All your points are decent ones. However most of what we did is so far over the line as to not being debatable. Sleep deprivation, ear splitting loud music while being held in stress positions, making someone sleep on a cold concrete slab until they died of hypothermia, and so much more are all so far beyond the line that we should not be still discussing whether there is any validity to the "might not be torture" point of view.
We tortured a bunch of folks. We have brought our selves down to the level of all the despots and dictators that we vilified for such behavior. We hid it from our citizenry, and punished practically nobody for their part in it. The lack of accountability makes us complicit after the fact, we are harboring war criminals and torturers.
You get the Disney version of it in those cases. People you trust administer a very gentle version of it. You volunteer for it as well.
Compare that to getting waterboarded an average of 6 times a day by mask wearing thugs yelling and screaming at you as they take you to the limit of what a crooked doctor will allow.
It is like saying that since people willingly participate in MMA that repeated closed fist beatings cannot be torture.
You sir, completely underestimate my cheapness. $360 a year is about 3x what I spend on music a year. I spend a decent amount of effort constantly shaving down costs, especially anything that is recurring. I have the cell bill down to $35 a month for 2 phones, and I buy those phones outright. Insurance gets re-quoted about every 2 years, and I have moved companies several times. Recurring charges are corrosive to your bank account. You quickly forget them, but they chew away, and chew away in perpetuity.
I really like discovering a new-to-me band, only to find out they have a half dozen album I can pick through and get 15-20 good tracks. I find it maddening when someone like Lorde comes along, and there are only about 3-4 songs that are worth grabbing, hardly seems worth waiting for more.
I really enjoy when I discover some group where I enjoy almost all their stuff and can load up. I ended up buying over a 100 tracks from Flogging Molly when I stumbled onto them a few years back. I still regularly listen to all of them as a shuffle. Pity my wife.
"Many people there see western Democracy as a farce and instead flock to their faith and religious extremism, which they perceive as the last remaining vestige of hope and stability."
Heck, I live under Western Democracy and see it as a farce. At least in the USA the rich and powerful get their say, and the masses get paid lip service. Bills are written by the companies they are supposed to regulate. Congressional districts are gerrymandered to a comical level. Party loyalty and scoring purely political victories is more important than the citizenry who get screwed in the crossfire.
At least with a Dictator the score is a little more obvious what is going on (though it is getting ever more obvious by the year here).
Trump is tapping into this ever growing frustration this has created, as is Bernie. We can only hope the eventual cleaning out process will be peaceful. Worst case scenarios is that we see frothed up Red state try to break away, or try to "Save Our Country" via an attempted coup. Judging by the rhetoric for the last 7 years I think we are less far from that than people would like to believe. I doubt it would be intentional by the Republican leadership, but a group of angry armed folks taking them at their word and listening to too much Hate Talk AM radio could easily feel that it is do or die time and storm the White House.
Many people play Slug Bug and punch their buddy in the shoulder. That does not make beatings less of a form of torture.
Having your buddies, who you trust, give you a taste of this treatment is more in the Slug Bug category. Having a bunch of masked thugs bum rush you in your cell and drag you out of your cell and vigorously waterboard you 183 times in a month (6 times a day) is about as horrific a thing you can do to someone without leaving physical scars.
Seriously, with names like that it makes any outsider confused as hell. Is it Ubuntu? Linux? Version 16.04? Version 4.4.21? Eff it, Xenial Xerus it is...
No wonder Linux for the desktop is and always will be a joke. At least it feels as consistent and well thought out as the UI.
Yep, still beats the hell out of Comcast or any other cable subscription.
It is worth it for the lack of ads on kids programs alone. While I am probably a terrible, no good, very bad parent for letting my kid watch TV at all, I really want to keep the ads away from him while he is still far from being a critical thinker. I've probably saved a ton from not having my arm twisted into buying all sorts of toys and sugary cereals he would be begging for after watching "normal" TV.
In RTFA I failed to find a decent breakdown of where the huge energy savings were exactly coming from.
The new wing style should be usable without the electric drive aspect, so how much is the hybrid aspect actually contributing, or is that just a way to score Buzzword Bingo points?
You sir have apparently never been in a typical meeting with overseas colleagues/customers. My typical experience is that it can takes months of weekly calls to make half the progress of just being in the same room with someone and a whiteboard. It is stupid, but I have dealt with it multiple times.
What I think you are arguing for is a way to discourage un-needed travel. Usually that means putting a higher price on it, which logically leads to a carbon tax. While that works for me, it is DOA with the public at large.
By that argument BeOS was a roaring success. How is it doing today?
