Causification

Are there really people that walk around with their phone GPS switched on all day? Security concerns aside, what a drain on battery life that must be.

How long did you spend staring at your screen in slackjawed disbelief after selecting the zoom tool and finding that instead of zooming out, right-clicking does nothing?

Modern smartphones aren't so good at it either. Think of the last time you just wanted to listen to the audio from a video file while you browsed the internet.

I am an irregular Linux user and am not deeply involved in the Ubuntu community, but over the past several months I have seen the general attitude of "random geeks" change dramatically with regards to Ubuntu. A year ago the standard response to a new user inquiring about Linux was "install Ubuntu, it's easy, there's lots of help available. Go get 'em tiger." Now, Ubuntu is usually spoken of with a kind of regretful contempt. I didn't much care for it myself, but Ubuntu used to be the public face of Linux, the thing 95% of the Windows/OSX users hit if they get interested in Linux. As far as I can tell, it's fallen out of the good graces of the power user community. It appears as if Ubuntu has decided to forsake the early adopters and power users in favor of the newbies and average Joes. That may be well and good on principle but I don't see it as a strategy capable of sustaining an OS ecosystem that doesn't come preinstalled on Dick and jane's new laptop.

Agreed. Unless it's supported by a legal framework, racism is a self-defeating phenomenon. Racist individuals deprive themselves of the benefits offered by the group toward which they are racist, therefore making themselves less likely to succeed. If anything, a person or group of people being racist should alert you, the observant seizer of the day, to an under-utilized resource and/or market niche.

So long as big brother isn't enforcing it; another person's stupidity can always be turned to your advantage.

Except that kottke didn't say anything at all about Stallman's ethics, position on software, or the FSF. He just said it was ridiculous for him to put two paragraphs about parrots in his rider. Simple as that.

It is a very common flaw in reasoning that one party assumes that the opposition disagrees because they are scared or secretly agree. Atheists are all secretly christians, homophobes are all secretly gay, liberals are scared of "the truth."

People who mock Stallman for taking his shoe off and eating things he picked off his foot in the middle of a presentation are not terrified of him shattering their paradigm. They just think it's gross.

Having read only the stonehenge page and not the full slashdot article, I don't even have to be metaphorical when I ask what kind of pathetic, alarmist, lilly-livered school district would call the police over anything short of an actual threat against the school?

If it happened around here, whoever read the page would probably think some chunk of the student's blog where he was talking about his hunting or range trip got inserted into the page by accident. I am genuinely disgusted at the type of personality who would react to that text by calling authorities.

Know what would be a heck of a lot closer? A Clie TH55.

http://reviews.cnet.com/sc/30733801-2-440-front-2.gif

There's already an international symbol for touchscreens: fingerprints.

The end goal is for the user to have something that best suits their needs. For most people that might be an iphone. Many others are restricted to paying for things they don't want in order to have the things they absolutely require, while being denied the things they need. I hate to say it, but the things I could buy seven years ago suited my needs then much better than the things I can buy now suit my current needs. Computing began by requiring the user to know exactly how the computer worked. Later it merely encouraged and rewarded the user for knowing, like the person who can save a jpeg without pasting it into a Word file. Now it doesn't encourage the user at all and is making an effort at removing any difference between the person who knows and the person who doesn't. A computer can be easy to use without stifling the user; that's one reason Windows is so successful.

"I for one am sick of the technocratic elite denying everyone the benefits of technology in the boneheaded pursuit of some kind of technological purity."

In what way? No one is trying to stop a company from selling whatever they want. We're just saying we don't like the trend computing is taking toward a world where as far as everybody is concerned, the devices they entrust their lives and fortunes to might as well work by magic.

