Well no, what I'm saying is true even though there are some rational concerns about nuclear power. The fact that there are rational concerns doesn't prevent some people from having an irrational fear.

There are actually quite a number of environmentalists who have suggested that we should use nuclear power in order to get off of fossil fuels. I suspect a lot of the problem is political. There are still a lot of people with an irrational fear of nuclear power on one side of the issue, and on the other side there are people who support fossil fuels just to say "fuck you" to "the hippies". And that's before you even get into the lobbying and propaganda from fossil fuel producers.

It's an uphill battle to do anything, even if it completely makes sense and has broad support, because there are always ignorant people and entrenched interests.

No, because there's a very good chance that you're going to have to use computers for their jobs, and because using a computer effectively for your work requires a greater degree of understanding than watching TV.

I've done IT support for quite a long time, and I don't expect most people to be able to do what I do. However, most of the businesses I work with would be much more effective, and could lower their IT costs substantially, if people had even the most basic understanding the logic of how computers work, even if they couldn't write a single line of code.

Yeah, I don't think everyone needs to be able to program well, but I do think our public education system to aim to give everyone a very basic understanding of what a computer does and what it does not do, how a computer works, and what programming is. Computers have become too much a part of our lives, and too vital to our economic and social systems, for people to be completely ignorant of how they work.

I also agree that it makes sense to connect computer science to math. Really, I'd want to restructure our math education to include logic and statistics (and how to spot bad use of statistics). It you teach logic, math, statistics, and algebra, then computer science seems like a natural part of that curriculum.

Part of the problem is, these two things are working at cross purposes. Contrary to your instinct, making a language easy to learn will also probably harm the cause of fostering interest.

The problem is, from a sort of detached, scientific, logical point of view, it sounds like a great idea to have a language that is simple, easy to learn, containing definite rules, with no irregularity, and leaving little room for ambiguity. The problem is, people don't want language to work that way. It's not specifically that they want it to be hard to learn, but they want a language with nuance and ambiguity. We like puns and plays on words. People often enjoy and appreciate slang, or unusual word choice. And beyond that, people don't particularly like being told how to use language. It's something we learn culturally, and it's difficult to lose those habits. Picking up a language that no one actually speaks is difficult, since it has no purpose.

So if you really want to develop a clean, simple, clear, concise language, you should probably plan to abduct a lot of babies and raise them yourself in order to force them to learn it. And then, prepare yourself, because they'll start developing slang, and using the language in ways that you didn't expect and might not approve of.

I think his point was that, if you know what you're doing and you do these sorts of things regularly, yes, it's pretty simple and quick. However, if you're not used to the process because you're not doing it frequently, it becomes more cumbersome and frustrating. For example, on Windows, the process has changed a bit over the years-- not the process of issuing the key, of course, but exactly where do you go in Windows to go through the whole process? What does that process look like? If you want to use the same cert for Exchange, SMTP, IMAP, or other services, where do you go to do that? I couldn't tell you off the top of my head. The whole thing is pretty different from one version to another, so I'd probably have to poke around for 20 minutes just looking for the controls. Similarly, in Linux, I do it infrequently enough to need the instructions in front of me. If you ask me to put an SSL cert on some random shared hosting account, I'll have to go dig through the documentation for that host. My experience has been that the whole process is not hard, but it's not extremely obvious either. You need to be a decent admin who does it regularly to breeze through it.

Now you might ask, what's wrong with that? Shouldn't we expect the people setting up web servers to be decent admins? And that'd be great if we could leave it at that. However, if you've ever dealt with IT professionals, you'll know that the majority of them are not very good at their jobs. Believe me, I've supervised a lot of them, and even the ones who think they're super-brilliant hot-shots are often pretty sub-par. Even the ones that are pretty good usually have their weaknesses, and we all make mistakes.

So honestly, I agree, it should be easier. The process in general reminds me of some pieces of software that I've installed, where after you run the installer, you're supposed to manually run some commands on the CLI, edit some configuration files, edit the registry, or other manual tasks. That feeling of "This isn't hard, but it seems like you haven't thought this all through. You should have streamlined this process a bit."

I think part of the idea here was that we should all be using SSL. Encrypting web traffic shouldn't be a fringe case of "something used by people with money and expertise". Somehow, we should work on making it the default behavior. It should be cheap (or free) and easy, and setting up a web server without it should provide a bunch of warnings. Hell, visiting a website without it should generate warnings. But if you want to get to that point, then you'll probably need to streamline the process of getting a certificate, as well as making it cheaper.

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.