I just finished watching season 2 of 3 of "Caught on Camera" on Netflix (UK CCTV, mostly police). Prior to that, I would have been as adamantly against such government surveillance like CCTV as anyone else here. But now, I'm not so sure this is entirely a bad thing. I welcome anyone to intelligently dispel my illusion.

With all the private security cameras and smart phones everywhere, I haven't had much expectation of physical privacy for a long time, except restrooms/etc and inside my own residence (if I elect to use curtains). Ok, on a side note, I also think flying drones (private or government) without permission over anyone's private property needs to be explicitly illegal. There is clearly some gray areas that need to worked out.

Of course, the TV show is going to focus on successful restraint of the the worst people and only occasionally show examples of mocking people acting foolish. But watching the operators track some extremely violent offender from street to street, or better yet, with that extraordinary good IR camera in the helicopter, hopping fences and ducking into bushes, is all really quite satisfying.

Oh, come on, be serious.

It's pretty obvious that they're talking about $103 per year. That comes to about $8.60 per month. For me, I'd rather pay the 16% more for Netflix instead, to avoid the endless commercials, but I can see how it's a tradeoff that some people would be willing to accept.

Huh. What was that? Are you kidding?

Ah, yes, I took the Amiga route, probably far longer than it merited, up until about the point where I got a military-supplied SGI workstation to use in my roach-infested college apartment.

To be fair, I only used Windows for any serious purpose up through XP, for cross-platform fully-abstracted simulation software as well as large-scale PC/Console games. It's reassuring to hear that things have dramatically improved since then, although it is odd I'm just hearing about it now. I found a prospering industry that is not shackled to Windows, or even Mac, so I suppose I've just lost touch with those worlds. When all you deliver is pixels, no one cares what you used to assemble them.

So, lack of awareness, huh. Ooh, let's play a game, presumably just for my own amusement. Off the top of my head, no cheating and looking things up, let's harken back to ye olde... a decade or so ago and recall my foggy memories of the PC as it once was...

* Each DLL has its own heap, so cross-DLL malloc/dealloc causes crashes. Likewise, you can't inherit C++ implementations across DLLs, or something related to that. There is a non-obvious non-trivial fully-functional fix for this, but since every expert I asked said "deal with it", I had to come up with the answer on my own.
* Symbol visibility is off by default and you can't change the default. You have to mark up your code with import and export even for small projects, where it is just a waste of time. Arguably, that made us all ready for gcc visibility, but it's no excuse.
* Emaciated CLI.
* File paths contain backslash, which is also a string special character and just pointlessly different than the existing standard.
* Drives are a single letter and follow a forced inconvenient pattern. The colon isn't a real problem, so much, but rather a constant reminder that makes you feel stupid for even being in that situation.
* 8.3 filenames were pointlessly out of date at the start and absurd for how long it lasted. Likewise, isn't it /more/ work to annoyingly ignore and/or remove case in filenames?
* No symbolic links.
* No NFS except with sketchy third party pay software. Samba was arguably worse, but the choice was usually more about where the files had to be than which solution was less intolerable. So, the "choice" was generally forced on you.
* The symbol "color" was already defined somewhere in a common Win32 header, but not in a way that simply reported as such. If you did something as outlandish as use a local variable named "color", you would get a cryptic assembly error.
* No valgrind.
* Fully reinstall the OS once or twice a year, watching it slowly fall apart each time.
* Something about a "registry". I don't really recall why I had to keep going back to that, but I associate the word with deep feelings of dissatisfaction.
* No remote display, although VNC kinda filled in the gap late in the game.
* Window decorations are apparently baked into each program, not provided by the window manager, so a slow or frozen program isn't particularly manageable.
* Oh right, there's no real window manager, so you you can't replace the simplistic naive "default" with something useful. I'd say this one counts for about as much as all the rest combined.

There's going to be a dozen more that pop into my head after I press "Submit".

Thank you. I post less than once a year, but I have to speak now. Modding up would not be good enough.

I have stated almost this exact quote many, many times throughout my life, but always attributing the honor to "Bill Gates". It is truly tragic to consider where we could have been now, or even twenty years ago, if that ill-conceived cardboard substitute for an operating system hadn't been unleashed upon the world. Let us not forget.

Windows is like a hollow plastic hammer. It appeals to the timid who are afraid of breaking anything. But once you actually try to get some work done, you realize that you are only playing with a toy.

You're still using Windows? When you buy a frame, you're supposed to throw away the sample picture it comes with.

I am not sure if this is something I am obligated to respond to or if it is just some provocation towards an escalation of inane comments. But I will humor you and assume that you are just posting AC because you forgot your password today.

