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USA: The Next Steps (after the election)
2017 is not going to be pretty, regardless who wins this election. Let’s reason it out. There are four basic electoral outcomes (all of which are possible IMHO): Clinton wins in a landslide. Clinton wins narrowly. Trump wins narrowly. Trump wins in a landslide. In the two narrow cases, the next steps are likely litigation…
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Couple Questions for my Republican-Leaning Friends
(This is not about Trump.) I have the impression that many Republican-leaning people not just think Hillary Clinton would be a bad choice as president. Their views seem to go beyond “oh no, she really isn’t qualified for this”, or “I really disagree with these policies over there that she’s advocating”. Instead, I often come…
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Let’s Build Indie IoT Systems for our Homes instead!
Join me at the “IoT Tech Expo” at the Santa Clara Convention Center next Thursday, October 20th, at 6:30pm, where I will give the following talk. Registration is free and gives you access to other IoT talks as well. Abstract: According to conventional wisdom, installing an IoT system inevitably means to invite the vendor and…
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The political cage fight drug
If you had to design a political system where big, urgent problems can remain unresolved and connected criminals can stay out of jail, without (much) protest or repression, how would you go about it? I think I’d invent a supposedly all-powerful “grand prize” position called the Presidency, and make sure everybody believes it is a…
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What are the FLOSS community’s answers to Siri and AI?
A decade ago, we in the free and open-source community could build our own versions of pretty much any proprietary software system out there, and we did. Publishing, collaboration, commerce, you name it. Some apps were worse, some were better than closed alternatives, but much of it was clearly good enough to use every day.…