Yeah, and I think part of the whole thing is, it needs to be put into concrete terms. A lot of people (at least middle-class white people) aren't actually that frightened of the idea that law enforcement might possibly intercept one of their communications. You can say that it's impinging on our freedom, and that it has the possibility of creating an oppressive police state, but most people aren't actually afraid of that. The possibility seems too distant, and they assume it must be, "The police are monitoring communications for real problems, and if my communications get intercepted, it will just be accidentally, and who cares? I don't mind if the police know that I called my mother last Sunday."

I think it's a problem, but I can understand why people don't. So what I think "Last Week Tonight" was doing was to put it into terms where people can more readily see the problem.

It's not just that the police might know that you called your mother. It's that they might see your "dick pic". It's not just that they might accidentally intercept a random work email. It's that if your creepy ex-boyfriend has a job at the NSA, he can potentially read through your emails to your current boyfriend. It's not just that they might accidentally intercept one of your meaningless work emails, but that they could potentially read Obama's personal emails looking for political leverage.

And it's not just that they potentially have that kind of access, but that there's not really much oversight to prevent them from using that access irresponsibly, to detect when they're using that access, or to determine what they're doing with the information they glean.

I don't think that the interview was, in the end, very critical of Snowden. If anything, I think he came across as someone who, whether or not you agree with his decisions, had the best interests of the general public at heart. If anything, it made me feel very sorry for Snowden, especially when he had to watch video of people who didn't understand what he had done.

And I'd agree that it's the media's job to make the whole thing easily digestible, which is exactly what I think Oliver was doing in reducing the issue to "dick pics". He forced Snowden to explain the different programs in terms of "dick pics" because he knew that, otherwise, people wouldn't really understand or appreciate Snowden's explanations.

Maybe it's so that content creators can work in 8k. Like if you're working with 8k video files, you need an 8k screen to view your work at full resolution.

Of course, that would imply that these might be external displays to be used with a Mac Pro rather than iMacs. Also, it would seem strange, since Apple generally leaves that kind of niche market to others.

Also, it's often reasonable to pick your battles, and to not try to fix everything everywhere all the time. Is it really reasonable to expect Apple to only ever deal with good, moral people who have never done anything wrong? For Cook to criticize bigotry, should Apple refuse to sell iPhones to anyone who has any bigoted opinions?

Maybe, but what's wrong with that? Consider the hypothetical: What if Microsoft released Windows to the GPL, and other programmers took everything of use and moved it to Linux, and the result was better than Windows?

Microsoft could then just use Linux, with great compatibility with their other products and services. Nothing is lost.

Also, we'll find out that the NSA is now even more aware of all of our movements because they have access to the car's navigational records.

Is it that he wants to have fun, or that he wants to study something that interests him?

There are some people for whom it makes sense to go to college to "get a career". Really, those people shouldn't even be forced to go to college. We should have vocational training centers that are cheaper, more flexible, and more focused, in such a way that they can provide job training both for young people and for older people who are interested in changing paths.

Aside from vocational training, we should have serious centers of learning which study a variety of subjects for the sake of real education and the progress of civilization. Then, finally, we should have summer camps for 18 year-olds where they can get hammered, get laid, and root for their local minor-league slave-labor football team.

I don't understand why we insist on putting those three things together into huge institutions.

Agreed. I'm definitely not saying that there are no genuine brilliant "rock-stars" in these fields. Even in my field, boring old network/desktop support, every once in a while you find someone who just seems to be really good at diagnosing problems quickly, making intuitive leaps to conclusions that frequently turn out to be correct, or quickly assessing which risks to take. There are also people who are kind of amazing at dealing with users/customers, where someone will call in completely and justifiably pissed off, and the tech will listen and talk to them, and in the end the caller is satisfied.

Those people may have, to some extent, earned the right to "be a cowboy". However, the people who have earned that right are much more rare than the people who think that they have. And what's more, those people would often do better to color within the lines most of the time, and save "being a cowboy" for the relatively rare situations where it'll pay off. Sorry if I'm mixing metaphors.

So my point here is, even with those young, smart, motivated programmers who are working like coke-addicts, they might be making some big strides and getting a lot of things done. Still, at some point you want to take that flashy application and make it stable and reliable, and then a bunch of coke-addicted cowboys aren't going to succeed.

I don't think it's about "going to extremes" per se, but people have the expectation and demand for a single solution and a single "right answer". They're looking for a "correct belief system" that can't be challenged and will never require revision. They're looking for "the correct thing to study in school" to the exclusion of all other topics, which should guarantee you a good, easy job that makes you rich. They're expecting there to be a "correct place to invest your money" which will return large profits every year with no risk whatsoever. They want a "correct diet" where they can eat some specific combination of foods that will make them always healthy and in-shape.