So far Linux is very successful in server closets, and underneath Android. For servers the extra power of the OS more than makes up for the large sunk investment it takes to be able to use the feature. Android completely tossed out the UI and started over. Same for set top boxes and many other places where Linux hides in plane sight.
Being a half-assed copy of the Windows GUI won't do it. Winning the desktop requires a fully polished UI that never forces normal users to the command line unless they want to go there. It needs to be unified or people will tune you out faster than you can say "compile the driver". Wading through 50 or 100 distros with various chunks and pieces stitched together like Frankenstein's monster to find a one that makes sense is awful. Trying to find out why one distro is better than another leads to unearthing holy wars, and finding out that Linux was destroyed by "systemd" (whatever that is, and no I don't care), and lots of jargon.
Yeah, but 1.78% is not good either, barely better than Windows Vista at 1.41%, and that is more than 6 years after it was replaced by Windows 7.
Linux has been very successful for "real work", but no the desktop.
What I don't see is an acknowledgement that maybe years and years of half-heartedly trying to become a well used desktop OS and failing should result in a change of behavior. "We'll just wear them down" is an acknowledgement of deafness and stubbornness. Anyone arguing Linux has been ready for the masses for years is just delusional. Hell, I say that fully aware of the Windows 8 disaster, and the current Windows 10 mess.
Linux suffers from a bad lack of polish and inconsistencies.
For any mass appeal there needs to be one face of Linux for the masses. The completely splintered and complex web of distros is great for technofiles who want to geek out to get their jollies, but sucks for anyone who does not want to adopt a new religion just to run a spreadsheet, and write a report.
Look what OS X has done for BSD. I know a thousand fanboys just threw up on their overgrown beards ("Mom, I need a mop for the basement!"), but by shear number it has put BSD on orders of magnitude more home users desks than if Apple had not used them as their foundation.
Getting Linux onto the desktop in a successful way will take a similar effort and strategy. The GUI side needs to be well designed and well rung out. We run CentOS at work (IC design house), and the GUI file browser is right out of the early 90's, clunky and un-refined. It was clearly written by someone who wanted to check off a requirement and get back to his command line as quick as possible. I find the same experience all over for GUI, just enough to be able to tell the Windows wanks that Linux has the same thing, but no more. You quickly find that the GUI is hobbled and you have to revert to the command line, meaning RTFM to make progress.
So Linux needs a true consumer distribution, and just one of them. Having a dozen finishing carpenters with different visions on a single house and no shared blue-prints will result in an ugly house, far uglier than if they all worked together on a shared mediocre plan.
Clearly the problem is that there aren't enough oddly named distros and mash-ups. If only those pieces of spaghetti would stick. Eventually... Sure...
As a mostly non-linux guy (only at work) who has installed and tried to use a few variants, I just find the experience to be bad. The jargon of the names alone is off putting, I am not installing Hypoxic Ringworm 14.1RC5 3.14.4. Get Mint! No, use Cinnamon Mint!
Let's face it, Linux on the desktop has too much of a resemblance to HAM radio 20-30 years ago. Cool stuff, but too inward looking, and not looking like it will have wide appeal anytime soon. Not to say those who Linux have issues (except you Steve, you know who you are). But User interface and user experience for non-technical users is apparently low on the priority list.
Linux is very powerful, but you have actually be invested in it. If you use it casually you have one of two experience. 1) You figure out hieroglyphics to grep something at the command line, and are wowed, but also realize you will likely forget the details by time you need to do it again. 2) You try to use the GUI stuff that has been layered over top, and find it is all poorly implemented facade by people who clearly don't believe in GUI's.
Given the crap storm they put us through, they owe us at least a rough idea of what was found. My guess is nothing. Given the diligence to use and then destroy a burner phone, he likely had nothing of note on a work phone that I'm sure they expected was not private from his employer.
Bought most of our stuff 9 years ago. We went for base models, as those are the highest volume and have shown to fail less than the fancy upright shiny models that spent their effort on form rather than function. Other than a well handled infant mortality event with our fridge all the appliances have been totally trouble free.
Agreed. Stuff for your home should be planned to be in place for 15-30 years. Most IoT and cloud crap sold today is likely to have more like a 1-3 year lifespan before lack of support, hard coded vulnerabilities, or shoddy quality kills it off. Wait for widely accepted standards and keep things simple. Otherwise you'll be spending your weekends and evenings ripping out the old crap when it dies sooner than you think.
Can you imagine if your washer and dryer bricked every couple years? Garage door opener?
Most of the stuff sold today are toys. Only buy it if it is for fun, it will likely be non-functional before the next decade.
