False ideas don't require personal vulnerabilities. Any attempt to engage with the world produces false ideas, because we are ignorant and fallible beings.

Personal wisdom and enlightenment can reduce one's vulnerability to manipulation, but it does not answer political questions. It can tell me why I'm scared, but if my fear is based on the prospect of an undesirable outcome, spiritual wisdom cannot tell me whether the outcome is plausible or likely. Even if you reject fear as a basis for thought and action, you will still find yourself agreeing with it quite often. For instance, assuming you have not yet achieved perfect enlightenment, you are probably scared of injecting heroin. You were manipulated into this fear by information and media provided by people who want you to be scared of injecting heroin. Spiritual wisdom allows you to realize that you are scared and manipulated, but it does not answer the question of whether or not it is a good idea to inject heroin.

In general, there's no way to dodge the necessity of examining everything on its merits, and no way to get out of the catch-22 that all the information you consume is produced, directly or indirectly, by people who care about what you do and believe. Rejecting all self-interested manipulation would mean rejecting almost all human interaction. It would certainly make it impossible to learn anything about politics. As for fear, you can reject fear, but you can't simply say, "Fear is on one side of the issue, so I must be on the other." The presence of fear is informative, but it is not that informative.

To go back to the example at hand, wisdom cannot advise me to ignore the issue, nor can it resolve the issue one way or the other. After all, the bogeyman prospect is a story of how the current legal system is vulnerable to exploitation and how that will affect American business. Wisdom helps, but not the kind of wisdom you're talking about. The issue must be approached by seeking information, reading opposing viewpoints, and discussing it.

You're wrong about the user interface. Remember how everyone complained, "I don't mind the iPhone as a product, but I can't stand how people who own them are constantly taking them out and playing with them just to show them off?" That's what I thought, too, until I got one and started pulling it out to read news on the web every time I had to wait in line for a few seconds. It was a completely new experience after years of button and stylus phones. Other devices made it possible many years ago, but the iPhone was the first device that made it pleasant enough that large numbers of people actually bothered.

Anecdotal evidence: I had a Nokia n800, which I thought was a really neat device, but it never seemed worth the hassle. I carried it on and off for several weeks, and then it started gathering dust. I didn't use any mobile device's browser (neither the n800 nor the ones in my various phones) more than once a month until I got my iPhone, then suddenly I was browsing the web away from home several times a day. The difference was usability (especially one-handed usability) and the slim form factor.

By now some slick, usable Blackberries are on the market, but I bet they account for a small percentage of RIM's subscribers. You have a point about tethering, but there's a difference between a handful of traveling businessmen tethering when they don't have any other option and a bunch of young people watching YouTube all day and not even bothering to look for wifi.

I think you missed the fact that I was disagreeing with you in the explanation of people's behavior. People have little imagination, and for most people, almost any impulse takes them in the direction of conformity. They can find group identity and ready-made identities on the right or on the left, through worship of corporations or enmity to them. (But you know that already.)

What the corporations are doing is slightly more subtle than just offering an opportunity for conformism. Their reasoning even allows people who distrust corporations to believe that trusting corporations over consumers is the least bad option.

Actually, this mentality comes from disenchantment with the legal system that is carefully cultivated by businesses to give themselves a legal leg up on consumers. If you convince people that the legal system is unable to decide consumer complaints justly according to their merits, then logically, there are only two choices: trust the corporations' word on everything or allow them to be torn apart by jealous parasites.

So, if you make people cynical about lawsuits by individuals, people see every consumer complaint as a threat to the production of all the food, services, and cool stuff that we currently enjoy. That is, a threat to capitalism and all we know as good.

Companies are happy to rely the legal system to regulate relations among themselves when they can't get along, of course. Then they gang up on consumers to exclude them from the system because they don't have to rely on lawsuits to hold consumers to their word -- that's what credit reporting services are for.

Frankly, I'd love to see our ridiculous liability system restored to some kind of sanity and credibility. Then corporations will have to face more public responsibility. These days, when a company gets walloped in court for blatant fraud and dishonesty, people don't take it very seriously because business interests make sure there's a steady stream of ridiculous personal injury lawsuits in the news. I have to admit they have a point, but they don't invest billions in cultivating our cynicism just as a public service.

I bet the average BlackBerry user consumes far less bandwidth than the average iPhone user. The iPhone is a media device; if you don't want media and web browsing, there's no reason to buy it. Many people with little interest in media and web browsing own Blackberries for purely business reasons. Plus, the iPhone's slick UI means people consume more bandwidth simply because it's more convenient. The lack of friction in the UI means iPhone users will start browsing the web at the drop of the hat, just because they're bored. Most people wouldn't access the web on a Blackberry without a reason -- at least that's true for a lot of older and cheaper Blackberry devices that account for many of RIM's subscribers.

I agree, but AT&T has always been known for mediocre cell service. If you aren't known for being good at something, there's no point in being better than adequate. Everywhere I go, the AT&T network seems barely adequate (though the data bandwidth can be excellent in off-peak hours.) I wouldn't know, but I assume it takes careful management to achieve such a consistent level of mediocrity. And they know that consistent mediocrity means that any aberration from normal conditions (such as an event that attracts an unusual number of people to one place) results in terrible service or no service at all. I've learned not to rely on my AT&T service. I'm looking forward to switching back to Verizon as soon as I can get a Verizon iPhone or something similar. Verizon has always hung their reputation on the quality of their network, so they have an incentive to keep it from crapping out all the time.

