the std deviation of the data, as it would be if the researchers' assessment of "self-control" were completely unrelated to future DNA methylation. Is this field of science too soft for the concept of statistical significance?

Lolwut. A non-blinded survey of completely subjective ratings? Try sugar pills folks; they're cheaper, likely just as effective, and much less likely to cause Alzheimer's.

But it has web scales!

> I also think there should be a site-wide word filter that prevents certain words from being displayed, regardless of who wrote them.

This could be cool if it's more of a map than a filter. For example, I don't like the number 7; I'd like to have all instances of 7 replaced with "over 9000"

Oh, I'm not very serious. Your cow suits scenario just made me think of the Witch House (along the lines of Fever Ray, usually an interesting live experience) and Noise Rock (I never got it) and Really Sketchy Basement Situations (oh man) sort of stuff I encountered around there.

> except that this infuriates and chases away users who want real discussion.

I think the joke is that it would do so less than most actual comment sections...

Hm. Could be eviler... What if that were the only easy way to win? Make the player feel like they're not just playing a dark game, but they have chosen darkness.

It sounds like you're familiar with the Providence music scene! I miss that town.

It's difficult for many people to run their own mail servers (really fun convincing all the other servers in the world that you aren't a spammer), and that only works if all parties in the conversation do it. As for mitigating it, I wouldn't expect deleting my mail on someone else's server to make it unavailable to anyone but me.

End-to-end encryption is the answer. Even a simple trust-on-first-use scheme makes the barriers to eavesdropping much higher (i.e. existent). It still has network effect problems though - most people use Android email clients that don't support encryption (presumably iPeople are in a worse boat, but that's their choice), most people use webmail for some reason, etc. People at large seem to be achieving the first glimmers of lucidity on the importance of privacy in The Information Age, so hopefully that can be overcome. The only downside once more people are using it is that it destroys the revenue model of all free email providers (i.e. reading your mail).

Find them both at PetsMart™ near you!

Poe wrote on both of them!

The article implies Aether is destined to become /b/ due to its anonymity. Although I'm not familiar with the Aether community, I think this view overlooks so some of the complexities of "anonymity", and also the influence of convention and expectations of a community. Aether calls itself anonymous; this is true in the sense that it obscures to some degree the slave name of its users (I don't know the technical details, but I guarantee you if Big Brother really wanted to know who you are, he could find you). However as far as anonymity affects behavior (e.g. on 4chan), I think it's much more important that communication is "one-shot" (by thread if not by post), there are no reputations, and you can't get to know anyone - and in this sense Aether is pseudonymous, since it encourages post-signing. The other factor is expectations: /b/ is anonymous, but so are /v/, /a/, etc; there are trash heaps, but there are also recycling bins and maybe even some compost piles to be found. The reputation of an online community is extremely self-perpetuating, and as long as people don't come to Aether expecting it to be the new /b/, it's not going to become the new /b/.

> But perhaps best of all, there's actually a feature to mute other accounts and ban them from commenting on your threads.

Maybe to a redditor that sounds like a killer feature, but I've never actually had a reason to use that here. Our content quality ranges from great to trying; there's nobody trying to set negative karma records.

> drugs (the good kind!)

I don't think weed would help here; this sounds like a situation for the heavier stuff doctors specialize in.

I can't think of any less arbitrary scale for comparing civilization advancement than power harnessed.

We have the core technologies for interstellar travel now; if we found out our Sun would be dead in 50 years, we'd build it. I don't see any reason to assume that doing so would fail a billion times out of a billion.

So you're saying the Great Filter is probably before Type II?

That would be perfect if I were the guy from Memento

I had a dozen that were mostly twins once. Not organic, a big size (jumbo?). Other dozens from the same company were normal.

Adlai Stevenson

In America, anyone can be president. That's one of the risks that you take.

"Aviatrix". What a word.

  I'm going back to Ancient Rome
  to give them back their gendered nouns
  Our weak inflection has no need
  Our culture cares less how you peed
  And while I'm there I'll try to trade
  it for a real semantic aid
  like plural "you"
  but one
  not mired
  in so many associations
  one
  I can hear
  without visions
  of roller-coasting through so many little hills
  out of the dry county
  into the land of drive-through bourbon
  and Waffle House
  Like a bat out of hell
  thirstily descending
  upon the hapless deer
  midway between
  a Pharaoh's pasture
  and the tobacco fields
  where a mother grows ditch-weed
  to smoke desperately
  in a beat-up car
  on the side of the road
  late at night
  with a long-lost friend

Sexed to death by an antechinus? Whatever floats your boat I guess ;)