Heh. They put him in the "Open Source Development" category. He's going to just love that...

People who care about the iWatch functionality will buy iWatches

Well, shit. That's what I wrote in my head. So much for proofreading.

I can't understand the fuss, since the iWatch and a Swiss watch are two different markets.

Mostly. However, there's going to be a large intersection in the people who buy a $device in that price range mostly to show off how much money they have, and the iWatch is probably going to own that market.

People who care about Swiss watches aren't going to buy an iWatch. People who care about the functionality of an iWatch probably aren't going to buy an iWatch. But people who want an excuse to flash an expensive piece of wristwear are going to buy a gold iWatch and set their phone to send a notification to the watch every few minutes so everyone can see them checking their wrist.

Death/mass violence threats are not a political correctness issue. They are a criminal issue.

Sure. And if speech crosses the line to become a real criminal matter, then by all means treat it as a criminal matter.

That doesn't change the fact that in 99.99% (or more) cases the motivation is to get a rise out of society rather than the aggression or hatred the parent post was blaming.

At the same time, institutions hyper-sensitivity where even perfectly innocent and reasonable behaviour gets perceived as a threat ("OMG! Someone's walking towards the art department carrying something in a long bag! Call 911!") and the complete lack of sanctions for gross over-reactions has basically turned trolling into an instant denial of service.

There's gotta be a balance. Right now, the way things are structured, we're letting the trolls run the show and just reacting. Poorly.

I don't object to references to raping my daughter and leaving her in a bloody pile in a ditch because it's politically incorrect.

No, but you also don't issue a press release saying how the entire community is just aghast at the whole business and how you're going to host a conference to talk about "healing", do you?

If they said something sufficiently heinous, you might try to track the fucker down and kick his ass (i.e. how "talking shit" was generally handled up until around the 70's), or perhaps something like Curt Schilling. In other words, a response based on going directly after the perpetrator. Direct threats are something for law enforcement to handle.

A "politically correct" response, on the other hand, is rooted in the idea that all we need is a bit more education and a lot more censorship.

Education will probably work in the very long run, unless it's so ridiculously heavy-handed that it becomes parody and propaganda. Censorship will work for a short while until the next mole pops its head up. The gaps in between the short and long term is where the trolls live.

I don't know what the ideal solution to trolls is, but I'm positive that ineffective hand-wringing isn't it, nor is trying to engage them in healing dialogue.

I'm pretty sure that effective, but not excessive, discipline where they can be caught is one necessary aspect (we tend to fail pretty badly as "not excessive" when discipline actually happens). Having society be just generally more resilient to offensive (and particularly anonymous) speech is absolutely critical.

But monopods are still allowed, right?

...an anonymous way for people to let out the aggressions and hatreds that they already had, and are just afraid to announce...

I doubt it.

Most of them are just trolls. You know, bored assholes who've learned exactly which buttons to press to get the most reaction out of society.

That being said, the root of the problem is the same; political correctness is fundamentally just a way to tell the trolls which buttons are the best.

So the protection is only effective if someone steals my phone while it's turned off, which is, like, 0.1% of the time?

Entirely different threat vectors.

When the phone is on and locked, the attacker has to (relatively slowly) manually punch in a PIN and deal with lockouts and such. Shorter passwords are sane in that case.

When the phone is powered off, the attacker can pull the flash and do a high-speed static attack. A short PIN won't stand up in that situation.

Then over the next 15 years we managed to push the clock-speed boundary up another, what 3-4x? That looks an awful lot like hitting a brick wall to me.

It could be. Then again, it may just be the improvements that gave rapid increases in clock speed were the low-hanging fruit at the time, and once increasing clock speed further became difficult (but let's not say "impossible") then other low-hanging fruit came along.

Maybe it's a brick wall, and maybe not, but the industry has a long history of "probably not" when it comes to telling them what they can or can't do.

There is some debate among people if 5nm will make sense or even be reasonable to do...

It's not a new discussion by any means. It was an old debate when people were asking whether a 100MHz bus was as fast as we could get, and 45nm was considered ridiculously small. The GHz barrier on clock speeds seemed insurmountable.

Didn't stop anyone, did it?

If it can be done, someone's going to try. If it can be done profitably, we'll see it on our desks or in our pockets in a few processor generations. That's just how it is.

I should have no reasonable expectation that a farmer (Nye wrote "regular software writers and farmers") would have expertise in astrophysics for example.

I'd expect farmers to have a far better background in and a more intuitive understanding of science than software writers. Farming is, at its core, applied science. It may not be as rigorous or structured, but for thousands of years people have lived and died based on how well farmers hypotheses have panned out.

Software writing and computer "science" in general falls more under mathematics than science. In mathematics, once something is proven it stays proven, not matter how sloppy or random the process of getting to the proof might be.

I guess that opens a philosophical discussion of whether writing device drivers counts as "kernel coding" at all.

writing device drivers is debatable; the kernel side of it is frequently just cut and paste from elsewhere and most of the "real work" is on the device side. A strong argument can be made that maintaining them in the longer term is true kernel coding as there's a bigger need to track changes to the kernel side of things.

Then again, it might've gotten easier. I haven't maintained drivers since the 1.3/2.0 days.

8. moving parts can be lubricated with either gun oil or maple syrup.
9. bayonet lug will accept a non-lethal Shawinigan Handshake module
10. Canadian flag on the butt to ensure that our troops aren't mistaken for Americans ... this stuff practically writes itself.

A VERY vocal minority do not want Systemd on ideological grounds (although I suspect it is more a matter of the new and different scares them, no matter what advantages it may offer)

"new and different" actually is a huge problem, combined with what appears to be a very atypical adoption process happening in a very short period of time (in Debian, within a single release cycle).

Now, ignore the vocal minority. There's always a vocal minority. Sometimes they're right, most times they're just loud, but in the bigger picture they're still a minority.

It's the silent majority you need to be worried about, and the silent majority don't want systemd. This has nothing to do with the technical merit of systemd. They don't want any substantial deep changes. They want small, piecemeal, trackable and revertable changes. The very conservative people who's livelihoods depend on Linux "just working" are looking at this systemd business and flat-out wondering if the distros have lost their collective minds?

My group, who are usually pretty near the bleeding edge by our corporate standards (we generally track current stable releases and and deviate from stock as little as possible) normally track Debian stable and we're seriously considering bypassing/delaying Jessie. I can't imagine selling systemd to the other parts of the organization who have deep mods to the distro and reams of detailed documentation that'll have to be completely gutted.

Basically, all this discussion is pointless noise. Watch the adoption rates for the next couple of release cycles of the more "conservative" distros who have been pulled into the systemd gravity well. Particularly adoption rates where there might be a desktop/server breakdown. That's the silent majority passing judgement. I don't think it's going to be good.

Online shops is the obvious place to enforce this. No packaging for simple stuff like cables, plain bags for non-breakable loose stuff, plain boxes for everything else. People are buying from pictures and reviews and shoplifting is a non-issue, so packaging only needs to be minimally functional. I think AmazonBasics products use this approach, and it'd be nice to see Amazon push it back a bit on their suppliers.

Ideally, it should be the responsibility of the retailer to display the product attractively rather than the job of the package, but blame Walmart. They've done a pretty solid job of unloading a lot of traditional retailer jobs back on the manufacturers.