rickmb

I hadn't seen the post you mentioned, but the whole thing was so dripping in arrogance and a complete disdain for Wikipedia and its international users and contributors it is begging to get panned.

Basically, it is the original post that is not constructive to the point of being hostile. There is very little "polite" about it.

Maybe it should have been ignored rather than reacted to, but this kind of thing would provoke a negative response anywhere.

Also, I suspect the whole scenario of arrogant designers presenting a design that completely ignores the needs and identity of the client and the audience, interspersed with arrogant statement declaring their own superiority is not entirely unfamiliar to many here. At least my first reaction was "oh great, that again".

This is not a way to start an friendly open discussion or get constructive criticism. It's a provocation, which is also a perfectly valid way to start a debate, but it does set the tone.

I mean, how insane is it when people have to work with technology on their job they've ditched 5-10 years ago at home for being too outdated to be even be give away? There comes a point where enterprise IT loses all credibility.

At this pace, during my lifetime homeless people in third world countries will have phones that are more modern and powerful computers than office workers will have at their desk. The practices enterprise IT currently still holds on to don't seem sustainable to me.

I can ditch Apple within 24 hours if need be.

Ironically, it was using Windows until the late 90s before moving to Linux that taught me the value of avoiding vendor lock-in.

Of course, this means forgoing some of the wonderful features Apple offers in exchange for some less elegant solution, but I can live with that.

Paying with credit card is in itself rare in most of the world outside the US, where debit cards and cash are way more common. My guess is, 95% of all locals and non-US visitors automatically pay with cash and don't even notice the Visa-only signs.

Not having the local currency on you and waving your credit card in situations where it's considered inconvenient and inappropriate is a very typically American tourist thing to do.

And I really can't think of anything within the Olympic venue that would be considered appropriate to pay for with credit card.

It matters because the economic argument is the only marginally justifiable motivation for the heavy handed enforcement of copyright over civil rights. And I'm being very generous in using the word "justifiable".

> People pirate media because they don't want to pay for it.

People pirate media because they understand they shouldn't have to pay for it. We pay for services rendered (Netflix) or goods delivered (DVD's). Everything else is either tax or extortion.

You know, passive phrases like "owning the rights" are so insidiously misleading. Nobody "owns rights", all that actually happens is that the rights of others get limited. That's how this convoluted artificial construct works.

No, I'm not denying that that leaves us with the original problem of stimulating the creation and distribution of original work.

But millions have woken up from the shared illusion of copyright, and no amount of enforcement, DRM or just incessantly repeating the words "stealing", "pirate" etcetera is going to put them back to sleep.

Half the topics on HN would be very different if you took away the political context. Unless you only want to discuss programming languages at an academic level, it's almost impossible to ignore the politics.

Said password is therefor used a lot, with a lot of chances for interception. But most of all, it's used for trivial matters in which password typing is a nuisance (installing a cheap iPhone app), which pretty much invites people to use a weak, easy to type password.

iCloud should have multiple, completely separate forms of authentication for services like Find My Mac, instead of using the same login for wiping all your Apple hardware as you use to download Angry Birds...

Because, like soylent green, companies mostly consist of people...

Why on earth did they have to mess with that?

As I'm typing this, I'm trying to dislodge the L-shaped plug from my 13" Macbook, and it's truly impossible to do that by accident.

On the other side of the equation, I'm far from unfamiliar with tripping on the cord, but maybe that's just my clumsiness.

(This is especially insulting if the site in question represents a company/brand that actually operates internationally.)

Also, English speakers are not limited to countries with English as an (un)official language. Just an example, LinkedIn had 3 million Dutch users before they introduced a Dutch language interface. I don't know what business you're in, but that's a lot of creditcards...

Seriously? Seriously?

I mean... no, never mind. "Confused" doesn't even begin to describe it. Given that the US doesn't have an official language, India is more of an English speaking country than the US is.