And those things don't really exist. They can't exist. But a bunch of people get convinced that they've the "correct" belief system, they run around trying to get rid of all of the other ones. Someone tells us the "correct" field to study is law, and then we end up with a glut of lawyers. We hear on the news that the "correct" place to invest your money is home ownership, and we get a housing boom followed by economic collapse.

"Going to extremes" is the result. "Wanting easy answers" is the problem.

I'm not a programmer, but more in IT support, and but it seems like there's always someone doing the same thing: trying to be clever. Everyone wants to be a cowboy. Everyone wants to do something badass that serves their ego.

more often than not, doing a good job is more about paying attention, being thorough, and doing the obvious thing. Listen to the user, read the error messages, look in the relevant log file. Tell the user what to expect, and then keep them informed until the problem is resolved.

I wonder if that's that it's about in all professions. Maybe most jobs don't require special genius, but most of the secret is just being thorough and conscientious, and using some common sense.

I think it's an improvement aesthetically-- almost like, "How could it not be?" You went from ugly, busy, childish graphics to a blank. A plain color. It grates on me less.

But I would agree, that Windows 8 is a step back in terms of user interaction, in various ways big and small.

I'm not sure I agree there. I suppose you could use a drop shadow to help provide depth in order to differentiate the windows, but I don't think making them flat make them more confusing.

And this, I don't get. This is the second time I've heard someone claim that Windows 8 is the result of "hipsters", which leads me to conclude that you probably don't know what hipsters were.

Believe it or not, some people like the modern/metro/flat look. Personally, I think it's better than a lot of what came before. After all, look at the Windows XP interface. That blue/green/silver monstrosity is far worse than anything that came after, but the design of Vista was also pretty unappealing. Windows 7 is fine, but all of the windows have this weird thick border of fake frosted glass, including a cheesy fake reflection.

Until Windows 8, I always just went back to the "classic" look of Windows 2000. At least it was plain and unobjectionable. Windows 8 seems fine to me, aesthetically at least. As far as user interaction, it's worse than Windows 7, but aesthetically I think it's an improvement.

Your sentiment matches mine more or less, but I also think there's something that needs to be thrown into the debate: whether we should try to use grammatical/spelling/usage rules prescriptively is not really a question of science or history. You can say that attempts to prevent the evolution of language often fails, at least to some degree. You can point out that our current rules of "proper English" are not an absolute and unchanging set of rules that have "always been that way." However, none of that addresses the question of whether we should try to stick to a particular set of rules.

That's one of the things that people who are really into "descriptivism" as a theory often miss. Languages are dynamic, yes. There are various dialects with different rules, of course. Nobody is arguing about that. The question of whether we want to teach people to use the Oxford comma... well, that's something we get to decide, and not exactly a question for scientific study. To clarify: In trying to decide, we could devise a scientific study to attempt to find out which kind of comma usage is more confusing to more people, but we could still debate many other related issues.

Ultimately, if you write something like, "I should of gone to the store yesterday," it makes you look, at best, uneducated. Of course, we all have typos and little brain farts. And yes, if people keep saying "should of" and "could of", it may eventually be considered valid within some dialect. In fact, it's perfectly reasonable for an author to use that choice in dialog to convey the casualness with which someone is speaking, or the educational level of the speaker. However, until we have a whole separate dialect in which that's considered proper, it's supposed to be "should have" or "should've".

And that's another key issue here: these rules are contextual, but they are rules. You can have a dialect where the grammar is different, but then there are still rules, just a different set of rules. Slang usage can be different from "proper" usage, but even slang has a meaning and a set of rules that are understood and accepted.

I don't know that anyone is arguing that there should be a "one, true, proper English". However, in whichever context you're speaking English, there are rules for how you speak, and you should probably follow them. Knowing those rules might include knowing when to use slang, even when to break the "rules" in order to create an effect and clarify your meaning. But there are still rules.

It's important to understand why the debate is coming from on this issue. On the one hand, most people will agree that if you're going to perform executions, they should be "humane". Not everyone agrees on what that means. Performing painless executions have never been difficult, but whenever it's seriously suggested, people object that they don't want it to be completely painless. There are people who insist that the execution needs to be a form of punishment, and so it needs to always stay a bit scary and painful.

And you might think that's crazy, but there are enough people who think that way that it's politically infeasible to go against it. If a politician pushes to make executions completely painless, he'll be branded as "soft on crime".