Unfortunately, the design of XP/2000 required admin privileges to install most programs...
Of course, if you're intending to compare to the Linux situation, it's basically the same. I know of one package manager that is designed to run as non-root, and that's the one in GoboLinux. Yum? Apt? Emerge? All require root to install, or at least did a year ago when I spent some time looking for a package manager I could use on a system without root.
This basically means that you either need to go through the wonders of manual dependency tracking (considering the existence of the term "DLL hell" it's amazing that doesn't have a more derogatory name) or you're in the same situation.
UAC is far worse than sudo -- with sudo you have one point when application is started as root, and the only thing user has to say is to confirm that he actually wants to run something as administrator.
So, um, how does UAC differ? Near as I can tell, you've largely just described it too. I haven't received multiple UAC prompts for a single process, so it's not like it's giving you UAC prompts for different kinds of operations; my impression is that when you accept the prompt it changes the user it's running under so that it's root. What this means is that, on this axis, I would say it's actually rather more convenient than sudo, because you don't have to restart the program to give it root permissions. There's none of the "crap, I needed to run this with sudo" that you get when working from the Linux command line. (Things like the KDE sudo wrapper don't have that problem either.)
Sudo is better designed, but I think UAC takes way more flack than it deserves. I posted some other differences a while ago.
The amount of vitrol in the post I would say is minimal; about the only thing remotely close to the line is "ASSHOLE CHAUVINISTIC PIG". Posts get +5 around here with far more than that on a somewhat regular basis.
OTOH, I was regularly reconnecting the separating cord (great idea BTW, whoever did it first) when I would disconnect it while playing GH or RB when I did that more regularly. I am pretty sure I did it more than most people, but I suspect you do it less than most.
I've also played with a wired controller (or a wireless controller that was plugged in for power) on a number of occasions; I forget if I've done the same with those.
If that's your argument how can you hate republicans? They're just supporting themelves like Obama did.
I don't claim to be unbiased, but I do try to be (at least a bit). Show me a Republican who actively campaigned and voted for removing the telecom immunity provision before and when it was voted on separately to see if it would become part of the full FISA bill (as Obama publicly did) and then voted for the final bill, and I'll show you a Republican who was in a similar situation (whether that situation be he just felt that the bill as a whole was an improvement, or needed to "play politics"), and who I would respect for his opposition to the immunity.
Oh wait, you can't (well, at least among Senators), because when the Senate had a vote to determine whether to strike the immunity provision (when the FISA bill was still in Congress), not a single Republican voted to remove it. (Paul Graham, R-SC, didn't vote.) And yes, there are a bunch of Ds down in the "nay" part, and I disagree with them as much as the Republicans there. In fact, my reaction is a little stronger because my thought is "I'm in your party, supposed to be reasonably aligned politically with you, and you're still taking a position I couldn't support in a million years."
I would argue that it's not particularly selling out. The job of a representative is sort of twofold; one is to represent the interest of the people he or she is serving (i.e. their district, state, or country), and the second is to do what he feels is best for the country. The two are not always in agreement. All you need to do is consider legislation that will help one part of the country more than the others (e.g. corn subsidies don't particularly help people living in NYC, and very well may be damaging). But more than that, the two may be in conflict even ignoring area of effects.
For instance, take gay marriage. Suppose that the electoral college, by some stroke of madness, elected me as president instead of Obama. (You never know; the edit distance between our names is only 18; they could make a few typos.) Furthermore, Congress and the States accidentally pass a couple Constitutional amendments that give me dictatorial powers. Ooops. Anyway, I am firmly in favor of gay marriage. But I have a much harder time saying that I should declare that it is legal throughout the land, because it's so widely opposed.
Take the argument a step further. Instead of becoming Supreme Dictator of the US through the electoral college going bonkers, I am instead running for the position. I'm not going to say "I'm going to allow gay marriage", but not (just) because it would keep me from getting elected -- mostly because I probably wouldn't anyway.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that a discrepancy between how a politician actually thinks and how he votes is not necessarily a bad thing. What you need to look at is whether they follow their platform, and do what they say they will. In this case, Obama may be taking a "stronger" stance on homeland security than he would like to. I'm not telepathic, so I can't tell.
And besides, this warrantless wiretapping system itself has never been found to be illegal.
