> Theoretically, it can guide operators to course-correct during a call to win over an angry customer
It's more like I feel like I have to get heated during every customer service call I might make now-a-days (at least when it comes to big companies) since calmly and rationally explaining your problem seems to give much worse results and waste much more of your own time.
This, the lauding of the engineering and business efforts involved mentioned in other comments on this article pales in comparison to the continued oppression of human rights in China and government censored access to information. Let's stop praising technology that doesn't do anything positive for the world.
> The need for a deep sense of caution when working on a new frontier struck me as more rational than a stance that basically boiled down to "let's assume we haven't overlooked any potential risks".
It's an economically profitable assumption for the particular businesses which happen to operate with it. Especially when they are able to lobby congress to encourage this point of view.
> Esser has his reasons - "Short reminder: Europeans are not allowed to disclose vulns privately to a foreign company like Apple without registering dual-use export"
I don't think of this as strictly career advancement. I think he is making an important legal and political point. If there were never serious issues while we operate under said laws, then they would never be changed or subject to question either.
> The citizens here are to blame. The police are just giving the public what it wants. It's a county full of McMansions and extreme paranoia
Your comment makes it sound like the fear and paranoia are a natural consequence of the environment and the US citizens are responsible for this kind of police force.
Fear and paranoia exist in the US primarily due to the media portrayal of certain events and the fact that political parties and certain corporate interests have a lot to gain from cultivating this mentality in the population.
> [1] It's notable that this story takes place just across the Potomac from where those parents got in trouble with the police for letting their kids walk home less than a mile from school.
Yes, for example the safety of children in the US - I have not seen any statistically significant evidence to support the statement that they are less safe today than they would have been 50 years ago. This is a very likely case of media and culturally induced paranoia.
Yes, but the last 25 years, for what? Unlike North Korea or China (our major economic partner) Cuba has neither a greater record of human rights abuses nor Nuclear weapons.
Edit: I'm not arguing Castro is not bad, but as far as dictators goes he is probably a lesser evil; as it stands US Foreign policy has done nothing to displace Castro* but a great deal to oppress the Cuban populace.
*(although we did displace a number of democratically elected governments in other Latin American nations) -
This is the modern narrative for revolutions in Latin/South America? "Middle Class", really? Because well fed people providing for their families decided to take up arms? Or because the well-fed were a tiny minority, and the rest lived in poverty under the economic oppression of former colonialists?
> The US didn't ruin Cuba's economy. Cuba did it to itself
This is almost entirely fiction, although I'm sure this is the common political narrative. Cuba is a small island in the middle of the Caribbean cut-off from it's biggest and most developed trading partner, which would have been what 70-90%+ of the economy?
But yes of - course the arch-villain fidel castro and those damn commies.
Yeah except the US basically ruined Cuba's economy with sanctions for what 50+ years? And another ~25 after there was no more soviet threat - just to stick it to the damn unrepentant commies. Because forcing the rest (majority) of the populace to experience economic hardship for dozens of years is really an admirable foreign policy.
> PowerShell returns objects, not strings. Which means they can have as much information as you like without being overly verbose :-)
How does the user know exactly which output he is going to get? The formatting program cannot know anything about default expected output - so it either must be specified explicitly, or objects must distinguish between default_for_formatter_to_output fields and more_verbose_hidden_fields - I'm really not a fan of the amount of man <command_name> using Unix involves, - but is the alternative really much better?
I'm not familiar with PowerShell, but wouldn't following through with this principle mean that the default program has to give maximally verbose output to the piped formatter, since the formatter can only filter rather than extend the original command.
I imagine to achieve the default functionality your command must be significantly more verbose, if this philosophy is followed through 100%, or you have a lot of per-configured default formatters (and you have to remember what to pipe to which). Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, it's very neat in principle though.
That's a narrow way of looking at it. More likely rule by government will simply be replaced with rule by cooperations (e.g. Gibson's trilogy) - it's not an unexpected movement since the role of governments has weakened significantly since the time when a large standing army in Europe gave dominance to a nation.
Will it be worse for the average person/family? Probably, yet I tend towards seeing it as a natural historical movement rather than some kind of craftily-perpetrated evil. For example Spengler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler) writes about the dominance of money and commercial interest as being the primary value at the aged point of a civilizations development (cf. the last couple centuries of ancient Rome).
I second the Thinkpad. I've been using a X1 Carbon w/ Archlinux and it's great, almost everything works straight out of the box - and the archwiki for Lenovo products is quite comprehensive (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Lenovo).
The one thing to be wary off is some alterations they made to the keyboard/trackpad in a few of the models (I think they may have reversed the changes most recently, but make sure you are getting the classic one).
> Either way enough relatives of deceased drug abusers testified at sentencing, and enough heartless chat logs of DPR's were introduced as evidence, to rather eviscerate the idea that Silk Road was completely "victimless".
By that logic relatives of deceased drunk-driving victims should be testifying against bars and liquor store proprietors as well.
I think while most expected this kind of outcome, the comments coming out in support are really a round-about kind of way of expressing various posters underlying opinion about U.S. drug laws and policies as ridiculous, draconian, counter-productive and harmful.