RaleyField

"Spotify is currently not available in your country."

Take my euros goddarnit. Probably fights involving licensing agreements, or competition buying whole markets. I don't know if I should play at being an international spy and buy VPN just for Rogan or just pirate it out of the general principle.

You are choosing the most uncharitable reading which is not what he meant. How do I know that? Because, despite his meatheaddy appearances, he has consistently shown himself to not be transphobic, I watch his show. What he wanted to say is that her sex was biologically of male and that's why she has in this specific case unduly enormous advantage, to a degree that she is depriving others of fair chance at competing.

That's why should verbally slap him around a bit, preventatively, just in case? Because as you admitted "the context isn't inherently transphobic".

That's what you can do, sometimes. Step around dozens of dark patterns. It's not what your less tech-savvy relatives can realistically do.

I use Linux, I am pretty ambivalent about Windows, I don't like adware and telemetry in my paid-for software but if they really start doing that honestly that will irritate me enough to start pushing people to Ubuntu when that's possible.

If it's so obvious then why am I receiving security patches for my Linux desktop almost every day?

There's slight difference in that in Firefox's case tech journals will be writing about it, everyone else will be talking about it and it will be on front page of HN. In the case of random extension going rogue it will likely get unnoticed for years and when it is finally noticed there's a small chance it will be picked by HN if planets align.

That's why it's only fair we as users uphold the same rules by immediately severing any ties, present and future, with Blizzard. The rules are perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

> poorly calibrated for obviousness

They should move way to the other side on the scale of obviousness. Patents should be there to protect investments, not to stake out ideas bright and not so bright practitioners can stumble upon. In my opinion only ideas that necessitated a few man-years of work to be discovered should be patentable with onus on inventors to prove nonobviousness. I wouldn't be surprised if only pharma patents would survive only because expensive trials are needed.

Question: If it makes sense for games to be resalable then why not tickets for cinema or concerts? Ianal afaik both are contractual agreements.

And manufacturers. I tried to install system-wide cert on my Android to intercept and see exactly what system apps on my old Nokia phone were sending to Chinese servers but couldn't because Google thoughtfully "protects" its users. Tivoization at its worst.

I have a suspicion that most libertarians would be completely fine with unplowed roads. On top of that, should people want to have plowed roads they are free and welcome to hire someone to plow their roads.

> Every single company did stupid things in the past

Perhaps there is some boundary that shouldn't be crossed. You seem to be arguing there isn't.

Perhaps global and successful companies should exercise some due diligence and have a department that would control quality and firewall wacky ideas.

Perhaps we as CEs should hold companies responsible so that they stop perpetuating never ending shenanigans that this industry is known for. If even we don't boycott bad actors how can we expect normal users to do it.

> Does it mean you should condemn the company for the rest of eternity? Probably not.

If they showed some contrition perhaps? Name and fire entire chain of people responsible for it and donate a year of their net income to foreign FOSS organizations - in ideal world the company should've gone bankrupt, so the penance should be hard. Then I'd be more ready to believe them they would do better in the future.

> In the end, these devices do ship with Windows, which has privacy problems anyway.

It does, but those are "theoretical" in comparison to the degree Lenovo stooped on, it doesn't excuse Superfish at all. Windows isn't a free for all platform, yet.

> All this is moot, when you put Linux on it, which was the context we were talking about.

_That_ time. I'll copy a response I provided two months ago as Lenovo on HN has become a seriously annoying groundhog day for me:

I can't know that whatever harmful and irrational environment that led to Superfish in IdeaPad won't affect ThinkPads in the future. Even in the most generous understanding where IdeaPad is a different, physically separate branch of the company, and Superfish was an act of incompetence and not outright malice I can't be expected to keep up with the insider intrigue of the company to notice any changes that could negatively affect me. More importantly, leadership is still responsible for setting irrational environment that lead to Superfish, whatever that environment was. This is a multi-billion dollar company, there is no excuse for such incompetence.

> want to be in control of their data and devices,

The other day there was a thread on HN about which laptop is great for Linux. Tons of people recommended Lenovo, a guy from Redhat said it's even the brand that's used internally and I got a little depressed and smh. Nobody mentioned superfish. Those glorious days of Linux are gone.

> but moving/resizing windows is still very painful

Press alt and drag inside a window. Left mouse for moving, right for resizing.

ls -l ~/.bashrc and by design.

And I, as a member of the esteemed assembly of contributors to this thread, am pleased to nominate Internet Services Providers’ Association as the 2019 Internet Villain. Congrats..

To a significant extent you have to fear US if you are planning on blowing things up and you have to fear China if you have valuable IP. I don't have to like it, but hit me up with Room 641A over PLA Unit 61398 any day of the week.