The part of me that doesn't feel like it's been beaten and flogged to a bloody pulp and actually thinks this country can still stand up pretty straight says that's only because it hasn't seen a fair trial. The Bush administration keeps pulling out the state secrets clause, which means that people against it never really got a chance to argue.
The problem with that argument (though I do find it somewhat sympathetic) is that compromises are necessary in government or nothing will get done (though maybe not a bad thing), which means that Obama voting for the bill with telecom immunity (saying he voted for telecom immunity is at best imprecise and at worst misleading, as he voted against it when it was by itself) doesn't necessarily say a whole lot. It is a very large and totally unsupported jump to equate that with anything along the lines of he would have done it in office or whatever.
It's a less extreme what you'll sometimes see where some legislator will attach $PET_PROJECT which most people are against to some bill that provides for increased child abduction protection or something. It's politically extremely hard to vote against something like that, or next election you'll get reamed during the campaign on that issue.
Because of this, it's even hard to say that Obama really supported (himself, as opposed to part of his platform) the bill that he voted for, since he could have easily been worried that voting against the bill would have hurt him in the election if he was portrayed as even weaker on national security than he was.
Yes, but if it's built at the poles it stops working. The idea is that the "centrifugal force" (yes, the physicists tell us there's no such thing, but it's still a very useful lie) is what will keep it up. This goes away if you put it at the poles, and so by my understanding it would just come falling down.
There's probably some balance you could strike between the two.
Yes, there are differences between UAC and Sudo, but it's far from clear which wins out, at least for home use. You name just one difference, which goes in Sudo's favor. Here are the differences I've thought of:
1.) Repeated UAC prompts require you to enter your password each time. 2.) UAC prompts require you to enter the password of the administrator rather than your password. (In this respect, UAC acts more like su than sudo.) 3.) UAC prompts appear even when logged on as administrator, though do not require a password. 4.) UAC prompts are on-demand.
#1 is mostly in favor of Sudo, and offers a promising lead for improving UAC. That said, my experience is that the difference isn't substantial. My UAC prompts tend to be spaced further apart than at least sudo is willing to cache my password for. Sometimes there will be two or three in a row, but I would say that on average I would have to enter my password only twice as often.
#2 is a mixed blessing. For home use it doesn't matter all that much, but it does have one benefit, which is that I (as the computer owner) can bless an option when I'm not signed on. Sudo, at least as I know how to use it, would give the logged-on user the ability to do what they want, not let me do what they want on behalf of them. There's probably some way to do that with sudo, but I don't know it; you have to go to su for that. (Though that's not a big complaint.) This also illustrates a benefit with the UAC way of doing #1 (at least over sudo; not so over su): if the admin is performing an action for the logged-in user, after he leaves his credentials won't be cached.
#3 is a win for Windows, I would say plain and simple. It is actually a pretty nice middle ground between running as a truly limited user (which is often painful on Windows thanks to crappy programs) and having full rights at all points.
#4 is also a win for Windows over command-line sudo, not Linux GUI sudo, plain and simple. Under Linux, I often run a command, have it fail, then have to re-run it. Not a big deal; up, home (or maybe C-a), sudo, enter, but still more annoying than having the system figure out that I need rights for whatever it is I'm doing.
Overall, sudo probably still works better, but UAC is also ragged on way too much, as the differences are not substantial.
Well, it depends on how you actually go about teaching QBASIC, right? If you teach kids FUNCTION and SUB and FOR/WHILE rather than GOTO & GOSUB, then that's what they're going to use. And vice versa.
You act as if the teacher will be the only resource out there; but he won't be. There are tons of websites, books, etc. that people will turn to, and my impression is that most of them don't cover that.
The really good thing in QBASIC was its simplistic but readily-available graphics library.
Sure it does. It's at least not bad at all, and as an instructor you could provide code that does any boilerplate that's necessary. (I don't know how much is necessary, but I think it's at least only a very little bit.)
I started with QBASIC, and I would rather recommend against that. Things like real functions (as opposed to GOSUB) and such, even though you can do them in QBASIC, I didn't see for years.
Eclipse won't let you make an untitled document (at least that I saw), and it drives me mad. It means I can't just open a quick window for jotting something down temporarily, storing some text I've copied and pasted but will overwrite in the clipboard (standard clipboards need to be more like Emacs's kill ring, but that's another topic), etc. without giving that file a place in the file system, which means if I want it to be temporary, I have to go in and delete it.
