zcrar70

This sentence did it for me - I definitely agree. There's a tendency to focus on life stories these days, and they're given the same importance as the accomplishments of the people whose stories they're looking at, which doesn't seem right.

How do you know that?

Contradictory?

Look I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings

You didn't - but you still didn't answer my question. What makes it OK for you to hijack Iranian government websites based on hearsay you read on the internet, but makes it bad for the Chinese to hijack the Dalai Lama's computers?

Now that this story is a couple of days old, there seems to be a little more perspective on this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660169

This is an article explaining how an echo chamber effect through Twitter and the net may have convinced people that the election was stolen, even though it may not have been. The situation isn't black and white like you painted it; things rarely are.

I don't suppose you'll even consider that you might be wrong, but it would certainly be nice if you had gone about it with a little less conceit.

I didn't think it was, but I'm once again surprised by the arrogance and self-righteousness of your statement. I thought that this kind of bombast had no place here, but perhaps I'm mistaken?

in a room full of critical thinkers

I take it you're including yourself from that group, but that I'm not a part of it? Or at least that's the implication I'm getting from your comment.

nonsensical relative moralism / You might not like it, but it exists nonetheless.

Err, no - it was actually a genuine question. When the Chinese hijack the Dalai Lama's computer network, they genuinely think that they are in the right. But you might disagree with that; what makes your right truer than theirs?

This type of question has confounded philosophers for thousands of years. It's not an easy problem to solve, and is fraught with contradictions. The best we've arrived at is that principles like 'equality' are enshrined in our constitutions; each of our opinions are considered to have equal importance, and that includes the opinions of the Chinese and the Iranians. You seem to show no awareness of this, which makes me think that your bombast and self-righteousness may be misplaced.

You may be right that there is such a thing as a higher moral ground, and you may even be right that it applies here; I think it would be difficult to define in an off-hand 10 line comment, but I'd be glad to read your attempt should you care to try.

That was my point, exactly.

Actually, my question was rhetorical, and your answer was arrogant.

> In a sham government, it's just some assholes who pretend to represent the people that own the buildings and websites, and they do so by use of force. To attack those websites is to attack those people, and some people deserved to be attacked.

You have no idea whether or not the Iranian government is legitimate, all you know is what you've read on a couple of western websites. To take the higher moral ground based yon your own sense of morality (which may be different to that of those people your purport to defend), and enforce your beliefs by force (by attacking a government website) makes you no better than the 'assholes' you claim to be defending against.

I think this type of speculation is how we arrived at this, once upon a time (before the printed press, TV and the internet): http://bestiary.ca/

As an aside, I don't actually think it's unfair for MS to block access to Windows to users who are using illegal copies of Windows. It's their product; it stays their property so long as you haven't pay for it. If you don't like that, use something else instead (like Linux for example) or pay for the license.

Please note I'm not accusing you in particular of using an illegal copy of Windows. I'm just expressing surprise at people getting outraged when their PCs stop booting up into Windows because they have invalid licences (there was a story in China recently, which as I remember it was reported with glee by one of the Mac sites.)

(PS you could always load up the hard disk on another machine and copy the data from there)

It's as if they feel that Rails is a direct product of their personalities, and that because Rails is so successful, anything they do is vindicated by that success. That's just the wrong approach.

In fact, that's the premise of Web Services, mashups, and Facebook applications, most of which involve the browser...

We are unable to validate your customer information and proceed with your order at this time.

"Wages are compensation for value creation"

This implies that compensation in general (not wages in particular) is always relative to value creation, which I don't think is true for most definitions of value (other than monetary.) 'Wages are compensation for the creation of financial value' would be more correct.

Nice analogy though :-)

They're definitely doing something wrong, and they definitely need to fix it.

I like your redesign, but I doubt that their existing design is what's losing them 1.2 billion a year.

Treat this as a pandemic emergency across your entire company / Immediately fire your entire web team, if you have one / [Booking a flight on your website] disturbed me so deeply that I vowed never to fly your airline again

This comes across as hysterical and out of proportion with the problem at hand. This detracts from your main points, and makes it more difficult for you to be taken seriously.