Correct, it had essentially nothing to do with environmentalism at all, the Unibomber's Manifesto as reduced to its simplest thesis is: technology necessitates regulation and conformity, as a result technology necessitates increased levels of control over people. With increased technology we will require increased control to the point where we will be automatons controlled by a central authority in order for society to continue functioning. The Unibomber Manifesto is incredibly well written I recommend everybody reading it. I expected it to be a crazy person rant but it is extremely lucid and he sets up his arguments well with assumptions and conclusions from those assumptions. For the most part his conclusions seem to be sound--the problem generally comes down to whether or not you accept his stated assumption that technology inevitably leads to increased dependence on society/authority.

I think historically that is true. In order to live in a city you need to rely on its sewage system. In order to use a computer you need electricity. In order to get electricity you have to tie yourself to a large grid and buy electricity. In order to use the internet you have to adhere to the standards and interfaces. In order to live in the city you have to buy your food. In order to not piss off your neighbors you need to control your impulses and desires to avoid offense and promote harmony among cohabitants. In order to manage those who don't self manage we need police. In order to travel and co-exist in society we need transportation which necessitates a large government run transportation network or owning a vehicle. Owning a vehicle or using a transportation network requires regulation of roads for traffic laws and emission standards etc etc etc.

If we did extrapolate that out I would agree that we might need to consider destroying technology and regressing. But I would disagree that it's the case. What we have seen is that we've all been wired for telephones--but now we're moving to wireless. We all are connected to the grid but Solar and Geothermal is rapidly reducing or eliminating that. Our dependence on all showing up to a factory is evaporating. Technology both enslaves us but it's a bell curve--go far enough down that technological curve to magic and it frees us to live where we want, it frees us from reliance on large government/corporate entities for basic services. If we achieved a Star Trek level replicator society or a Matrixesque virtual reality where our physical location was irrelevant we could be free of consideration or dependence on others without the Unibomber's dystopian world of drugs and oppression. The weakest point though is that in his manifesto he acknowledges that it's pretty much impossible to technologically regress and that it would require 100% buy-in from the population to sustain. Ultimately I felt like he just wanted it out there so that if his predicted apocalypse occurred he would get credit for predicting it--it didn't read as if he actually had any hope of his goals being achieved. In that regard he is very much like the California Shooter, it was a final act of despair with no real hope of changing the world--just self gratification.

I view that as fear mongering. I minimum wage employee costs :

$7.50 an hour
* 40 hours
* 52 weeks
-----------------
$15,600 in wages x2 overhead = $31,200 a year.
* Let's say leasing a machine for 3 years = $100,000

That's already very expensive. You can get a pretty fancy machine for $100,000 today. The *moment* the technology is there to replace a worker those workers are gone. There isn't someone going "Hmmm, well the machine costs $130,000 over 3 years and the person costs $100,000... but if we increase minimum wage then we should buy the machine instead!" It's purely a technological problem today. The technology isn't ready to replace most fast food workers. The cost of the machinery to replace them is already lower. You can buy an industrial robot and a very high quality lidar system for $100,000 today. The component costs are *already* less than a minimum wage employee.

4. I'm pretty much certain that the DOD uses bitlocker to secure all of their systems--even in warzones. If the NSA was pressuring them to add a backdoor I imagine Microsoft would knock on a senior DOD officer's door and go "Hey, uhhh, the NSA over there wants us to open up your data to possible breach. Go talk some sense into them."

I had read early on that most of the code they had stripped out was code supporting Windows and OSX. Is that true or was that just the initial pass? Dumping hundreds of thousands of lines of code is impressive--but if it comes at the cost of multiplatform support it's not surprising.

It sounds like it's an incompatibility with Ext4.

I've got 10 drives and haven't had any trouble with mine or anyone I know. But here we have at least 4 instances on slashdot of Ext4 failures. Maybe the controller freaks out with Ext4 somehow.

Oh the Irony of someone who claims to have strong social skills missing an obvious sociological/cultural argument, not a personal argument.

Creative Cloud isn't really a cloud service. It's just a website that authorizes your licenses every 2 months and provides an auto-updating service. They've never claimed Creative Cloud could never fail. They've honestly never even pitched it as cloud computing.

A lot of those external card cases aren't useful to me and I'm the prime target demographic (3D rendering and RED RAW rendering). What I really desperately NEED is faster networking. If USB Superspeed or Thunderbolt can deliver a switched SAN solution for shared storage I will be over the moon.

Thunderbolt is on paper very close to Infiniband. I would love to see OpenFabrics deliver a software solution and Intel to show off a switch.

Furthermore does this mean if a politician says something super dumb/racist/crass they can actually force news outlets to not report on it?

Not really possible. Usually people expect very specific responses. Even if we "upgraded it" then everyone would have to rewrite their code. Some people may never rewrite the code so we'll by necessity then also have a "legacy mode" for those older solutions. All of the attackers will simply communicate in "legacy mode" and we won't be able to tell if they're a way out of date grandmother on a 10 year unpatched machine or else a hostile application.

That sounds great in theory, but at this point I'm kind of reserved to the fact that "resistant to mischief" just means we would have a year or two of peace before the inevitable flaws were so totally exploited that we were right back where we started.

Or it should have been setup in such a way that we had no TLDs in the first place. It's just obnoxious to have CocaCola.org Cocacola.net Cocacola.org Cocacola.tv Cocacola.biz etc.

Just have CocaCola. The end. Nothing more.

Really? How is spying on an Australian being a traitor to America? Are they being a "traitor" to some organization I'm unaware of where we swore an oath to keep Australians free from snooping? Is there a constitutional amendment I missed where foreigners living in foreign territory are protected from unreasonable search and seizure?

To the original poster's point though even if we lose a 777 every 20 years due to a design flaw, the money is better spent feeding the 20,000 people who die every day of starvation.

But to be the rebuttal to that:
If it costs $350m to find the fault with this plane then it'll still be a net win for the starving people. If the plane also costs $350m and this saves 2 planes over the next 30 years of service then you've netted an extra $350m in savings that could be put towards saving starving people. And if you save 500 passengers that translates generally into about another $500m in wages. So if you have a 30% tax rate (normalish) you've got another $150m in tax revenue that could go towards food assistance programs.

Whether you pay or not, you're licensing the source. So it's both open and restricted in what you can do with the code. Similarly Epic can both gives you the source code to Unreal Tournament and restrict how you use it.