I agree with the poster who started this thread, but I think the right way to handle it is to have it transparently save the open untitled documents somewhere and reopen it the next time you start the program. Then if you close an untitled document explicitly, it kills the file for you.
At every PhD institution I know of, Teaching Assistants and Research Assistants are employees. In fact, third-rate employees. You get no health benefits, you get no retirement benefits and you get no intellectual property benefits. Basically, you get no benefit other than an effective scholarship.
University of Wisconsin gives (the option of) health insurance and also lets you keep copyright on your work. No retirement benefits though, and if you have something potentially patentable you have to tell the university and help them file a patent if they want one, in which case it's theirs. (Proceeds from the patent in part go to the inventor in royalties and also help fund further research.)
Regardless of its popularity, OS X is still going to be the nicer platform to work with.
Short term I don't expect people's informed opinions to change, but longer term this is a much more shaky statement. (What I mean by "informed opinion" is that if you know the systems. E.g. there will be people who switch to a Mac because they use it a bit and go "oh, this is actually quite nice.")
Ten years ago I'd have said the exact reverse; I still maintain that MacOS before OS X was... underwhelming at best on a number of points, even by the day's standard, and even as compared to the Win9x line (let alone NT).
But then Apple goes and basically pulls a 180 from sucking to starting to do a pretty darn good job, and has been making progress since. Meanwhile MS and Windows are sort of plodding along, making largely incremental improvements at best. (I do think Vista is an improvement over XP overall, but not a substantial one.)
MS is not going to be able to maintain what they've been doing for the past couple decades, but they aren't going away any time soon, and there's a lot of time for them to do something radical.
(My disclaimer: I'm largely a Windows person, but not very strongly. I'm posting this from Linux right now, and I've used OS X a bit. I would consider setting it up as an alternate OS on my computer but Apple won't let me, because they steadfastly refuse to offer either something I both would want and can afford hardware-wise (laptops possibly excepted, but I'm a desktop person still) or a stand-alone installation of OS X.)
But they weren't just advertising it's features, they were advertising that the iPhone is "really fast" repeatedly while doing it. If the guy was talking about what he was doing without reference to the speed it'd be another matter. From the ASA, via the article: "We noted the voice-over claim "really fast" was used in conjunction with each of the functions shown in the visuals. Although we noted the on-screen text disclaimer, "network performance will vary by location", we considered that the visuals, in conjunction with the repeated use of the claim "really fast", were likely to lead viewers to believe that the device actually operated at or near to the speeds shown in the ad. Because we understood that it did not, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead."
Don't bring up prison rape and such like that, that is not something the government sponsors or supports.
No, but it is something the government sometimes will look the other way on, and not take reasonable measures to stop and prevent.
For instance, there was an interesting case where an inmate escaped from prison (twice?), and when caught, took the argument to some high court (which eventually ruled against him) arguing that he was escaping out of necessity to avoid physical injury, sexual assault, etc. Turns out that it was well-known that it was actually pretty easy to (1) get out of your cell and (2) get into someone else's cell, and this would go on at night with groups of inmates roaming around. Furthermore, the only avenue that the inmates had to report rape was through the prison mail system, which was sorted by... inmates! Who would often open the mail and read it. And good luck if someone discovered you were a snitch. What did the state do to remedy this? By my reading of the story, basically nothing, at least until the suit hit the press. They installed some more locks that prisoners could latch from inside to keep others out (!), but these were also easily bypassed.
This sort of event is an extreme as far as this sort of thing goes, but don't act like the prisons are doing what they can to prevent rape.
Breaking one of these pedals requires either a defective piece or abuse.
Don't confuse bad technique with abuse. We've broken two of them, and while I am very hard on the pedals, it's because when the bass drum hits become frequent, it's the only way I can get them because I'm not a drummer. (Did you consider that the fact that you are could actually contribute to you having better technique and thus being less hard on them?)
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Unfortunately, the design of XP/2000 required admin privileges to install most programs...
Of course, if you're intending to compare to the Linux situation, it's basically the same. I know of one package manager that is designed to run as non-root, and that's the one in GoboLinux. Yum? Apt? Emerge? All require root to install, or at least did a year ago when I spent some time looking for a package manager I could use on a system without root.
This basically means that you either need to go through the wonders of manual dependency tracking (considering the existence of the term "DLL hell" it's amazing that doesn't have a more derogatory name) or you're in the same situation.