This was not some free beta, but a product I'm supposed to fork over a license fee for, and hope the issues get solved within a year. That way of doing business is just not on.

I'd say, no, it's not time to integrate web notifications.

Especially if you want a consistent user experience across browsers.

Nice informative writeup on the current state though.

I checked the date to see if it wasn't written in 1982 before I closed the tab.

If you can manage that, well, you've got a bunch of hackers with some hardware, an internet connection and time on their hands. The rest will pretty much sort itself out.

In most times and places, the institution would be called "State Security". Which is a commonly used name for the main instrument of repression in totalitarian countries (for instance Stasi or Securitate, both of which went by the full name "Department of State Security".)

Most free countries have given their national security agency a rather more neutral name and a less powers to distance themselves from such practices. The US has chosen to actually start an agency with that name and give it unprecedented powers. You do the math.

Given Digg's history, it's a bit of a red flag. However, it all depends on how this technical debt is managed. If this is an alpha release under the heading "release early, release often" and the tech debt is known, there's nothing alarming about it. But if this is truly considered a final product than it makes you question how capable these people are to revive Digg.

Either way, some of these issues suggest simply a lack of skill/knowledge rather than deliberate tech debt. That's not a good sign.

In other words, they deny having done what they consider not acceptable, so that can't be what they are apologizing for.

"I absolutely didn't hit you. I'm apologize. I never hit people, that would be unacceptable."

Doesn't make any sense. They just stuck the word "apologize" in between saying how they did nothing wrong and denouncing something they claim they didn't do in the first place.

So the account would have been restored if Guy Adams did as they told him. That's just the standard "he shouldn't have resisted arrest" line of deflection.

Stating how right you are and always have been is quite the opposite of an apology. It's not even a well constructed "non-apology apology", it's just randomly inserting the word "apologize".

They continue to defend the decision to suspend the account because it contained "private" information, claiming they can't make the distinction (big.boss at bigco.com, gimme a break...), even though by now various media have dug up plenty of incidents where publishing unambiguously private information has not lead to suspension.

And to add insult to injury: the account wasn't restored because Twitter reversed their decision, but because NBC retracted the complaint.

Seems to me like NBC giveth and NBC taketh away. Twitter merely apologizes for, well, what exactly? Being the messenger?

I think I'll pass on putting my email through their systems. Although I have to admit this looks way better than GMail. I hope this inspires Google to do something about their interface design.

It's a corporate business address, which makes it as socially acceptable as "send all your complaints to NBC c/o Gary Zenkel", and not against Twitter's policy.

Not to mention the fact that "terrorism" itself is a propaganda term. No organisation calls itself "terrorist", and it is used to label a broad range of tactics. There are plenty of terrorist organisations that have never killed anyone or never targeted innocent civilians.

This focuses completely on the most extreme forms of terrorism, the islamic extremists with their suicide attacks. A form of terrorism that has been quite rare in the West, despite all of the publicity. And one could argue that those have been quite successful so far: with only a few successful attempts, they've gotten our full, almost daily, attention for over a decade now.

Or in other words, the package deal in which I have to pay for content that is 90% irrelevant to me, distributed (even online) in a way I consider quite inconvenient.

Which is exactly why I only read a very small subset of NYT's content via HN. Unfortunately, there's no convenient way to pay for that kind of usage.

But I don't feel sorry for the newspapers about that. They've had decades to invest in solving that problem, and most of them have invested exactly 0 cents. They've thrown millions at online publishing and keeping their offline business going, but when it came to investing in the one thing that could possibly give their future readers what they actually want, they just bitched about "the market" not providing them with a convenient solution.

That is not so much caused by a lack of math as it is a surplus of delusional optimism. No amount of math will ever beat that. Not only is it a bad example, I can't think of any better examples, and apparently neither can the author.

It may be that my utter incompetence in math makes me less than objective, but I fail to see any convincing argument in the entire article.

We're talking entire books who's sole purpose is to promote or support the use of Amazon. Clearly Apple has no problem with those.