Paleo excludes grains, dairy, legumes, potatoes, and, well, salt. I don't see the sense in that. You might make some caveman argument against bread, I suppose, but I believe that in the few years since we started making bread (and liquor), our systems have adapted. I have had doctors tell me that full exclusion of bread is a bad idea (niacin or something). As for the rum, I'll use whatever excuse I need to.

Your comment about caffeine appears to be made in opposition, yet your conclusion just seems to parallel what I said, that some, but not all, people can have problems with caffeine. If you have, in fact, summoned words of wisdom, then, sadly, they have eluded me.

John Meacham was kind enough to point out that "organic" does not exclude pesticides. I appreciated the reminder and provided the additional follow-up fact that I was thinking about my particular produce provider, who is allegedly pesticide-free. My orchard is also pesticide-free, but maybe that's because I'm too lazy to do anything but water the trees. Most of my losses are from birds and squirrels, so it wouldn't make much difference anyhow. I apologize to anyone who may have gotten a message that general organic food is safe (or even safer).

I had no idea my comment about about "one ingredient" would be so confusing and disturbing for anyone. I did not intend that people would wildly purchase random items just because they were of singular content. I simply meant that I would want to purchase things like "Nantes carrots", "heirloom tomatoes", "prime rib", and "Carolina Reaper peppers" (mmm, sounds like a great recipe). I don't need sugar saturated into every can and jar on my shelf. You are welcome to the microwave mealbox with 47 ingredients in it. There are certainly plenty in the freezer case to choose from. But if you become impotent before you're old enough to vote, don't come whining to me.

I had to add that last line just in case you're trolling. Otherwise, you can just ignore it.

Aside from my own little orchard, I've been getting most of my produce from these guys:

http://www.farmfreshtoyou.com/why_choose_us/

My main reason for this is that it is almost impossible to find Nantes carrots anywhere else. These guys claim to be pesticide-free, but I suppose they could simply be lying. They actually invite people to visit their farm(s). I haven't done that, but I'd like to believe that it means that their facilities are not obviously appalling.

But, yes, you are correct. Simply looking for "organic" isn't good enough either.

By the way, if you've never tried a Nantes carrot or Splash pluot, you are really missing out.

(I am not a doctor or nutritionist, but I read what I can and watch the whole spectrum of Netflix documentaries, from the obvious to the eccentric.)

That's not a bad list, but...

- Sodium isn't bad for you (unless you have a special condition).

Sodium levels in the body can be fairly independent of ingested sodium. Some people can retain high sodium (and have high BP) even if their salt intake is very minimal. A prescription can bring that sodium down to safe values. But yes, for a lot of people, sodium intakes seems to be of only minimal consequence.

- High fructose corn syrup isn't significantly different than regular sugar.

I thought there was that issue where HFCS doesn't trigger the fullness response in the same way as plain sugar, provoking people to consume more. Has that been debunked now? But nutritionally, I generally treat all the "added sugars" as the same. Try eliminating all added sugar for a year and then eat an apple. They taste awesome.

- Aspertame has no significant health effects.

I don't eat anything that tastes awful, so I haven't even looked into it. And also, I don't trust anything "unnatural" (using my definition).

- Fat isn't bad for you.

In reasonable amounts. Also, I'm still buying into the whole olive oil versus crap oil thing.

- Caffeine doesn't cause heart problems

For some people, it can cause heart palpitations. That seems like a problem to me.

- Health food isn't much better for you than regular food

If "regular food" is what most people eat, then I think there is a big difference. But if you mean brown eggs versus white eggs, than probably not. The brown shells are better, though, because they're a little easier to spot in the frying pan.

- Eggs don't give you a heart attack

The only thing that I got from that big China study was that eggs looked pretty good and
that eating only 1-10 servings of vegetables PER YEAR (in two provinces) was really bad. Those same two provinces were also the only places where anyone drank a considerable amount of milk and that was used for some very sketchy claims against dairy.

Doctors tell me that ingested cholesterol only accounts for like 5% of your blood levels, so if you're doing a Cool Hand Luke on a regular basis, your probably pushing your luck.

- Organic doesn't mean healthy. Neither does natural.

If "organic" means no-pesticides, then I'm all for it, where I can afford it. "Natural" on the package doesn't mean anything useful and it probably will always be a junk marketing term. I use "natural" to mean anything that you could find while wandering around on the planet. Of course, then, arsenic is natural, so that isn't a good enough criteria by itself.

I try to stick to buying food with one ingredient. It's not a perfect rule (I like vinegar in my pickles), but I think the intent is solid and it is a good mantra in the grocery store.

- Chemicals are not bad for you.

See arsenic.