UAC is far worse than sudo -- with sudo you have one point when application is started as root, and the only thing user has to say is to confirm that he actually wants to run something as administrator.
So, um, how does UAC differ? Near as I can tell, you've largely just described it too. I haven't received multiple UAC prompts for a single process, so it's not like it's giving you UAC prompts for different kinds of operations; my impression is that when you accept the prompt it changes the user it's running under so that it's root. What this means is that, on this axis, I would say it's actually rather more convenient than sudo, because you don't have to restart the program to give it root permissions. There's none of the "crap, I needed to run this with sudo" that you get when working from the Linux command line. (Things like the KDE sudo wrapper don't have that problem either.)
Sudo is better designed, but I think UAC takes way more flack than it deserves. I posted some other differences a while ago.
The amount of vitrol in the post I would say is minimal; about the only thing remotely close to the line is "ASSHOLE CHAUVINISTIC PIG". Posts get +5 around here with far more than that on a somewhat regular basis.
I disagree with what you say, for the reasons that others have said.
But troll? Seriously? Mods, what's wrong with you?
I've never tugged on the cord during play.
OTOH, I was regularly reconnecting the separating cord (great idea BTW, whoever did it first) when I would disconnect it while playing GH or RB when I did that more regularly. I am pretty sure I did it more than most people, but I suspect you do it less than most.
I've also played with a wired controller (or a wireless controller that was plugged in for power) on a number of occasions; I forget if I've done the same with those.
If that's your argument how can you hate republicans? They're just supporting themelves like Obama did.
I don't claim to be unbiased, but I do try to be (at least a bit). Show me a Republican who actively campaigned and voted for removing the telecom immunity provision before and when it was voted on separately to see if it would become part of the full FISA bill (as Obama publicly did) and then voted for the final bill, and I'll show you a Republican who was in a similar situation (whether that situation be he just felt that the bill as a whole was an improvement, or needed to "play politics"), and who I would respect for his opposition to the immunity.
Oh wait, you can't (well, at least among Senators), because when the Senate had a vote to determine whether to strike the immunity provision (when the FISA bill was still in Congress), not a single Republican voted to remove it. (Paul Graham, R-SC, didn't vote.) And yes, there are a bunch of Ds down in the "nay" part, and I disagree with them as much as the Republicans there. In fact, my reaction is a little stronger because my thought is "I'm in your party, supposed to be reasonably aligned politically with you, and you're still taking a position I couldn't support in a million years."
I would argue that it's not particularly selling out. The job of a representative is sort of twofold; one is to represent the interest of the people he or she is serving (i.e. their district, state, or country), and the second is to do what he feels is best for the country. The two are not always in agreement. All you need to do is consider legislation that will help one part of the country more than the others (e.g. corn subsidies don't particularly help people living in NYC, and very well may be damaging). But more than that, the two may be in conflict even ignoring area of effects.
For instance, take gay marriage. Suppose that the electoral college, by some stroke of madness, elected me as president instead of Obama. (You never know; the edit distance between our names is only 18; they could make a few typos.) Furthermore, Congress and the States accidentally pass a couple Constitutional amendments that give me dictatorial powers. Ooops. Anyway, I am firmly in favor of gay marriage. But I have a much harder time saying that I should declare that it is legal throughout the land, because it's so widely opposed.
Take the argument a step further. Instead of becoming Supreme Dictator of the US through the electoral college going bonkers, I am instead running for the position. I'm not going to say "I'm going to allow gay marriage", but not (just) because it would keep me from getting elected -- mostly because I probably wouldn't anyway.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that a discrepancy between how a politician actually thinks and how he votes is not necessarily a bad thing. What you need to look at is whether they follow their platform, and do what they say they will. In this case, Obama may be taking a "stronger" stance on homeland security than he would like to. I'm not telepathic, so I can't tell.
And besides, this warrantless wiretapping system itself has never been found to be illegal.
The part of me that doesn't feel like it's been beaten and flogged to a bloody pulp and actually thinks this country can still stand up pretty straight says that's only because it hasn't seen a fair trial. The Bush administration keeps pulling out the state secrets clause, which means that people against it never really got a chance to argue.
But the point is that he committed a felony
I thought that up above you said there are legal protections for whistleblowers.
The problem with that argument (though I do find it somewhat sympathetic) is that compromises are necessary in government or nothing will get done (though maybe not a bad thing), which means that Obama voting for the bill with telecom immunity (saying he voted for telecom immunity is at best imprecise and at worst misleading, as he voted against it when it was by itself) doesn't necessarily say a whole lot. It is a very large and totally unsupported jump to equate that with anything along the lines of he would have done it in office or whatever.
