I don't agree. I think Gladwell is the master of thought-provoking oversimplified perhaps-sort-of obvious but counter-cultural idea. For example, in this case, although we have the saying, "practice makes perfect", our culture is disposed to believe that some people are simply better than others, and if you're not gifted, you just shouldn't try. Gladwell sets off on an argument that, no, if you spend enough time practicing you can be great. He oversimplifies the whole thing, but probably (I haven't read this book, actually) puts some admission that practice isn't *everything* and people do also have innate gifts. If you really researched it, you'd probably find that he has an interesting point that isn't complete enough to be "the truth".

At least, this is the pattern I've noticed in his other books. And... I don't really mind it. It would be unwise to just read Gladwell's books and take everything he's saying on faith, but I'm not sure that's what he expects you to do. I think he might just be shooting for "thought-provoking", and in that, he's successful.

Yes, you're right. Let's just throw up our hands and accept things as they are. Hell, let's help it along. Why not change the laws specifically so that we don't have elections anymore, but we just allow people to bid on legislation at auction. Highest bidder wins. And then let's make the official rule that you don't even need to win the bid, you just need to bribe the auctioneer. Because fuck it, the having auctions sounds too close to being a just system, and might actually raise money for the government.

Oh, I know I'm not answering your questions. I'm responding to your position instead. The "why bother trying?" stance is really hard to refute, because any answer to your question, you could come up with some potential unintended consequence that might possibly result in something bad happening. Even if I could propose a completely iron-clad system of rules that regulated the political system, you could say, "Oh, but people will just break those rules and cheat anyway, because the potential benefits are too high." And you'd be right, so let's just all sit back and watch the world go to hell, because you can't fix anything, right?

We did build our own-- or at least, we did pay these companies hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds to build it for us. I suppose we could build another one, and if we did, there's no reason to think that corrupt government officials won't just take it from us and hand it over to rich people.

I don't think we need to build our own internet. I think we need to build our own government, and outlaw bribery. Our current one has been taken from us, and has no interest in serving the common good.

That argument would hold more weight if (a) there were a possibility of competition; or (b) the Internet had not been subsidized with taxpayer money. The reality is, this *is* infrastructure like roads and plumbing, competition is stifled by law and economic forces, and taxpayers have put hundreds of billions of dollars into building the network. Besides that, I'm sure there are plenty of legal restrictions on what chemicals a dry cleaner can use.

If there's a single systemic problem with HTTPS, it's that we're still largely relying on Certificate Authorities which charge a lot of money. The expense and complexity discourages people from using SSL more ubiquitously.

I'm not saying it's a perfect security scheme, but my point is that the single biggest problem with it is that we're not using it enough.

He's conflating "people placing themselves beyond the law" and "people placing themselves outside of the reach of law enforcement". I don't know if he's doing it intentionally, but he's starting from the assumption that law enforcement agencies have the right to review the contents of your phone. Beginning from that assumption, it becomes immediately obvious that inhibiting their access to that data constitutes "doing something wrong".

Also, sometimes it's just easier to give people what they want than it is to convince them that they don't really want it. Sometimes you have to ask whether "being right" matters, or if it's harmless and easy to comply with a silly request.

Oh no, there are people arguing that. It's true that there are some people in the right wing pointing out that rich people invest money, but there are an awful lot within the right wing who, when you figure out what they're actually arguing, it boils down to "If you tax rich people, they no longer have an incentive to be rich, and they will stop driving economic growth with their magical rich-people super-powers. I can't explain how any of this works, but I will tell you that rich people have magical rich-people super-powers that make everyone's life better, and taxes are kryptonite."

I'm not opposed to having an actual argument about perverse incentives and unintended consequences of taxes, but let's not just take for granted that "rich-people=good" and "government=evil".

According to the previous logic, that's still 2 keys too many. I think Anonymous Coward wants every keyboard to have a "Terminal" key that does nothing but launches a terminal window.

