Jefferson was much more Hamiltonian when he himself was in the presidential office. Just sayin'.

"Ideals" and "beliefs" are mostly useful in getting the sheeples in line, because sadly for most people "ideals" and "beliefs" are much easier pills to swallow than facts and evidence. How many "ideals" and "beliefs" have we had throughout the centuries, and how much good has ever come out of those? Those great men who actually got things done and moved our society in a positive direction almost always compromised.

Well, erm, so I guess my point is, it may be more constructive to critise a politician based on the actual issues, rather than painting him with a brush and attacking his "ideal".

Yes, because the need to avoid "official embarassment" outweighs the needs of the 239 lives on board and the anguished relatives on the ground. Naturally.

That's a good one, probably explains why Lamport only just got the award now and not much sooner :)

Sad indeed. But it's not my fault that Malaysia Airlines chose Facebook as their official channel. Here's a non-Facebook quote if that makes you feel any better, though I suspect all non-Facebook sources are second-hand sources who themselves copied from MA's official Facebook page.. http://www.freerepublic.com/fo...

Steam also doesn't require an "install", the game is playable after the download, unlike origin.

Nope. That NYT piece seems to have forgotten about the initial statement from Malaysia Airlines, which said the last time of contact with flight 370 was at 2:40am:
https://www.facebook.com/my.ma...
That was before the Malaysian authorities went into full denial mode and claimed last contact was at 01:20am. The 02:40 time was inconsistent with their estimated "crash site" in the Gulf of Thailand, which was one of the initial sources of confusion. However, 02:40am turned out to be the exact time of last military radar contact which they were forced to confirm more than 5 days later. Additionally, there were the "small" details that two transponder systems were turned off one after another more than 10 minutes apart, and that the ACARS system was turned off before the last voice contact with the pilots.
In order to fit all these facts into a theory of stupidity, you'd have to accept that: 1. an unidentified flying object the size of a 777 can just fly across the width of Malaysian airspace (more than 1 hour of flight time) at cruising altitude without being noticed by the Malaysian military 2. that 02:40am time from Malaysian Airline's initial statement just turned out to match the time of last military radar contact by complete coincidence 3. nobody noticed the time descrepancies between the two transponder systems turning off.
This is clearly beyond the realm of incompetance, and can only be explained with a touch of malice. The Malaysian authorities knew from the beginning what was going on, but was more concerned with the possible liabilities and damages to their "image" resulting from a rogue pilot, than with actually finding the plane. With wanton disregard for the 239 lives on board and their relatives on the ground, they knowingly misled the international community on a wild witch hunt across the Gulf of Thailand, delaying the search for at least five crucial days, thereby eliminating any possiblity of finding survivors (if the plane had ultimately crashed), and quite possibly lowering the likelihood of finding the cockpit recorders to near zero.

The firmware residing in hardware ROM is considered part of the hardware. The FSF only takes issue with the binary firmware that are distributed as part of the driver software, i.e. those binary blobs under /lib/firmware. RMS even said if the hardware manufacturers put those blobs on ROM then it would be fine [1].

Today's home routers are just small general purpose computers with a bunch of network ports.
Today's "smart scales" are just small general purpose computers embedded in a scale.
Today's smart TVs are just general purpose computers embedded inside a big TV.
Today's treadmills are just general purpose computers, in a treadmill.
Today's DVRs are just general purpose computers with an hdmi-in and an IR receiver.
Today's PS4s and Xbox Ones are, well they are just general purpose computers really.

They all do. If they don't, they'll have to at least double the price on most of these products.

matroska is definitely a no go on both. mp4 is recognized at least on the ps3, but can only play a very limited number of codecs. In the end I just said to hell with it and built a small XBMC box.

Oh, yes they do support DLNA. What I meant to say was that their codecs and container format support is so poor that it makes them practically useless as a living room media player, DLNA or not. I don't expect the next-gens to be any better in this regard.

That sucks but I don't see how the Xbox can be any better in these regards, speaking from my experience with the PS3 and the Xbox360.

If you want this kind of freedom then you need a general purpose computing device (i.e. a PC). The consoles are very locked-down, special purpose hardware, designed specifically for you to consume content in ways they intended, generating sustained revenue for MS/Sony in the process. If you're buying a console expecting anything more than that then you're bound to be disappointed. On the other hand, a general purpose computing device (i.e. a PC) of comparable processing capabilities would also cost you a fair bit more.

There's much more exploitable bullshit in Chinese traditional medicine than just big hard dicks. You just need to find the human organ that most resembles a "small, inert floppy goop-sack", and somehow link that organ to one's sexual prowess (through the theories of Chinese Medicine of course, I'm pretty sure it's in there somewhere). Do that and before you know it we're adding the jelly fish to the endangered list.

Or you can boot into a custom recovery like clockworkmod, start adb shell, mount /system and make whatever changes you like from there. No need to root at all.

If you have root access you can just remove any apks you don't like from /system/app and they're gone for good. You can always get root if you buy the Nexus phones or the so-called "developer" phones. If you can't have root access because the your device is locked down from the bootloader (and no one has yet published an expliot to unlock it), then that essentially means you don't "own" the hardware.

Well, to be fair, they feel that way because they sold you a $600 phone for $200. So it's not really that outrageous they woud try to recoup that difference, by doing their best to force you to use their shitware. The confusion arises from the fact that you expect to fully own a device, while paying subsidized price.

If you really want to have full control of your device, then you'll need to adjust your expectations, that a high-end phone is $600 and not $200.

AFAIK all Nexus devices are bootloader unlocked, which means you can do whatever you want with the device, up to ripping out the whole operating system and installing your own. Does Google make it easy for you to remove their stuff? No. But that's no different from say a laptop. Does Microsoft make it easy for you to remove IE? When I buy a Thinkpad, there's Microsoft shit and Lenovo shit, and they don't make it easy for me remove their shit, but there's nothing stopping me from installing Linux. Same goes for smart phones, which are essentially small computers.

The fact is, it really isn't that bad, at least not yet. The phone manufacturers are more than happy to sell you "developer" devices at a full price, and if that's too expensive then get a Nexus. The subsidized pricing model seems to flourish especially in the US market, presumably because the carriers make back much more than loss on the initial hardware sale over the long run. But the consumers are not without blame, as they've basically voted with their wallets saying that it's OK to trade their freedom (to tinker) and their privacy for a couple hundred bucks off their new shiny device. Luckily the choice is still there, but just don't expect to pay $200 for a $600 device and still be able to do whatever you want with it.

Aha, but there is a difference: collecting user data doesn't take any "time and attention", it's basically just pure "profit". In fact, for a company like Apple, I imagine it'd take enormous will power to resist the temptation to collect data on its users. If they're true to their words, kudos to them, but the business practice of Apple really doesn't give me any reason to trust them on that.