It was just so overbearingly beaten head-first into the ground for two hours non-stop and was already dealt with more depth and subtlety in the original that the lack of imagination was glaringly in the writing. The slightly disturbing difference is that in the original, it was the perfection of uniformity and control that was portrayed as not just evil, but a fraud that ultimately failed at the hands of the creative outlier. "Legacy" takes that outlier and has him self-immolate to end his delusions of utopia -- which if you recall from the original, was simply freedom of expression in general -- "you're ruining my zen thing, maaaaan" and his progeny simply wander off to let the corporate board do their jobs so they can happily live off their dividends without bothering to do, well, anything.

The fact the the writing just plain sucked regardless of the message and its implications vis. the original deserves a right drubbing. The fact that the message of Legacy is an absolutely toxic perversion of the original that can basically be summed up as "stupid hippie, shut up about all this peace love and freedom crap, cash your checks, go screw in the woods and leave us alone to rule the world" is actually rather chilling.

All seems wonderfully noble until you realize they were not impossible fights -- by the prima facie fact of having been won -- and, barring becoming human barbeque, which quite arguably is the ultimate act of losing, "winning" requires compromise. In the case of Mandela, what could be a clearer act of compromise than Truth and Reconciliation? An uncompromising victor simply would have necklaced the lot of the bastards in the National Party.

"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong." --Bertrand Russell

Unless you are willing to drop all manner of financial instruments in general and reduce every eventuality to what people and businesses can afford with cash on-hand -- and, ergo, deny service to those without at that very instant of service -- this dog don't hunt.

The mandate was never on the table, and that was pretty much a deal killer for ANY conservative.

The mandate was demanded by AHIP, which is a group of, shall we say, not exactly left-leaning CEOs.

Hell, my frakking GYM solved that problem. Scan card, picture shows up on screen. Attendant does a quick head check, says "Hi [name]," waves through. If the picture doesn't match, Tiny goes for a tackle.

...or that, under Larry, it is getting significantly more expensive with no increase in benefit.

Honestly, it almost comes off as personal. Do a quick image search for "Steve Jobs and" vs. "Larry Ellison and." The first page of Steve are with Bill Gates, Woz, Eric Schmidt and others. The first page of Larry consists of nothing but Larry, his yacht, his wife and his McLaren.

Then do a google for "Oracle"+"Sues"+"Java."

Larry is being a dick and Steve is telling him to fuck off and takes his newly acquired toys with him.

XCode.

Baloney...

I run at least five flavors of Windows and hafter as many Linux distros, am pretty solidly in the Ubuntu camp. I have a Mac and an iPhone and am going to be buying more for a laundry list of reasons.

HOWEVER, the first thing that struck me about the Mac and the iPhone was how much they did NOT "just work." I was ready to be converted. Oh, please, let me for once just buy a !@#$ing box and be able to plug it in and start working. It was NO different to me than setting up a Windows or Ubuntu box. The OS wasn't fully configured or even current. I had to install everything myself only to find it wanted to automatically run 2.9GBs of patches, rebooting about six times in the process. I didn't have a working computer until the next day.

The difference is that Apple has an army of well trained baby sitters who will, for a fee, put up with this crap for you and coddle your ego telling you what a special, pretty smart and interesting person you are and then hand your shiny box back.

I refuse to pay for that sort of saccharine bullshit, so I'm left with a computer that is just as much a pain in my ass as any other.

There's no constitutional authorization to forbid private citizens from committing murder...

Or, perhaps, the solution is to accept the fact that, yes, you may do (as a matter of proven fact) whatever you want with that hardware, including installing whatever-the-hell OS and applications you want. This, however, removes any and all expectation of functionality of the original configuration.

So, if you end up with a device that looks like the computer equivalent of a riced-out Honda Civic and performs like a Segway on AAAs with legos for wheels, though it now does lots of crazy shit no one else with similar bog-stock devices gives a shit about, don't make it a high-minded politco-social issue. The normies just think you're a dork -- and you are free and welcome to be a dork -- hell, some normies may even find you "adorkable" and might even date you.

You may actually end up with a more useful/enjoyable device -- for you -- and you are free to spend all your time lovingly caressing it and playing dress-up. Congratulations, you won, it does _precisely_ what _you_ want. It's just, well, very few other people actually give a shit. Again, do not make this a grand social issue. Some people just aren't that invested in their fucking phones.

It's funny, because the problem is the same on both sides: Ego. Steve Jobs' planetoid ego permeates everything about Apple. However, having screamed and nearly smashed my jailbroken iPhone as it melted into a mess of cobbled-together crap in dependency chaos, it strikes me that the collective egos of the Jailbreakers are just as bad. They assume free is better in all cases, no matter if that means completely obliterating the actual intended purpose of the item in question or making the continued use of it such a tiresome exercise in maintenance that it might as well be a brick. No, better is better. Free is free. The twain _rarely_ meet. When they do, glorious, but let's not fool ourselves.

It reminds me of the old Laurie Anderson bit:

"In our country, you’re free and so you’re born and so they say, You’re free, so happy birthday. And even if you were born to lose--even if you were a complete wreck when you were born--you might still grow up to be president ... because you’re free." ...but, you won't.

So in effect what the Russian Minister said the VOA and BBC in the 60s through 90s was an act of aggression.

Good or bad, it was, and quite deliberately so, but don't give them too much credit. The internal forces were present from the beginning and would have been sufficient without Scorpions and Billy Joel concerts.

...one that is not running.

If you're walling off a listening service to /all/ external connections, that service shouldn't be running in the first place. In Windows-land, sure, it's easier to turn the firewall on and call it a day, but it's an (ostensibly necessary) ass-backwards solution to what should fundamentally be a non-problem.

I just arbitrarily pulled up the specs on the Seagate Barracuda ST3500630AS 500GB SATA Hard Drive. Its Mean Time Before Failure is 700,000 hours. That's EIGHTY YEARS. They have an annual failure rate of 0.34 %. Are Seagate lying to you when they say your hard drive probably won't fail until sometime in 2090, yet your data center just had three drives fail within six months?

Now, that's a fairly isolated piece of hardware where you could rightly expect that the reported stats given compliance with environmental limits should be fairly independent. Yet, not only do people "get" the fact that, no, their hard drive probably won't be happily spinning into next century, they /plan/ on it knowing that at one end of the curve, it is /expected/ that some portion will perform far, far less than the mean.

Your network connection failing to deliver even an arbitrary /average/ speed as you connect to Ouagadougou /obviously/ is subject to many, many external considerations. I would expect all spittle and histrionics from your average schmo on the street, but to have a bunch of dweebs pretending they don't get it is pretty silly. Yeah, if your connection is consistently falling far short of spec, fine, investigate, complain, switch, whatever. But this OMGCon$piracy b.s. is just stupid.