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Lend out tools, toys, computers, and other things. The grand idea should be for people to learn for free.

Would that be something like: NoiseBridge?

The San Francisco hackerspace NoiseBridge apparently just waived terrorism insurance, "until we're absolutely sure we want to hire a terrorist full-time." https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/2013-November/040296.html HAH!

Nobody should subsidize anyone, IMO. Note that I said not a word about prices that USPS may charge for delivery to certain locations. I'm all for them charging more; that would give me a reason to review the deal with USPS.

So you wouldn't mind paying back the FCC universal service fund subsides that help deliver your phone and internet service?

However many people live outside of cities just because they need the space. For an example, look here. Can you install such an antenna in your backyard (that you don't have anyway?) Other people have other interests, and often their needs exceed what a standard city home, with a one-car garage, can offer. Where do you set up your machine shop? Where is your nanoparticle-emitting 3D printer installed? Where do you do your welding and plasma cutting? You can't seriously suggest that human interests must be constrained to a morning jog in a park and a bar in the evening. I don't even know where any bar can be found in this area, since I have no use of them. But I have a good list of metal warehouses, electronic parts suppliers, and know every Harbor Freight within 100 miles.

Even city dwellers manage to operate ham radios - VHF/UHF obviously has a lot of activity (and antennas are small and easy to disguise), but even HF is possible if you're creative, I've managed some good contacts with a 3 foot diameter magnetic loop, and I know people that set up a buddipole outside in a clear area with good results... take it to the beach for even better results. If you want to use a big antenna, then you can use a remote station either through a club, or rental. If I want to use a machine shop or 3D printer, rather than spending money building my own small shop, I can join a hackerspace and have access to far better equipment than I could afford on my own (along with instant access to others that are experienced at using the equipment and can help out when needed).

Instead of trying to run a TOR server yourself, and needing to defend yourself, let a charity take care of it for you. Your money will end up being pre-tax dollars and will then go farther, and if you really want to be more hands-on you could probably volunteer.

For EU residents, there is a tax-deductible German charity of the same ilk.

Yes, some people are better at some things than other people are, so in a sense "elites" always exist. But they can be organized quite differently, in particular when it comes to openness and boundaries, or what you might call a welcoming versus elitist mentality.

For example, the Homebrew Computer Club was an elite in a sense, but an elite that was: 1) open in a literal sense to anyone who in good faith wanted to come and participate; and 2) open in a cultural sense to educating people and spreading knowledge. It wasn't an elite in the elitist sense, of a closed club that wouldn't let you in if they didn't deem you worthy. If anything, they represented the opposite type of hacker, the hacker evangelist who actively wants to spread the good word, knowledge, passion, and skills.

There are some modern organizations that operate similarly, aiming for high quality of community and discourse (so part of the "tech elite"), but without the exclusionary/attitude sort of aspects (so not "elitist"), like Noisebridge, the Hacker Dojo, and the SuperHappyDevHouse hackathon/parties.

Alex Peake here.

"While you're all training your kids to be machines I think I'll give mine a toolbox and some engineering and science themed kits. We'll see who changes the world."

Exactly. Most of the best learning experience comes from people having tools to experiment with and a combination of great materials like tutorials and good human mentorship.

The chief design of Code Hero and all Primer games is to draw the player through the game into meeting other human players face-to-face for hands-on mentorship in an environment where they can learn with their mentor, especially by visiting hacker spaces and trying things like soldering with their own electronics kits. A Primer game's chief purpose is to inspire people to actually become a geek by getting hands-on with projects like building things with a makerbot and an Arduino to breathe life into using the coding they've learned how to do in Code Hero.

The Diamond Age emphasizes the importance of the degree of human mentorship in the different outcomes the girls have with their Primers. Teachers and mentors have an important role to play and the role of Primer is to stimulate demand and opportunity for mentoring, not to replace it entirely.

Hacker Dojo isn'[t a "hacker space". It's more like an incubator for startups. I've taken a machine learning class there, where we did homework from the Stanford class and were taught by a quant from Blackstone Capital. During the day, there are people working quietly with laptops, and a few people rent offices there. It's more like a Starbucks. They have a surface-mount workstation, microscope and all, but I've never seen it used.

TechShop in Menlo Park is more like a hacker space. Most of the members have engineering or technician backgrounds (this is Silicon Valley, after all), and the big, serious machine tools get heavy use. During the day, there are people who are sent there by their employers to get machining done.

TechShop in San Francisco is still trying to find its niche. Mostly I see people cutting art objects on the laser cutters. The big machine tools aren't used much; looking at the equipment sign up calendar, nobody has signed up for the big manual mills all week. The CNC mill (a Tormach) is reasonably busy. SF has enough sewing and embroidery equipment for a sweatshop, but it's not being used.

Both locations have electronics tools, but they don't get heavy use. Sometimes someone will be building some industrial electronics equipment, but that's not a hacker project.

San Francisco does have a "hacker space", Noisebridge. They do everything from Vegan cooking lessons to lockpicking to a high-altitude balloon space program. That's more like NYC Resistors.

If you're in the SF Bay Area, I would say you should go down to NoiseBridge on a Monday night at 7pm: Circuit Hacking Mondays, where Mitch Altman (of TV Begone fame) instructs in the basics of hands-on electronics hacking.

Jacob Appelbaum presented a wildcard cert that you can use for any domain a week ago. Not sure why this is a story when a paypal-only forged cert comes out.

https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/2009-September/008400.html

Note that you can create a SSL cert for any subdomain you host. I.e. CA root gives you *.example.com, you sub-certify a certificate for mail.myhome.example.com. So you can not blame a root CA for this issue, as anyone who is in the hierarchie can create a \x00 cert.

Some friends and I are the creator of the North Paw compass anklet. You can check out our website at sensebridge, or read all of our hack notes on the noisebridge wiki: compass vibro anket. You can purchase North Paw kits from us for $95, and then you don't have to take Quinn's word for what it's like to wear one :-)

There is a group of people meeting on Sundays at Noisebridge in San Francisco, to work on devices like this compass belt, check us out here: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Cyborg_Group

Fogbank is a light, highly insulative, strong yet fragile material that was very, very expensive years ago and was made using a solvent called acetonitrile in a very flammable process.

Aerogel is a light, highly insulative, strong yet fragile material that was expensive years ago and made with a variety of solvents, including acetonitrile, in a very flammable process(Supercritical drying).

You'd think they'd pick a better codename.

Still is pretty expensive for the space(and apparently nuke)-grade stuff, although you can make so-so aerogel fragments with CO2 and high-pressure pipe fittings. A 10 year old did it with sched 80 pipe and liquified CO2.