You just don't get it. You can't expect him to use an obscure text-based interface to run programs. He wants a simple, easy to use graphical interface that's purely mouse driven to accomplish all of his tasks. But he's a power user, so he doesn't want any of that graphical stuff, he just wants easy access to the terminal.

You took my response!

When it comes to security, I always try to drive the idea home that security is always a balance between "creating easy access for authorized users" and "making unauthorized access difficult", and where you strike that balance should always depend on the context of how easy authorized access needs to be vs. how hard unauthorized access needs to be.

So in this case, your child probably doesn't need very good security. There are no state secrets, no business documents to be hidden from competing companies, and no financial documents. You don't need good security to protect elementary school homework. If anything, you probably want the account to be easy to exploit by both parents and teachers, in case there's a suspicion of misbehavior. And elementary school kids need very easy access. Therefore, security should be relatively light.

What's more, writing down your passwords is *not* a bad security practice. It just means that the account becomes as easy to access as your password list. If you keep your password list in a safe, then it might be pretty secure. If you leave your list in a public area, anyone in that area could access your account. However, in a case like that, it's not the "writing passwords down" that's insecure, it's the storage of that list that's insecure. Writing down your passwords is not inherently less secure than using a password manager. A password manager is just a list of passwords, "written down", and secured.

If you're worried about teaching your children good security policies, then let them write down their passwords, and then teach them the importance of securing that list. Not only is that a good practice, but it also lets them feel like a spy, which is awesome.

You may have a good point, but you'd need to provide more of an explanation. Given that it's been a known loophole for companies to shuffle money and profits to offshore "subsidiaries" or "parent companies" in low-tax countries, why should we ignore it and open that loophole up? I'm not very familiar with the situation, and I'd need a better explanation before I believed you that this is unfair, or a real problem.

See, there are a bunch of idiots out there who think in terms of, "Whenever we tax rich people, we're disincentivizing them from being rich, which discourages them from spending their money. We need to cut all taxes, and provide subsidies to rich people and businesses. The more money we can put into the hands of rich people, the more money they'll spend. And this will somehow result in the perfect economy!"

So I had one post that was a response to the question "Do specs matter", but I just RTFA, and I want to respond to that too. The complaint seems to be that, in tests of application load time, a brand new high-end phone isn't significantly faster than a high-end phone that's 1 year old. The conclusion is that, therefore, people buying new phones are doing so for stupid reasons, which is extremely foolish because they cost $900.

And yes, I'm sure some people buying them are doing so for dumb reasons. But the implied assumption there is that new high-end phones are being purchased every year by people whose main concern is application load speed. The truth is, a lot of people buying phones have phones that are at least 2 years old, and in America at least, a lot of them are buying it as part of deal that gets them the phone for something closer to $200. So not only the the cost much lower, the the benefit is much greater because an iPhone 6 actually is significantly faster than an iPhone4, for example.

But beyond that, there are features that are new. Maybe someone wants the bigger screen. It seems like much ado about nothing.

On the other hand, processors have been getting more powerful. They just haven't been doing that by increasing clock speed.

I think sometimes people fail to recognize that the specs never really mattered. Not for any of it.

Does it matter what resolution the screen is? No. It matters whether the screen appears to be sharp. Does it matter how much RAM you have, or how fast the clock speed is on your processor? No, it matters whether applications are responsive. What really matters to people is the qualitative experience of using the object.

Specs and benchmarks are ways that you might try to quantify that experience. For the sharpness of the display, you can give the screen resolution and that can serve as an indication of the sharpness. For the speed of the device, you could measure how long it takes to complete a specific task, and that benchmark serves as an indicator of the speed. Those indicators may be more or less helpful. Some of these indicators (clock speed of the processor, megapixels of the camera) are often not that helpful anymore. But either way, they're just pieces of information that are helpful for shopping, for turning the qualitative aspects into quantities that make it easier to perform a direct comparison between products, and that's the only reason they're meaningful.

But a lot of the time, people lose sight of that. Especially when they have an agenda, and want to say, "my gadget is fancier than your gadget because it has more sneezelflopits." It doesn't matter what a sneezelflopit is, or whether it serves any purpose.