Lagged2Death

What could any ordinary Twitter user possibly provide that you would accept as proof?

You could have expressed pretty much the same sentiment about Java ~20 years ago. The trade-offs (high resource consumption, additional complexity, but less demanding of developer time) and even the fundamentals of the approach (an additional abstraction layer that works as a VM, APIs oriented around all the latest thinking) were also very similar.

Java is used for a lot of things, but mostly not as the basis of mass-market cross-platform applications the way it was originally intended.

Here's some irony for you: You really need an SSD in a modern PC - largely because of exactly this sort of insane bloat - and as a consequence, no, disk space isn't so cheap anymore.

When I was 20 years younger, I might well have made the argument you're making. But I would have been wrong.

It's a lot harder to make a snap judgement regarding a person's socio-economic status if they live in an unremarkable apartment. If someone lives in a trailer park or a terrifying drug-infested cinder-block shithole, though, you can make some guesses about them right away.

I snark, but I'm also serious. An awful lot of lower-middle-class suburbanites see large, inexpensive housing complexes (be they trailer parks or low-rise apartment buildings) as systems for isolating lower-class people from the surrounding neighborhood.

I would expect a really small apartment building project, well-integrated with my neighborhood, to face grassroots opposition. Some of the suburban governments I've lived under actually planned to demolish well-kept, inexpensive, functioning apartments and replace them with expensive single-family houses. There is more than a hint of racism bound up in this, and this seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised the article didn't even broach the possibility.

He many not have spent that many hours sitting at a desk, but he had to be directing a tremendous amount of mental effort and attention to his work to have this sort of reaction. The article describes his not-sitting-at-a-desk time as "downtime," and maybe that's half-defensible. But that "downtime" probably isn't something I'd recognize as leisure time, either.

Here's something else that many successful 19th/20th century artists, scholars, writers, and scientists turn out to have had in common, the other side of the same coin, perhaps: sufficient economic prosperity (often familial) to employ servants. They could devote great swaths of time and attention to their work, even when away from a desk, because they were not fretting about the grocery shopping, not wondering if they should be pushing the kids harder on their ABCs, etc.

The class structure and sexism that made such arrangements common also surely squandered enormous amounts of human potential.

If they give me the broadband access for free then I might feel some sympathy for this line of argument. At 97% profit margins, not so much.

Funny how "entitlement" can be a positive thing when it describes a rich, powerful entity but a negative thing when it describes someone or something more ordinary.

Some sanity checks:

1993 Toyota 4Runner / Hilux Surf: 25 psi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_pressure)

Caterpillar D6R LGP Bulldozer: 5 psi (http://www.ritchiespecs.com/specification?type=Con&category=...)

Some tracked vehicles like bulldozers are available in extra-wide track versions to reduce their ground pressure even further. It wouldn't be surprising if most of the snow fleet is so equipped.

Charities and private businesses actually succumb to corruption, inefficiency, and outright fraud pretty often. How much research do you perform on your charitable contributions versus your taxes? Do you know, off the top of your head, how many cents on the dollar actually support the cause of your favorite charity, and how many are "wasted" on administration?

Gasoline motor fuel accounts for somewhat less than half of global petroleum consumption.

If you could wave a magic wand and eliminate gasoline demand tomorrow, the oil business would suffer a catastrophic adjustment/contraction, yes. But it would not go away, it would still be huge and powerful and rich and important. There are a lot of applications where there is no viable alternative yet, and no viable alternative on the horizon.

Here's a perverse idea: falling oil demand and prices due to vehicular electrification could make petroleum an attractive fuel for electricity generating plants. Ugh!

It isn't, hasn't been, won't be, and everyone perfectly well knows that.

In 2016 the US spent about $0.75 on CBP for every $1.00 we spent on NASA. Illegal immigration across the border reached new long-term lows, and so did the number of immigrants living in the country illegally. There is no border crisis.

Falsely promoting a crisis is unpatriotic, it undermines the culture and institutions that we collectively refer to as "the country." It's a betrayal, a dereliction of duty.