It's a less extreme what you'll sometimes see where some legislator will attach $PET_PROJECT which most people are against to some bill that provides for increased child abduction protection or something. It's politically extremely hard to vote against something like that, or next election you'll get reamed during the campaign on that issue.
Because of this, it's even hard to say that Obama really supported (himself, as opposed to part of his platform) the bill that he voted for, since he could have easily been worried that voting against the bill would have hurt him in the election if he was portrayed as even weaker on national security than he was.
Yes, but if it's built at the poles it stops working. The idea is that the "centrifugal force" (yes, the physicists tell us there's no such thing, but it's still a very useful lie) is what will keep it up. This goes away if you put it at the poles, and so by my understanding it would just come falling down.
There's probably some balance you could strike between the two.
Yes, there are differences between UAC and Sudo, but it's far from clear which wins out, at least for home use. You name just one difference, which goes in Sudo's favor. Here are the differences I've thought of:
1.) Repeated UAC prompts require you to enter your password each time.
2.) UAC prompts require you to enter the password of the administrator rather than your password. (In this respect, UAC acts more like su than sudo.)
3.) UAC prompts appear even when logged on as administrator, though do not require a password.
4.) UAC prompts are on-demand.
#1 is mostly in favor of Sudo, and offers a promising lead for improving UAC. That said, my experience is that the difference isn't substantial. My UAC prompts tend to be spaced further apart than at least sudo is willing to cache my password for. Sometimes there will be two or three in a row, but I would say that on average I would have to enter my password only twice as often.
#2 is a mixed blessing. For home use it doesn't matter all that much, but it does have one benefit, which is that I (as the computer owner) can bless an option when I'm not signed on. Sudo, at least as I know how to use it, would give the logged-on user the ability to do what they want, not let me do what they want on behalf of them. There's probably some way to do that with sudo, but I don't know it; you have to go to su for that. (Though that's not a big complaint.) This also illustrates a benefit with the UAC way of doing #1 (at least over sudo; not so over su): if the admin is performing an action for the logged-in user, after he leaves his credentials won't be cached.
#3 is a win for Windows, I would say plain and simple. It is actually a pretty nice middle ground between running as a truly limited user (which is often painful on Windows thanks to crappy programs) and having full rights at all points.
#4 is also a win for Windows over command-line sudo, not Linux GUI sudo, plain and simple. Under Linux, I often run a command, have it fail, then have to re-run it. Not a big deal; up, home (or maybe C-a), sudo, enter, but still more annoying than having the system figure out that I need rights for whatever it is I'm doing.
Overall, sudo probably still works better, but UAC is also ragged on way too much, as the differences are not substantial.
And wouldn't a great benchmark be "UAC dialog boxes per hour" instead?
I wonder how it compares to "requirements to 'sudo' per hour"?
(Oh wait, I've actually kind of done that experiment, and it comes out to be about the same.)
Well, it depends on how you actually go about teaching QBASIC, right? If you teach kids FUNCTION and SUB and FOR/WHILE rather than GOTO & GOSUB, then that's what they're going to use. And vice versa.
You act as if the teacher will be the only resource out there; but he won't be. There are tons of websites, books, etc. that people will turn to, and my impression is that most of them don't cover that.
The really good thing in QBASIC was its simplistic but readily-available graphics library.
Sure it does. It's at least not bad at all, and as an instructor you could provide code that does any boilerplate that's necessary. (I don't know how much is necessary, but I think it's at least only a very little bit.)
See subject.
I started with QBASIC, and I would rather recommend against that. Things like real functions (as opposed to GOSUB) and such, even though you can do them in QBASIC, I didn't see for years.
When I said that (under a previous account), it was not free. It was ad-ware or pay-ware.
Yeah, but you brought up your old post as if the point was still valid.
You do know that Opera has been free for ages, right? Even without ads?
I'm not saying it's the browser for you; I use Firefox. But Opera is a very good contender nonetheless.
Eclipse won't let you make an untitled document (at least that I saw), and it drives me mad. It means I can't just open a quick window for jotting something down temporarily, storing some text I've copied and pasted but will overwrite in the clipboard (standard clipboards need to be more like Emacs's kill ring, but that's another topic), etc. without giving that file a place in the file system, which means if I want it to be temporary, I have to go in and delete it.