I think what we've learned is that there's a bug in the POSIX standard, and Ext4 exploits the bug to deliver high measured performance in a way that is actually bad for users. So it's a benchmark hack on top of a flawed spec -- all in all, a shit sandwich for users.

That's not to say that Ext4 is bad technology. It sounds like it will deliver on its performance promises on systems that run well-written, failure-resistent software. It just won't work with the software that desktop users currently use. It will take a while for this to get sorted out, and we have to moderate our expectations from "everyone switches to ext4 and gets an automatic speed boost" to "wait and see; desktop users might not benefit from it anytime soon."

Advantages: Filesystem benchmarks improve. Real performance... I guess that improves, too. Does anybody know?

Disadvantages: You risk data loss with 95% of the apps you use on a daily basis. This will persist until the apps are rewritten to force data commits at appropriate times, but hopefully not frequently enough to eat up all the performance improvements and more.

Ext4 might be great for servers (where crucial data is stored in databases, which are presumably written by storage experts who read the Posix spec), but what is the rationale for using it on the desktop? Ext4 has been coming for years, and everyone assumed it was the natural successor to ext3 for *all* contexts where ext3 is used, including desktops. I hope distros don't start using or recommending ext4 by default until they figure out how to configure it for safe usage on the desktop. (That will happen long before the apps are rewritten.) Filesystem benchmarks be damned.

I noticed the same thing in Philadelphia with the service personnel. All the passengers were white and Asian, and the personnel cleaning, driving the carts, and working at the stores and restaurants were black. For me it was really disturbing, like a trip into an alternative-history universe, with white people on their way to and from vacation, college, and jet-set jobs, and a bunch of black people feeding them and cleaning up after them. Seeing just a few black faces walking around with carry-ons or a few white people working at the Pizza Hut would have broken the spell, but to look around you'd think the racial roles were enforced by law. It was uncanny, and I was relieved to leave.

I guess the logic behind it is that airport jobs are good working-class jobs. Some places don't seem to have any white working-class people; all the white people are either college graduates or desperately pretending to be.

Ah, so instead of a bag that was gay in the sleek, urban, waxed-bikini-line way, you wanted a bag that was gay in the hairy, gun-polishing, unwittingly homoerotic, paramilitary-camaraderie, "let's practice jiujitsu so we can protect our families" kind of way.

Personally, neither way works for me, so I'm only gay in the "rarely has sex with women" kind of way.

(P.S. My current carry-on sucks, and I might end up buying a Tom Bihn Aeronaut as a result of this review, but why is this on Slashdot?)

iPod, iPhone, and next, the iTablet?

A revolutionary new product type is conceived. "Everyone will want one! Everyone will have one!" Then a few products come out, and it turns out that only a few people want one. The conventional wisdom changes: "Never mind. Kinda lame. Just for gadget enthusiasts." Years later, Apple creates the first implementation that isn't a fiddly high-overhead pain in the ass to use. The revolution finally arrives. "Everybody wants one! Everybody has one!" Then other companies spend years trying to figure out how Apple's product is different from theirs. Thousands of people like me who kind of hate Apple hold out a few years and then give up and buy the Apple product.

I haven't decided whether I will wait out the iTable cycle, if that's what is coming. I can't stand OSX (I have a Mac Mini at home gathering dust because someone persuaded me I had to give OSX a chance,) but if the alternative is waiting until 2013 for a decent competitor, I'll buy, and I'll give Apple credit for another "first" regardless of the predecessors. Why? Because I'm familiar with some of the currently available tablets and have no desire to carry one around, and knowing fucking Apple, they will come out with a product I want to use, and I will have to swallow my resentment and buy one.

Software has to be designed to scale up and down through an acceptable range of hardware. If fast dev boxes spawn software that doesn't scale down, then slow dev boxes in the hands of the same developers just create the opposite problem: software that doesn't scale up to take advantage of multiple cores and gigs of RAM.

Wouldn't you rather piss off stingy customers than rich ones who are spending money on technology?

It's far from an abandoned space. Jambi/Qt faces the opposite problem: trying to take market share away from two large, popular GUI application frameworks: Netbeans and Eclipse RCP. Eclipse RCP is already well-established as the platform of choice for Java programmers who want to build GUI applications using native widgets. GUI applications framework have a significant learning curve, so the uptake of Jambi/Qt among Java programmers will be gradual at best.

As the developer of a commercial Eclipse RCP application, I'll be disappointed if Jambi doesn't catch on. It seems like a simpler, light alternative to Eclipse and a good choice when you don't intend to build a heavy, complex application (which is what Eclipse RCP is good for, and not much else.)

No kidding. These obfuscated C winners impress the hell out of me, but in real life, I have yet to meet anybody who can code that way who doesn't think everybody should code that way all the time.

Most software distributors provide an easy, careless route through the installer -- just keep clicking OK. I think that's a fine thing to do, since most people just don't care. What do I need installed for Java to run well on my system? Don't tell me; just do it.

People who are more picky can find out what's going to be installed and opt out. They're a (supposedly) more sophisticated minority, so they can assume the relatively light burden of finding the checkboxes, understanding what they mean, and checking them or unchecking them as they desire.

Anyone who takes the careless route through an installer -- not taking the time to find out what the installer actually installs, and just clicking "OK" as fast as possible -- can't really complain if they end up installing something they didn't want, unless the installer is labeled in bad faith. That certainly wasn't the case here. Sun just wants their product to perform better in Firefox so people are more likely to have a positive perception of it.