The linked article points all of this out in the first few sentences. FUD?

Yet the administration itself keeps bringing it up. Making up stories to explain it away. As if it mattered quite a lot.

Don't forget this. Don't let this turn cloudy in your mind. The administration campaigned for a crackdown on illegal immigration and immediately went after legal immigrants instead, despite assurances to the contrary.

I love how all the responses here are all "No no no, it's not spite, it's perfectly valid extortion. Well what else could they do?"

What was that goal? Could it be ascertained from the "short and simple list" alone, or is it only evident in conjunction with a collection of cultural assumptions?

"Have some thought about the people your decisions effect" is a moral crusade?

That really depends on how you define "conventional encryption techniques." As is so often the case, this proposed line of attack isn't against the crypto proper, but against habitually poor implementation details. Human laziness, really. They're not picking the locks, they've found a way to steal the keys.

There must have been a lot of people who had suspicions.

But consider: for many years, US citizens who talked about ECHELON were considered crazies. Later, Bush's enormous surveillance expansion was mostly denied or dismissed. The 2016 Russian hacks of the DNC and the propaganda machine were brought up on national television during the debates. Yet there was denial, dismissal, and very little concern.

Without a plan for responding or reacting, denial is a very appealing way to deal with upsetting news. The Germans and the Japanese who were in a position to suspect that their communications had been compromised were also embedded in a totalitarian military chain of command, more focused on preserving the relative power of the people at the top than anything else. Questioning the efficacy of the system is easily cast as disloyalty. What could anyone do?

But the stats cover Firefox users, not average PC users.

I'd guess there's a lot of overlap between (people savvy enough to keep old PCs in service) and (people savvy enough to download a browser that didn't come built-in to the system).

In particular, if you're using an older PC to browse the web, you're pretty likely to want to do some selective content blocking. I believe Firefox has more plugin options for that than the other big contenders.

Similarly, Firefox may be the best choice on Windows 7. But on a brand-new Windows 10 PC, many people may be satisfied with built-in Edge.

The placebo effect is well known, understanding it is fundamental to designing a trial, and it has been studied a lot.

It strains credulity to suppose that a hard partition like this (one quarter of humans respond weakly, period), if it existed, would not have been discovered long ago. You wouldn't need to find genes or proteins or any of that stuff, you'd just need to check if placebo response in individuals is reasonably consistent over time.

This is, IMHO, why we should make it a priority to put PV on large commercial / industrial / institutional buildings. Double use of land, serious economies of scale, a maintenance organization already accustomed to dealing with rooftop infrastructure, and a ready customer for the produced energy (which means storage, transmission, and buy-back schemes may not be necessary at all) all together.

Like this: http://www.dlrgroup.com/work/mandalay-bay-solar-array/

The general public is (by our standards) astonishingly bad at using computers.

http://boingboing.net/2016/11/28/people-really-really-suck-a...

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

Perhaps most users need the fancy buttons, need the leading-users-by-the-nose-through-a-garden-of-visual-delights sort of experience that modern, beautiful, dumbed-down web UIs mostly provide.

The dense old interfaces the author champions are very rewarding and powerful for people who understand how to use them, but they're a huge turn-off for people who don't understand them and who aren't interested in investing the time needed to learn new tools.

Pretty much every web UI post-mortem you see finds the same thing: The more clicks you require of users to perform a function or use a feature, the less users engage with that function or feature. One click is often too much to ask.

Even so, the web as it stands today seems like (from a comp-sci point of view) a monumentally inefficient way of producing the functions it provides, with a ridiculous amount of hardware and software consumed by the problem of displaying, say, a news article which the reader has maybe a 5% chance of actually reading through and a 1% chance of commenting on.

It's not necessarily the case that any given symbol has a bunch of different Unicode representations; unfortunately G has at least two, though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_Extensions

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/ipa_extensions...

Go ahead, tell us with a straight face that supporters of Donald J. "bomb the shit out of them" Trump are pacifists who just want to avoid all that nasty conflict. I'll wait.