Seriously, I've never had a light switch or door key get bricked by the manufacturer. The more I go through life the more I want less electronics in places where the value is dubious. My time is worth a lot, and having to unearth documentation, or deal with software revisions is a real pain. I want the Easy Button for all the day to day stuff I don't want to think about.
There will always that small subset (over represented here) that get joy and fulfillment fiddling with things for the sake of fiddling with things. In some parts of my life I am the same. Home automation is not one of them. Having the source code to compile my own distro for home automation is not desired, I want it so simple and bullet proof that I never have to think about it after installation, or I don't want it (no matter what "it" is).
My fridge should never phone home, get viruses, get bricked, lose/gain features, spy on me, or have a touch panel. It should make cold using the smallest amount of energy for as many years as possible, full stop.
Yep. Look at Cuba where there no is no internet as such. Sneaker net becomes the default.
Personally I just wish the media companies would not make the real deal so lousy. All the crap you are forced to watch or fiddle a way around to watch s DVD or Blu-Ray is really obnoxious. I should never get a "That operation is currently prohibited" message.
Pay for "Ad-Free" Hulu? Only some of the shows are actually ad-free. WTF?
I really want to shield my kid from as much advertising crap as I can as long as I can, or at least until he has some basic critical thinking skills, but it is very hard to actually get get around ads, previews, etc.
But guess what? If I pirate the same stuff it is already stripped of this crap. Being a law abiding citizen really makes me and many others feel like real chumps.
Wait till their short attention span runs out and your 8 year old Alphabet car gets bricked rather than maintained. We need less of this fly by night tech in critical and long term installations.
Heck any large organization comes with a very high decision tax. Some underling effed something in the past, so going forward VP level authority is needed to do anything that affects more than your part of the office. VP's are just as error prone and even more risk adverse, not to mention busy as hell. So pre-meeting meetings are held, consultants are brought in to provide unbiased opinions, lawyers have to be consulted since it crosses state lines, and finally the finance department will lose the darn invoice and so on. So even in "efficient" corporate America you can have something like this end up costing $100k's just to roll out.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't procreate with her. Such bad judgement and inconsiderate behavior will make child rearing a nightmare.
All your points are decent ones. However most of what we did is so far over the line as to not being debatable. Sleep deprivation, ear splitting loud music while being held in stress positions, making someone sleep on a cold concrete slab until they died of hypothermia, and so much more are all so far beyond the line that we should not be still discussing whether there is any validity to the "might not be torture" point of view.
We tortured a bunch of folks. We have brought our selves down to the level of all the despots and dictators that we vilified for such behavior. We hid it from our citizenry, and punished practically nobody for their part in it. The lack of accountability makes us complicit after the fact, we are harboring war criminals and torturers.
You get the Disney version of it in those cases. People you trust administer a very gentle version of it. You volunteer for it as well.
Compare that to getting waterboarded an average of 6 times a day by mask wearing thugs yelling and screaming at you as they take you to the limit of what a crooked doctor will allow.
It is like saying that since people willingly participate in MMA that repeated closed fist beatings cannot be torture.
In short, your logic is tortured.
"Purely in terms of cost, a pittance, really."
You sir, completely underestimate my cheapness. $360 a year is about 3x what I spend on music a year. I spend a decent amount of effort constantly shaving down costs, especially anything that is recurring. I have the cell bill down to $35 a month for 2 phones, and I buy those phones outright. Insurance gets re-quoted about every 2 years, and I have moved companies several times. Recurring charges are corrosive to your bank account. You quickly forget them, but they chew away, and chew away in perpetuity.
Laziness and sloth have their advantages.
I really like discovering a new-to-me band, only to find out they have a half dozen album I can pick through and get 15-20 good tracks. I find it maddening when someone like Lorde comes along, and there are only about 3-4 songs that are worth grabbing, hardly seems worth waiting for more.
I really enjoy when I discover some group where I enjoy almost all their stuff and can load up. I ended up buying over a 100 tracks from Flogging Molly when I stumbled onto them a few years back. I still regularly listen to all of them as a shuffle. Pity my wife.
"Many people there see western Democracy as a farce and instead flock to their faith and religious extremism, which they perceive as the last remaining vestige of hope and stability."
Heck, I live under Western Democracy and see it as a farce. At least in the USA the rich and powerful get their say, and the masses get paid lip service. Bills are written by the companies they are supposed to regulate. Congressional districts are gerrymandered to a comical level. Party loyalty and scoring purely political victories is more important than the citizenry who get screwed in the crossfire.
At least with a Dictator the score is a little more obvious what is going on (though it is getting ever more obvious by the year here).
