### Who runs this website?

The site is commissioned by the trustees of Courage to provide information on the threats Edward Snowden faces, how he is being protected, and what you can do to support him.

### What is The Courage Foundation (formerly the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund) and who runs it?

Courage is a trust, audited by accountants Derek Rothera & Company in the UK, for the purpose of providing legal defence and campaign aid to journalistic sources. It is overseen by an unrenumerated committee of trustees. Edward Snowden is its first recipient. The terms of the fund and its trustees can be obtained from Derek Rothera & Company.

Here's my anecdotal list of downsides of amtrak train riding:

- People will talk on their cell phones in the cabin despite the rules. You wouldn't think this a big annoyance, but it gets annoying after several hours.

- Amtrak cars can have issues - I spent 12 hours in one with a door that kept opening and closing making a huge 'clunk' noise every 30 seconds. A passenger finally figured out a way to make it stuck open.

- Watch your stuff, Things can and will get stolen - particularly in areas where there's multiple close stops (e.g. the stops near seattle) - last time the person in the seat in front had their smartphone stolen while they took a brief break in the snack car.

- The co2 savings compared to flying depends on the actual route and timing - I have to point this out because amtrak does market themselves a bit on co2 savings - I calculated this once between flying and taking the train from seattle to spokane, and after factoring in the need to stay at a hotel an extra night for the train along with it's non-direct route, the co2 difference was negligible. Here's my math for those curious: https://i.imgur.com/zTHfSB8.png

- Certain trains are historically, tragically slow - amtrak has a website logging the timeliness of trains, typically 70% on time for a long train is on the good side.

This said, I do want trains to be more of a thing here - I've had great experiences with the ones in europe, wish the pioneer train ( http://pioneertrain.org ) and ski train ( http://www.skitrain.com/ ) make a comeback, and prefer taking the business class amtrak trains for shorter trips over flying or driving. Plus you can pack a folding bike like a brompton on amtrak just by tossing it into the overhead compartment.

More: here's a blog of someone traveling the us by railpass: http://railpass.tumblr.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10168854

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

"Easter eggs: Gordon and Donna Clarks’ first initials and back story echo those of Gary and Dorothy Kildall"

Really worth the listen.

also, an even older demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnL34XwTgag

I'm actually a bit surprised they didn't stress the collaboration features more, guess there's an initial fear of how many people will own the same device.

http://www.axelweinbrecht.de/en/Produkte/Schreiben_mit_Metal...

http://www.napkin4ever.com/it/

http://www.vat19.com/item/the-inkless-metal-pen

Basically it's not 'everlasting', but lasts for maybe a few years, and you may have to sand the tip down occasionally to make it a finer point again. Note that it does use a bit of lead, and so isn't recommended for use by children. I don't plan on buying any one myself, since it just doesn't seem like the writing give fine-enough of a point for my needs (search on youtube, there's a review or two of these things.)

I'd argue it was the rise of the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) economy that grew very rapidly over the past 30 years. The FIRE economy is opposite to the classical producer - consumer economy.

There's plenty of times I sometimes wish I just made money like my friends doing trading/finance/etc. instead of studying electrical engineering. I'd get to work downtown instead of in a far away suburb too.

I'll pay for anything that saves me a lot time, has a great interface, and/or replaces something I already use.

I'd consider paying for a very usable todo-list app that synced over dropbox instead of charging me a monthly fee (i.e. remember the milk), and had an amazing user interface over the free google task apps.

I'd also love to pay for mint if it similarly just worked over something more secure/local, and had an open backend (I had accounts that didn't sync at all correctly on mint). Maybe wesabe should be revisited.

not counting vps'es or anything as that's more of a hobby/entrepreneurship thing.

Many managers hire people as a sudden reactionary event ("we have an open rec, we've got to hire before the rec closes!"), leading to rushed hiring decisions, and then negotiation issues a year later where you ended up hiring someone (and they took the offer) out of immediacy / desperation, and the employee ends up leaving or accepts the lack of interest and doesn't work to his/her full potential.

I think that's the way forward, but for stuff that pays money I have to ship so I'm still kinda going with qt/swing/wx for cross-platform or wpf.

just curious, have you considered qt jambi (now open source) or qt4dotnet?

It made me think back to ten years ago, back when os x wasn't out just yet, and many hackers (including myself) were using desktop linux as a windows alternative. There were competitors such as BeOS porting to any x86 machine, and a slew of company-backed linux distros advertising themselves as the way to go.

Microsoft won the whole battle at the time because:

1) MacOS X was just shipping, and was sadly limited to PowerPC computers.

2) Linux distro vendors weren't investing much in providing a great user experience. They were at most (and still are) skinning Gnome or KDE and calling it a day. Doing any investment required creating X, which would be expensive for a post-internet-bubble company to undertake.

3) Microsoft shipped windows XP. It's ugly by today's standards, but it's surprisingly the most prevalent OS ten years later.

--------------------------------------------------

Now, after 10 years we come to a crossroads again. The gold is currently developing for smartphones and webapps, and the pickaxes for the most part don't need to run windows.

How WebOS will make desktop linux finally viable:

1) Last I checked, WebOS is based on the linux kernel. This is attractive for folks tired of juggling and making ports to BSD. The great interface to HP is partly a sunk cost due to it's development for the phone already.

2) WebOS on the desktop needs to quickly attract a crowd of developers. While they've made a great js-based platform for their smartphone apps, they need to go one step further for native desktop apps. My guess is that they're going to do a similar step to what sony was attempting to do recently and have some form of an openstep implementation. This is to attract the macos developers to quickly port desktop apps.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2200683

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

The problem seems that these hardware-only vendors are trying to extract profit from only their hardware investment instead of either charging a higher price for quality hardware or investing in and charging for a quality app store / user experience.

It would be nice if google set an "experience" tier, where if hardware vendors followed a high standard of hardware quality / display specs they could share some of google's advertising/android market profits.