They also just don't have much in the way of resources, so even things that are doable from a software engineering standpoint may well be impractical from an available man-hours standpoint, and pretty much anything is probably taking time away from some other aspect of OpenBSD development.

I agree that ripping out platforms they don't care about is not the maximally altruistic path; but is the delta between the altruistic path and the more altruistic path really 'selfishness'? That just seems to strain the definition a bit...

Really, netflix, congratulations. Very disruptive of you and all that. And the transition from a primarily USPS model to a substantially streaming service (barring that one really embarrassing fuckup that you could hardly have handled worse, oh how we chuckled over here...) Really sticking it to the stogy incumbents.

Now, it would be a pity if your customers were to... experience service disruptions... would it not?

I think I chose 'Tax Act' based on price to e-file federal and state; but I was very displeased. Not so much by 'Tax Act', or even by the taxation(I, um, did my best to refrain from calculating how many years I'd need to buy Uncle Sam another slipped F-35 deadline, or a Literal Coffin Ship); but by the fact that I was, largely because of lobbying by Intuit and friends, paying to re-type numbers from a variety of forms the IRS already has. Seriously?

Yeah, sure, if you have some sort of complex arrangement get thee to a tax accountant, maybe even a suitable lawyer; but this was just redundancy for its own sake: I took a W-2 and a bunch of 1099s and a few other bits and pieces, all provided by various institutions to both me and the feds, and then retyped them into another form so that they could be submitted to the feds. WTF? That wouldn't even make sense for free, much less paying.

C'mon, IRS, just let me see what you think my return should be(you have to calculate it anyway when deciding who to audit) and I'll tell you if I have any changes or disputes. We'll both save time and trouble. How about it?

It beats the alternative of providing the upgrades for free to the people who can most easily afford them, in the service of maintaining a good, solid, hierarchy.

Doesn't 'cheapskate' have a somewhat perjorative connotation, either edging into 'stingy' (if talking about spending on socially normative things) or 'penny wise, pound foolish' (if talking about good sense in short and long term cost/benefit thinking)?

From what the article decribes, Amazon isn't so much 'cheapskate' as operating perfectly sensibly given their scale, cutting unnecessary (but usually bundled) components, and not giving in to poorly justified; but commonly assumed, habits like sending Important Employees to fly business class.

I can understand why they would be scaring their competitors pretty seriously; but I'm not sure that I see the 'cheapskate' bit.

You don't bring in machines for their imagination, you bring them in for their repeatability and speed on something the imagination person has already worked out. At least for the moment, this means that automating-out all your skilled workers is probably a bad strategy, similar to eliminating all entry level positions and then wondering where the talented internal hiring options went.

(It also seems to be the case that, for all the advances in fancy-CAD and haptic feedback immersive somethingsomething, it's still pretty hard to beat having access to some actual materials and machine tools for the designing process. Sure, it all has to get CADed out in the end; but humans have a lot of experience manipulating objects. Somewhat less with observing 3d renders of objects floating in virtual space behind their monitor as they click at them.)

My judgement is probably biased, because I loath my phone and its interruptions; but 'smart watches' appear to be devices that you attach to your wrist because your phone is configured to bother you so often that you need a second, more easily accessible, device to provide a summary of the incoming demand on your time and attention in order to see if you should follow through with taking your phone out of your pocket.

Maybe I'm just getting bitter in my old age and shouting at those damn smartphones to get off my lawn; but if something isn't important enough to take my phone out of my pocket for, the fact that I'm being alerted to it is a software configuration defect that should be solved by my phone shutting the hell up, not by it phoning my watch to demand attention.

Arguably, the existence of such a device is an argument against the utility of the 'smartwatch' notion: Both are wrist-mounted; but that cuff-thing is basically an entire phone (at least before the horrors of the Phablet Era) strapped to your wrist, science-fiction-communicator-widget style. A direct refusal to sacrifice the screen size, computational and battery power, and other advantages of a larger device.

There's certainly an argument to be made for such things; but as an alternative to just storing your phone in your pocket, not as a different class of device.

Depends on how much credit you want to give for predictions that correctly interpret the purpose and effect of the shift; but provide no technical detail whatsoever.

Would the grim ruminations of the marxists concerning the distribution of the means of production qualify? They tend to either be writing about smokestack industry or broad historical trends, specific implementation unspecified; but some of them would probably feel pretty well validated by the (substantial) shift from computers that provide programming tools by default, to computers that don't ship with any; but can run some if you obtain them elsewhere, to computers that explicitly and artificially forbid essentially all program production(on the device itself, if you SSH into a real computer Apple and friends don't much care what you type on their shiny tablets).

I don't think that the sort of techies who like techology enough to enthusiastically prognosticate about the future of it would have guessed "In the future, computers will be opaque closed boxes. And consumers will fucking love it with the same intensity and in far greater numbers than you did your obscurantist geek box. Where is your god now, nerd?"