The lower the understanding of the average user, the less variety there is in a given product category. Desktops came in all shapes and sizes, until everybody bought one and suddenly they were all beige boxes. If you've strolled through a brick n' mortar lately, you probably noticed that most laptops look virtually identical nowadays. Tablets came in all shapes and sizes, from the ten inch slate ala Stylistic, to the convertible laptop, to the hybrid in the form of the TC1000 series, to the five inch chunkers like the OQO and the Sony UX series. Now they're all minimalistic squares of shiny, fingerprint-ridden black plastic. PDAs had a whole ecosystem of designs, so many you could find one that exactly suited your needs. Folding, sliding, with keyboard and without, slates, anything. The smartphone revolution destroyed that. Now you can pick from a shiny square of black plastic with one button or a shiny square of black plastic with four almost-buttons.

Everyone being able to use it means designers try to please everyone by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Ease of use is why you have to remove a panel and the battery just to change SD cards, assuming you even have the option of a microsd card or removable battery.

Touchscreens bring people closer to technology, but they also separate people from understanding technology. It's great that we have a whole generation of people with iphones, but we also have a whole generation of people who think that if it isn't in the app store, it can't be done, who crack the glass on their iphone and throw the whole thing into the garbage.

A touchscreen may give you a more organic connection to technology, but someone with a mouse is an order of magnitude faster at doing almost anything, and someone with a CLI is an order of magnitude faster still at complex tasks. Anyone who used PDAs for years before their first smartphone can tell you about the jarring sense of debilitation that comes when you go from using a stylus to using a finger.

As for voice recognition, its incompetence makes it too dangerous for me to use, and probably will for a long time. My phone calling/texting the wrong person at the wrong time is more than capable of ruining someone's life. I'm sure the same goes for many other people. It's like telling a five year old to retrieve a handgun. Behaving properly 98% of the time is not good enough by a long shot.

Whether it is desirable would depend on your values and objectives. I fail to see why UPP is desirable to anyone except the person who wants more accolade for a particular statement or action than it actually deserves. I do not think that an admirable desire.

I think you wrote an article that kind of ignored the real point of controversy, which is whether UPP is actually valuable. Does having a rigid identity tend to magnify the reactions of people to the things you do an say? Yes, absolutely. Your article almost wholly pertains to arguing that it does, but that's not what people would disagree with you about. They would disagree on whether UPP is desirable at all. As far as I can tell from your definition of UPP, it's little more than an accumulated distortion of logical merit based on superficial characteristics. The distortion may be to your material advantage, but I still do not see why it is desirable.

Edit: I don't actually have a "real" account. HN may not support anonymity, but signing up and posting doesn't require email confirmation, so I make a new account about every other article I choose to post a comment on.

I am amazed that someone would write so much so thoroughly yet completely miss the point that some people don't give a damn about UPP or identity. Want to know what my reputation is? Too bad, it doesn't exist. Excepting the handful of close, personal friends, everyone who communicates with me is forced to judge me based purely on the merits of what I am saying, and not any sort of accumulated respect.

That's exactly the way I like it, because it's honest. If I say something stupid, I want people to say it's stupid. If I say something intelligent, I want them to say it's intelligent. The concept that I would be dishonest or hold my tongue instead of saying exactly what I thought for fear of what the listener would think of me is little better than lying to their face. The world would be a healthier place if everyone was called out on their stupidity, every time, by everyone there.

Anonymity enables honesty. Rigid identities are for people who are afraid of what they might hear if there was nothing protecting them from the truth of other peoples' thoughts.

Do you think this comment is the most ignorant, idiotic thing you've read today? Then tell me so, without being influenced by who I am, or dissuaded by anything I might do or think in the future. I welcome your honest opinion, for I know it is based purely on what I have said.

I cannot remember the last time I read an article about a startup, technology, or general science where I paid the slightest bit of attention to what city the company/events called home. If you're an internet company nobody cares where you're from, aside from nationality and its accompanying laws. The article's author seems to have an obsession with Detroit and its image. I did a techcrunch search for my city, and again for my state. Zero articles in the past year. I don't care because it makes no difference.

I do thank the article for teaching me a new term today: "persecutory delusions."