The Telegraph article quoted Hitler, that bastion of honesty and truthfulness, of being a Socialist, and seemed to consider the matter closed. Socialism had a lot of appeal back then, and Hitler would say anything to gain an advantage. The National Socialist German Worker's Party did indeed have socialist elements, who were purged in the mid-1930s. They were becoming embarrassing to Goering's courtship of big business interests.

If you study what the Nazis actually did, it looks pretty right-wing. Favoring big business over workers and fostering insane levels of nationalism are rather right-wing. Hitler had support from normally right-wing military men pretty much through his career. Explicitly rejecting rationality (as opposed to just being irrational) seems to me primarily associated with the right.

I can't magically unmake the Nazis left-wing because, with some parts of the party that were purged before they could be influential, they weren't.

Possibly, but I often miss the spirit of words that include inaccurate and sweeping generalizations to make a point. I understand his point that highly immoral things can be legal, but I'd think of real examples - and Dr. King had enough of those.

To be fair, Martin asked for such fan reactions. In the second to last book of the "Song of Ice and Fire" ("A Feast for Crows"?), he wrote that he had divided the story, and that the companion volume covering the other characters in that timespan was written and in the pipeline. This was a lie. That volume hadn't been written, and it took Martin an unexpectedly long time to write it. Many fans were not only disappointed at not getting what they wanted, but angry because they had been lied to. They felt that Martin had assumed a sort of obligation by claiming the next book was going to be available soon.

The takeaway here is not that fans are unreasonable, it's that you don't lie to your fans and promise them what you can't deliver.

Rats, my main Linux box isn't a desktop. It lives under the desk.

Except that Hitler did not always obey the law. In particular, he committed illegal acts before he could dictate the laws, but even afterwards he violated treaties binding on Germany, including the laws of war. I rather doubt he always went through the formality of changing the law when he could, and very likely broke German law, but I haven't studied that part of his career as much.

However, the truth is out there. I have easy access to news sites around the world, and all sorts of blogs and such from all points on most conceivable political spectra. The truth may not be easy to find, but it's very easy to find propaganda from any viewpoint you like. There is no actual single propaganda message possible in this. If the current government tried to introduce Goldstein as a scapegoat, we'd immediately have (more or less) news sources claiming he was made up, that he was a plant, and that he really did have a Kenyan birth certificate.

Dunno about anyone else, but I work things out in vim.

Natural circumstance has always proven to be correct; supernatural circumstance has always proven to be incorrect.

This is not a verifiable statement. It is a statement of belief.

What you could say is that, in every case you've heard of, there was a plausible natural explanation, and that this is also true of people you trust. Further, in some cases, you (or people you trust) may have found that the supernatural-seeming explanations were confirmed as inaccurate. You could also say that you believe that all cases have a natural explanation.

If there were supernatural occurrences, and they happened very rarely, and could not be produced reliably, they'd be thought to be natural things that were misinterpreted or misreported. For example, if I claimed to have moved things by sheer mental concentration (which I don't*), even if it were true, if I couldn't do it on demand the reasonable conclusion would be that I was lying or deluded. This would continue for a long time, as there would never be strong evidence of the supernatural. I'm not saying that is the case, only that it would be generally indistinguishable from a world where there were no supernatural phenomena. Therefore, the statement that the supernatural doesn't exist isn't even falsifiable.

*Of course, if I could do that reliably, I'd be awfully tempted to cash in on James Randi's million-dollar reward. I'd also feel compelled to investigate limits and effects on my own.

User interface design. Jobs had a sense of what people wanted, a sense of what's possible, and was enough of an asshole to make people more technically talented implement his vision. The Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad had no capabilities other, comparable, things lacked, but they were far easier to use than the MS-DOS machines/MP3 players/smart phones/Windows tablets that preceded them. His ideas were copied and adapted from. MS Windows would not be what it is without Jobs.

The fact that many /.ers don't care about user interface doesn't mean that most of the general public doesn't.

Thanks - that does clear things up.

I started poking through the documentation you mentioned. Could you give me a pointer where to find that the computer owner doesn't get the keys?

Okay, go out on the street and find ten random computer users. Ask them (a) what TPM is, (b) if they have it, and (c) if it's a good thing. Report back if any of ten random computer users (which means not selecting at random from /. IDs) can answer the questions intelligently.

Yeah, but those pale against the "don't drink any more, stupid" program. This has a 100% success rate among those who stick to it. The fact that maybe 95% of alcoholics don't stick to it doesn't matter for that evaluation methodology.

When doing something for real problems, you need to consider drop-outs. Why did they drop out? If it's because they had good reason to believe the program wasn't working for them, or because they couldn't tolerate the treatment, then, for practical purposes, they should be counted as failures of the program.

This is a lot messier than measuring results in the usual way, but more applicable. Given those stats, it's possible that AA is counterproductive. Suppose 90% of alcoholics are fundamentally untreatable with any technique we've got now. Hypothetically, these are the ones who drop out of AA. Then, since about 50% of that population quits, and 40% of AA members, AA is bad for people. I don't think that's the case, but it can't be disproven with the stats you cited.

To try to explain this....

If you send alcoholics to AA, you can divide them into three groups.

One group isn't ready to stop drinking, for whatever reason. It's obviously not fair to count this against AA.

One group will stay with the program. You're apparently in this group, and AA works for you. That's great, but other people may have different experiences.

One group will want to stop drinking, but for some other reason not continue with AA. It is fair to count this against AA. These are people for whom AA didn't work for some reason. The proper population to judge how well AA works is the second and third groups together.

Suppose somebody is finding AA to be completely unhelpful, or is offended by things that go on in the meetings. Why would that person stay in AA? However, that's one person who turned to AA and AA didn't work for them.

C/C++: Modern C++, properly written, doesn't have the problems you attribute to it. (Granted, there's a lot of bad C++ code out there.) There's nothing inherently wrong with raw pointers if properly used, except that they offer facilities that should not be used (such as deletion). Treat them as non-owning, and std::unique_ptr and std::shared_ptr as expressing ownership. (It might be a good idea to write a nonowning_ptr that you can't delete through.) std::vector can be used to avoid buffer overflows (using .at() instead of [] regularly for subscripts). C++ is hardly problem-free, but it annoys me when people complain about things that have been fixed.

UNIX and Linux: There have been large, complicated, systems in competition. They lost. Currently, the only real competitor is Microsoft Windows. Meanwhile, people work on new operating systems. If one comes out considerably superior, it will have its chance in competition, and if Unix/Linux is the mess you claim it will have serious competitive advantages. I'm not sure what you want here (Multics back?).

Too much trusted software: This is a mess, all right, but it's not at the bottom. We're pretty much stuck with the NT/Unixlikes duopoly for large-scale deployments, but the way to address this issue is, simply, to write your programs not to ask for permissions you don't need. Applications can be modified and replaced. There are indirect ways, also. Vista introduced UAC, which isn't directly much good as security, but which punished applications that wanted too many privileges by annoying their users, creating market disincentives for permission-grabbing.

Lack of liability: This is not a software issue per se, but rather a market one. The solution is not to have legal standards for software liability, but to make companies more practically liable in general. If companies had to pay more for their screw-ups, they'd have incentive to get reliable software. This, and the trusted software issue above, are also issues in the software market. When first-to-market is more profitable than reliability and diminished attack surfaces, we get software that is buggy, easy to attack, and financially successful. There is value in buggy software, as long as the bugs aren't too bad