Trump is tapping into this ever growing frustration this has created, as is Bernie. We can only hope the eventual cleaning out process will be peaceful. Worst case scenarios is that we see frothed up Red state try to break away, or try to "Save Our Country" via an attempted coup. Judging by the rhetoric for the last 7 years I think we are less far from that than people would like to believe. I doubt it would be intentional by the Republican leadership, but a group of angry armed folks taking them at their word and listening to too much Hate Talk AM radio could easily feel that it is do or die time and storm the White House.
Many people play Slug Bug and punch their buddy in the shoulder. That does not make beatings less of a form of torture.
Having your buddies, who you trust, give you a taste of this treatment is more in the Slug Bug category. Having a bunch of masked thugs bum rush you in your cell and drag you out of your cell and vigorously waterboard you 183 times in a month (6 times a day) is about as horrific a thing you can do to someone without leaving physical scars.
Seriously, with names like that it makes any outsider confused as hell. Is it Ubuntu? Linux? Version 16.04? Version 4.4.21? Eff it, Xenial Xerus it is...
No wonder Linux for the desktop is and always will be a joke. At least it feels as consistent and well thought out as the UI.
Yep, still beats the hell out of Comcast or any other cable subscription.
It is worth it for the lack of ads on kids programs alone. While I am probably a terrible, no good, very bad parent for letting my kid watch TV at all, I really want to keep the ads away from him while he is still far from being a critical thinker. I've probably saved a ton from not having my arm twisted into buying all sorts of toys and sugary cereals he would be begging for after watching "normal" TV.
In RTFA I failed to find a decent breakdown of where the huge energy savings were exactly coming from.
The new wing style should be usable without the electric drive aspect, so how much is the hybrid aspect actually contributing, or is that just a way to score Buzzword Bingo points?
You sir have apparently never been in a typical meeting with overseas colleagues/customers. My typical experience is that it can takes months of weekly calls to make half the progress of just being in the same room with someone and a whiteboard. It is stupid, but I have dealt with it multiple times.
What I think you are arguing for is a way to discourage un-needed travel. Usually that means putting a higher price on it, which logically leads to a carbon tax. While that works for me, it is DOA with the public at large.
By that argument BeOS was a roaring success. How is it doing today?
So far Linux is very successful in server closets, and underneath Android. For servers the extra power of the OS more than makes up for the large sunk investment it takes to be able to use the feature. Android completely tossed out the UI and started over. Same for set top boxes and many other places where Linux hides in plane sight.
Being a half-assed copy of the Windows GUI won't do it. Winning the desktop requires a fully polished UI that never forces normal users to the command line unless they want to go there. It needs to be unified or people will tune you out faster than you can say "compile the driver". Wading through 50 or 100 distros with various chunks and pieces stitched together like Frankenstein's monster to find a one that makes sense is awful. Trying to find out why one distro is better than another leads to unearthing holy wars, and finding out that Linux was destroyed by "systemd" (whatever that is, and no I don't care), and lots of jargon.
Google "linux market share"
Press enter, get 1.78%
Be surprised that it is >1%.
Yeah, but 1.78% is not good either, barely better than Windows Vista at 1.41%, and that is more than 6 years after it was replaced by Windows 7.
Linux has been very successful for "real work", but no the desktop.
What I don't see is an acknowledgement that maybe years and years of half-heartedly trying to become a well used desktop OS and failing should result in a change of behavior. "We'll just wear them down" is an acknowledgement of deafness and stubbornness. Anyone arguing Linux has been ready for the masses for years is just delusional. Hell, I say that fully aware of the Windows 8 disaster, and the current Windows 10 mess.
Linux suffers from a bad lack of polish and inconsistencies.
For any mass appeal there needs to be one face of Linux for the masses. The completely splintered and complex web of distros is great for technofiles who want to geek out to get their jollies, but sucks for anyone who does not want to adopt a new religion just to run a spreadsheet, and write a report.
Look what OS X has done for BSD. I know a thousand fanboys just threw up on their overgrown beards ("Mom, I need a mop for the basement!"), but by shear number it has put BSD on orders of magnitude more home users desks than if Apple had not used them as their foundation.
Getting Linux onto the desktop in a successful way will take a similar effort and strategy. The GUI side needs to be well designed and well rung out. We run CentOS at work (IC design house), and the GUI file browser is right out of the early 90's, clunky and un-refined. It was clearly written by someone who wanted to check off a requirement and get back to his command line as quick as possible. I find the same experience all over for GUI, just enough to be able to tell the Windows wanks that Linux has the same thing, but no more. You quickly find that the GUI is hobbled and you have to revert to the command line, meaning RTFM to make progress.