> I don't see how boycotting ThinkPads sends a message that BIOS malware is unacceptable

It sends a message to other manufacturers: add malware at your own peril. I frankly consider it unethical to buy or recommend products from companies, like Lenovo, who demonstrated anti-consumer behavior because it perpetuates bad behavior as companies think consumers will forget or forgive them.

> ThinkPads never had that, and never would.

That is speculative. I can't know that whatever harmful and irrational environment that led to Superfish in IdeaPad won't affect ThinkPads in the future. Even in the most generous understanding where IdeaPad is a different, physically separate branch of the company, and Superfish was an act of incompetence and not outright malice I can't be expected to keep up with the insider intrigue of the company to notice any changes that could negatively affect me. More importantly, leadership is still responsible for setting irrational environment that lead to Superfish, whatever that environment was. This is a multi-billion dollar company, there is no excuse for such incompetence.

> For what it's worth

Not much in my book. The problem isn't Superfish, the problem is leadership that allowed it.

Users could reasonably expect that that information be stored in a separate database. My Linux distro doesn't make it immediately obvious that user.xdg.* attributes are attached with the file system. Normal users don't read EULAs, but we should expect them to read in-depth manuals to be up to speed on every gotcha that the operating system and browser could throw at them?

> outweigh any privacy concerns I might otherwise have.

What about concerns of other people or do you mostly do inanimate objects or selfies?

I suspect there are many people like me who feel coerced into allowing our private life being stored in public clouds by other people without ever being explicitly asked for our consent. Worst, I feel in many situations it isn't easy to modify behavior of others because of the fear of appearing "needlessly fussy" and and because we value relationships with other people more than the abstract, intangible and hard to quantify concept of loss of privacy.

> Letting the local market compete is "bullshit" now?

It was bullshit before too. This is nothing but another form of candlemaker's petition.[1] Why is welfare of corporations more important than free choice of consumers? Why not let consumers voluntarily decide where they want to take their business?

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/candle-makers-pe...

> Oh yes, the classic usability problem for the Average User, how could I forget

It becomes usability problem for your users when it becomes too burdensome for ISVs to port their software on your fractured platform. It the whole raison d'etre of technologies like snappy, flatpak or docker that now try to patch this problem.

How about unstable apis to anything outside the kernel[1].

Or, more personal, on this laptop I get shorter battery life (I have it plugged in most of the time so it's tolerable), sometimes it doesn't wake up so I have to always shut it down (tolerable) and bluetooth headset doesn't work (I use wired ones, so tolerable again).

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8&t=5m40s

> Consider yourself told, then.

Nowadays I run mostly Ubuntu but before this attitude used to be a big turn off for me. When things manifestly don't work but the partisan chorus is acting like Linux is the most perfect thing ever then it is really easy to walk back out of spite. I run Linux because it's the least bad OS _for me_, it's still pretty bad in so many ways.

> often better than Windows

And often not. My experience with Linux drivers has always been only "tolerable".

> KDE Plasma

It's functional. But its design language (if it has any) is by far my least favorite one. I'd rather use Windows than use KDE.

Nobody would need to read any reports if Microsoft respected customers by making telemetry opt-in.

It's great that all dependencies have been made to satisfy stringent NASA software assurance standards. A great day for entire NPM ecosystem.

> I haven't pissed anyone off.

You accused me of being disingenuous. I'm sure your radical views irritate other people as well.

> minimization of suffering

Now I'm starting to think you are trolling. Me and others have pointed out that this is a egregiously nebulous thing to say. People who say that they stand for minimization of suffering are also the same type of people who say they are for all the things that are good without ever elucidating what their idea of good is. Pol Pot probably said he was for minimization of suffering.

> you are equivocating "[my] ability to proselytize [a worldview based on minimizing suffering] on HN and elsewhere" to someone else's "ability to spread" antisemitism, which is obviously and transparently disingenuous.

It's hard to play mental forensics of what went through your mind. I'm not. I'm not saying there's equivalency, I think you misunderstood me because you are under impression that you can control or predict what people will decide is an acceptable speech. If you could control that then of course sign me up for no antisemitizem and all the proselytization.

And to repeat, I merely stated that you probably don't trust us to be your moral authority and we reciprocally don't trust you to be moral authority for us.

Furthermore, realization that we can't agree on any moral authority is reflected in free speech protections and democratic system itself. Again, unfortunate side-effect of free speech laws is that we let people speak obscenities just as it's unfortunate side-effect that we let murderers go if we can't prove their crime beyond reasonable doubt.