But we need more tanks dammit and if you don't agree you're not a patriot.

You have to give the guy some slack. He's lived longer than my grandfather yet was diagnosed with a disease that should have killed him in a couple of years. Of course he'll have something negative to say about aggression - what the fuck is he going to do about someone being violent to him and his family? Ram them with his electric wheel chair while making snarky comments via text-to-voice?

[cite needed]

Disagree. Why does everyone forget the golden rule?

He who has the Gold makes the Rules.

Therefore, Bankers always win. Lawyers are hired help.

Considering this audience is pretty much the only one that understands the implications behind these revelations. WE should be the ones raising the issues and getting in the government's face about this, but technologists are notoriously passive when it comes to protesting the government. With that in mind, there's not too much _I_ can do as a Canadian to protest the NSA/GCHQ, but there's definitely the CSE who are one of the "5 eyes" members.

However the easiest response to mass surveillance is mass encryption, and that doesn't involve standing outside for hours shouting at people who couldn't care less or trying to educate the average person about why this isn't just part of the fight on 'terrorism' but it's a direct assault on all of us. Obviously the entire cell phone network design will need an overhaul after these keys have been leaked, and hopefully the overhaul uses better techniques.

This is a result of the adversarial juror selection process where legal teams from both sides, plaintiff and defendant, try very hard to remove any liabilities from the juror pool. Knowledgeable people are liable to be on a "side" and therefore will be removed by one side or another.

That combined with the fact that, as a juror, you are not rewarded or likely to get compensation from your employer, means that people who have valuable knowledge, skills and generally good understanding of lots of stuff, try very hard to not be selected.

I'm not sure there's a better way, other than perhaps to try to increase the overall average knowledge of the entire juror pool (either by free, compulsory 2ndary education) or by restricting the juror pool to prevent the "know nothings" from deciding the law on cases that could have society wide impact (a slippery slope that I probably wouldn't recommend).

How do they do this kind of thing in Europe?

The whole point of due process is to ensure that yes, this is indeed the guilty party to be punished. Historically, the witch hunt was one popular alternative.

I mean, with the plethora of set-top boxes like AppleTV, Roku, FireTV, ChromeCast, why would anyone in their right mind buy an all-in-one, especially from a known UI offender like Samsung (TouchWiz?).

Samsung should focus on making a TV with sound that doesn't suck (i.e., integrated wireless speakers that auto-calibrate) or maybe focus on style and setup for differentiation.

Whatever... they are a low-price disruptor and they essentially kicked Panasonic and Pioneer out of the market so they could foist this "app crap" on us. Whoever buys a Samsung "smart" TV deserves one I guess.

Whenever you relieve yourself of a responsibility by giving it to someone else, you accept that that person is not you and may not make the same decisions that you would make. If Stallman is to be blamed for anything, it should be in the form of Stallman blaming himself for choosing a maintainer who does not more closely share his views.

Now that persuasion has failed, I suppose he could fork it.

It seems like every time there is a discussion that remotely touches on the subject of freedom, someone in some form or another has to rehash this same discussion. The subject matter changes, the circumstances change, the exact pseudo-logic has a few variations, and it's articulated with varying degrees of skill, but at heart it's really the same discussion.

So he tries to persuade people to agree with him, perhaps passionately, perhaps vehemently, maybe even not so nicely ... but (to my knowledge) he has never used force or fraud to coerce people into behaving the way he thinks they should. That sounds perfectly freedom-loving to me. I'm really not seeing the problem here.

If your opinion of the guy is correct, then his methods will cause fewer people to listen to him and he will thereby undermine his own efforts. This means such a situation would be self-correcting. I've never heard of RMS using force or threat of force to make you call it "GNU/Linux". The degree of power he has over you is determined entirely by how much you decide to listen to him*. The ability to recognize this is generally called perspective.

It's as though some people have an entitlement mentality, a manner in which they are self-centered. It leads to them feeling like they've been wronged or mistreated somehow when they discover that someone doesn't agree with them, won't support or otherwise validate them (probably the part that really bothers you), and speaks against them.

* I started to add "and use his software", but then I realized that's not true - you could use Emacs with the LLVM debugger ... or not, whether anyone else likes it or not, because the GPL and LLDB's NCSA license are compatible. RMS deliberately chose a license allowing this to happen. Did you fail to recognize the significance of that? That freedom means people might do things with which he disagrees does not remove his right to disagree. Are you suggesting it should? If not, what exactly are you trying to say, if you are not in fact expressing another entitlement mentality?

The only difference is that with Apple, it is simple and it works. If you doubt that, then look at how long a lead Google had with Wallet and how as soon as Apple Pay appeared, it's dominated the usage of contactless terminals.

Sure, Apple pushed it - but if it was a total pain, people wouldn't do it. There's always the fallback of actually using your card.

You don't think the same issues happen with cards vs. cash? Yeah, I go through stores already today just putting stuff in the cart, swiping at the checkout, collecting the receipt and never even looking at the bill until well after the fact (and sometimes never even then).

I manage my budget after the fact - hey that spongecake we bought was completely uneaten - never buy again. That TJs cold-brewed coffee habit is expensive but more cost-effective than buying beans and cleaning out the coffee machine... etc, etc.

Fact is, cards have already altered our spending habits and contactless does very little to modify that - it's just a nice shinier petina over the same rubric.

There is one good lesson they're teaching this boy: those with authority are not to be trusted.

By the way, now that I re-read this during a spare moment and once again think about it, I can again respond to you in what I hope to be a worthy way, yet this time focus on a different dimension of the thing at hand.

I would ask you to consider, simply, this other and possibly alien point of view: the "name-calling" types are simply enacting the lower (or if you like, "gutter") form of an idea that is nonetheless technically true. The name-callers are merely those who recognize this but also have a need to make you look worse in order that they know better, or otherwise focus on what they think is wrong with you, with little or no serious constructive suggestion concerning what precisely is wrong with your view and how better to regard the situation. Liike the thinking individuals, they see what the problem is; otherwise, they lack the clarity and objectivity to identify the problem and suggest a sensible solution. By contrast, they're simply bitching. But even those people are correctly identifying that somethng is amiss. They're just the least clever and easiest to ridicule among those who all arrive at the same conclusion.