So Linux needs a true consumer distribution, and just one of them. Having a dozen finishing carpenters with different visions on a single house and no shared blue-prints will result in an ugly house, far uglier than if they all worked together on a shared mediocre plan.
Clearly the problem is that there aren't enough oddly named distros and mash-ups. If only those pieces of spaghetti would stick. Eventually... Sure...
As a mostly non-linux guy (only at work) who has installed and tried to use a few variants, I just find the experience to be bad. The jargon of the names alone is off putting, I am not installing Hypoxic Ringworm 14.1RC5 3.14.4. Get Mint! No, use Cinnamon Mint!
Let's face it, Linux on the desktop has too much of a resemblance to HAM radio 20-30 years ago. Cool stuff, but too inward looking, and not looking like it will have wide appeal anytime soon. Not to say those who Linux have issues (except you Steve, you know who you are). But User interface and user experience for non-technical users is apparently low on the priority list.
Linux is very powerful, but you have actually be invested in it. If you use it casually you have one of two experience. 1) You figure out hieroglyphics to grep something at the command line, and are wowed, but also realize you will likely forget the details by time you need to do it again. 2) You try to use the GUI stuff that has been layered over top, and find it is all poorly implemented facade by people who clearly don't believe in GUI's.
Given the crap storm they put us through, they owe us at least a rough idea of what was found. My guess is nothing. Given the diligence to use and then destroy a burner phone, he likely had nothing of note on a work phone that I'm sure they expected was not private from his employer.
Bought most of our stuff 9 years ago. We went for base models, as those are the highest volume and have shown to fail less than the fancy upright shiny models that spent their effort on form rather than function. Other than a well handled infant mortality event with our fridge all the appliances have been totally trouble free.
Agreed. Stuff for your home should be planned to be in place for 15-30 years. Most IoT and cloud crap sold today is likely to have more like a 1-3 year lifespan before lack of support, hard coded vulnerabilities, or shoddy quality kills it off. Wait for widely accepted standards and keep things simple. Otherwise you'll be spending your weekends and evenings ripping out the old crap when it dies sooner than you think.
Can you imagine if your washer and dryer bricked every couple years? Garage door opener?
Most of the stuff sold today are toys. Only buy it if it is for fun, it will likely be non-functional before the next decade.
Seriously, I've never had a light switch or door key get bricked by the manufacturer. The more I go through life the more I want less electronics in places where the value is dubious. My time is worth a lot, and having to unearth documentation, or deal with software revisions is a real pain. I want the Easy Button for all the day to day stuff I don't want to think about.
There will always that small subset (over represented here) that get joy and fulfillment fiddling with things for the sake of fiddling with things. In some parts of my life I am the same. Home automation is not one of them. Having the source code to compile my own distro for home automation is not desired, I want it so simple and bullet proof that I never have to think about it after installation, or I don't want it (no matter what "it" is).
My fridge should never phone home, get viruses, get bricked, lose/gain features, spy on me, or have a touch panel. It should make cold using the smallest amount of energy for as many years as possible, full stop.
Yep. Look at Cuba where there no is no internet as such. Sneaker net becomes the default.
Personally I just wish the media companies would not make the real deal so lousy. All the crap you are forced to watch or fiddle a way around to watch s DVD or Blu-Ray is really obnoxious. I should never get a "That operation is currently prohibited" message.
Pay for "Ad-Free" Hulu? Only some of the shows are actually ad-free. WTF?
I really want to shield my kid from as much advertising crap as I can as long as I can, or at least until he has some basic critical thinking skills, but it is very hard to actually get get around ads, previews, etc.
But guess what? If I pirate the same stuff it is already stripped of this crap. Being a law abiding citizen really makes me and many others feel like real chumps.
Wait till their short attention span runs out and your 8 year old Alphabet car gets bricked rather than maintained. We need less of this fly by night tech in critical and long term installations.
No more touchscreens in cars please. Seriously stop it.
Give me good knobs with detents, not too many of them, and let me get back to driving.
Also, please give me an analog speed display, I greatly prefer them. I loathe the digital display in my Nissan.
This.
Heck any large organization comes with a very high decision tax. Some underling effed something in the past, so going forward VP level authority is needed to do anything that affects more than your part of the office. VP's are just as error prone and even more risk adverse, not to mention busy as hell. So pre-meeting meetings are held, consultants are brought in to provide unbiased opinions, lawyers have to be consulted since it crosses state lines, and finally the finance department will lose the darn invoice and so on. So even in "efficient" corporate America you can have something like this end up costing $100k's just to roll out.
Seriously, most new stuff is junk and even the survivors of the shakeout were often pretty lousy in their first offerings.