I don't remember exactly when the move started; but 'mainstream' anti-vaxers switched to the "green our vaccines"/"reduce the toxins"/"too many too soon" line some years ago to help distinguish themselves from the fringe 'Vaccines sully the bodily purity and weaken the vital essences with Aborted Fetus cells and zionist NWO population control schemes!!!' anti-vaxers.

Shockingly, this move has not led them to embrace any of the vaccines that have been reformulated by popular demand to reduce or eliminate whatever originally had them worried, nor has it led to any apparent interest in working with the toxicology people to determine what level of 'greenness'/'reduced toxins' is acceptable. Nor has there been a rush of interest to vaccinate according to some sort of reduced-pace schedule(though some individual doctors have various ones that they prefer).

Obviously, it would be hugely unethical and pointlessly cruel to advocate the use of vaccines whose risks outweigh their benefits (and, since vaccination for a selection of potentially-serious childhood diseases, as well as less common but more serious diseases, if we have the vaccine available and you are in a suitable risk group, is so enormously common, this is an area of medicine where studying safety both before and after approval is money well spent); but, despite their rhetorical shift, there appears to be no evidence that the 'We don't hate vaccines, we just want safe ones!' groups are actually at all interested in even setting goalposts that vaccines would have to meet to be accepted, much less reviewing evidence as to whether or not existing vaccines do meet those standards.

Honestly, I liked them better before their shift. There is a certain intellectual honesty to embracing a position that others see as lunacy and then fighting like a rabid weasel against all evidence. Not a...healthy...kind of intellectual honesty; but a kind of intellectual honesty. Mealy-mouthed disingenuous bullshit, though, lacks that virtue, and aggressively so. Even more cynically, it uses the cause of actual epidemiology, toxicology, and medical monitoring, safety standards, approval protocols, and other (vital) elements of keeping medicine honest and more useful than it is harmful as camouflage for a load of anti-scientific nonsense.

If they were willing to actually come out with some some sort of target (even if it seems pointlessly low according to current data), they'd just be the cautious wing of an actually scientific exercise in epidemiology and toxicology. As it is, no goals are defined, no data accepted, no improvement is ever good enough. It's pure smokescreen.

I agree that it isn't a bigger issue in terms of expected ongoing pain/users affected, since the issue with trusting too many shady/incompetent CAs is showing no signs of real solution ('pinning' is an OK hack, so far as it goes; but it doesn't go very far on most users' systems and nobody seems to have an actual ready-for-prime-time solution that shows signs of making it out the door).

I was thinking 'bigger' in that only SSLed stuff accessed by excessively-trusting systems can be compromised by a rogue or incompetent CA, while anything can be compromised (and relatively silently, some atypically clueful person tends to notice the shady certs eventually, which is much less likely with a perfect copy of the actual private keys) if you have the same private key material as the legitimate host.

So, barring the possibility of some particularly nasty targeted exploit against some specific organizations, affected population is likely to be smaller; but the set of vulnerable systems is necessarily larger. I really didn't make what I meant by 'bigger' clear originally, did I...

I suspect that the okay-ness of this fact depends on whether you are a disinterested observer (in which case your points are valid and likely account for many silent users, along with some amount of abandoned accounts, squatters, etc.) or whether you are somebody at Twitter, who would probably prefer to keep their (laughable) early post-IPO value of something north of 30 billion dollars, rather than have further bad news after announcing in Febuary of this year that you'd lost half a billion dollars in the last year, and that your >P/E ratio is kind of tepid.

For a site that requires sign-up to do all but the most crippled reading/following (do they do public RSS, such that you could 'follow' without an account? Barely matters since the public mostly doesn't and their design makes just-sign-up-with-us easier for most non-geeks than getting RSS up and running, especially across devices), 56% participation is actually higher than I'd expect, and certainly far from shockingly low. It's just that any pretense of being worth more than the scrap value of their office furniture is largely based on optimistic subscriber numbers, so I suspect that they are Not Happy about somebody talking about it. If some analyst comes out with "Percentage of twitter accounts that are actually bots" tomorrow, I imagine they'd be less happy still.

Not (all) twits gonna tweet. It's actually something of a heartwarming discovery.

Did you notice how I said that the harping, not the rules, is an utter waste of time?

I have no problem with grammatical conventions. I try not to depart to egregiously from them myself. That doesn't oblige me to like the grammar police, or to refrain from criticizing the insufferable moralistic error-sniping that certain people engage in just to show how serious they are about grammar. The ones who treat comparatively new rules as though they'd been handed down from time immemorial or who are still rejecting as an undignified neologism some usage with the thick end of a century of documented history are particularly vexing.

If you skip that nonsense, you can have all the advantages of well-formed communication without any time wasted. As for celebration of ignorance? I'd say that math takes substantially more flack, and that's a subject that virtually nobody picks up an idiosyncratic-but-workable knowledge of through basic cultural exposure, nor is it a subject where you can be substantially wrong and still get adequate results. (There is the separate, deeply vexed, issue of whether assorted nonstandard, but internally consistent, grammars associated with various regions and subcultures should be coddled or suppressed; but that's not an ignorance question; but a standardization one.)