I agree with the poster who started this thread, but I think the right way to handle it is to have it transparently save the open untitled documents somewhere and reopen it the next time you start the program. Then if you close an untitled document explicitly, it kills the file for you.
At every PhD institution I know of, Teaching Assistants and Research Assistants are employees. In fact, third-rate employees. You get no health benefits, you get no retirement benefits and you get no intellectual property benefits. Basically, you get no benefit other than an effective scholarship.
University of Wisconsin gives (the option of) health insurance and also lets you keep copyright on your work. No retirement benefits though, and if you have something potentially patentable you have to tell the university and help them file a patent if they want one, in which case it's theirs. (Proceeds from the patent in part go to the inventor in royalties and also help fund further research.)
What you say isn't universal.
You do realize that if you don't own the rights because you signed them over to the university, you can't open source it, right?
I think some erosion of market share would give MS the cover it needs to get into creating a full-circle suite (both software AND hardware).
At first I disagreed a bit, but after a moment's consideration and thinking about the Xbox and such, maybe such a thing isn't so far out there.
I would be very surprised though if MS ever takes the Apple route and stops selling their OSs standalone.
Regardless of its popularity, OS X is still going to be the nicer platform to work with.
Short term I don't expect people's informed opinions to change, but longer term this is a much more shaky statement. (What I mean by "informed opinion" is that if you know the systems. E.g. there will be people who switch to a Mac because they use it a bit and go "oh, this is actually quite nice.")
Ten years ago I'd have said the exact reverse; I still maintain that MacOS before OS X was... underwhelming at best on a number of points, even by the day's standard, and even as compared to the Win9x line (let alone NT).
But then Apple goes and basically pulls a 180 from sucking to starting to do a pretty darn good job, and has been making progress since. Meanwhile MS and Windows are sort of plodding along, making largely incremental improvements at best. (I do think Vista is an improvement over XP overall, but not a substantial one.)
MS is not going to be able to maintain what they've been doing for the past couple decades, but they aren't going away any time soon, and there's a lot of time for them to do something radical.
(My disclaimer: I'm largely a Windows person, but not very strongly. I'm posting this from Linux right now, and I've used OS X a bit. I would consider setting it up as an alternate OS on my computer but Apple won't let me, because they steadfastly refuse to offer either something I both would want and can afford hardware-wise (laptops possibly excepted, but I'm a desktop person still) or a stand-alone installation of OS X.)
But they weren't just advertising it's features, they were advertising that the iPhone is "really fast" repeatedly while doing it. If the guy was talking about what he was doing without reference to the speed it'd be another matter. From the ASA, via the article: "We noted the voice-over claim "really fast" was used in conjunction with each of the functions shown in the visuals. Although we noted the on-screen text disclaimer, "network performance will vary by location", we considered that the visuals, in conjunction with the repeated use of the claim "really fast", were likely to lead viewers to believe that the device actually operated at or near to the speeds shown in the ad. Because we understood that it did not, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead."
Don't bring up prison rape and such like that, that is not something the government sponsors or supports.
No, but it is something the government sometimes will look the other way on, and not take reasonable measures to stop and prevent.
For instance, there was an interesting case where an inmate escaped from prison (twice?), and when caught, took the argument to some high court (which eventually ruled against him) arguing that he was escaping out of necessity to avoid physical injury, sexual assault, etc. Turns out that it was well-known that it was actually pretty easy to (1) get out of your cell and (2) get into someone else's cell, and this would go on at night with groups of inmates roaming around. Furthermore, the only avenue that the inmates had to report rape was through the prison mail system, which was sorted by... inmates! Who would often open the mail and read it. And good luck if someone discovered you were a snitch. What did the state do to remedy this? By my reading of the story, basically nothing, at least until the suit hit the press. They installed some more locks that prisoners could latch from inside to keep others out (!), but these were also easily bypassed.
This sort of event is an extreme as far as this sort of thing goes, but don't act like the prisons are doing what they can to prevent rape.
Breaking one of these pedals requires either a defective piece or abuse.
Don't confuse bad technique with abuse. We've broken two of them, and while I am very hard on the pedals, it's because when the bass drum hits become frequent, it's the only way I can get them because I'm not a drummer. (Did you consider that the fact that you are could actually contribute to you having better technique and thus being less hard on them?)