Diseases of Affluence - <AUTHOR> http://maisonneuve.org/pressroom/article/2010/nov/15/the-diseases-affluence/ <comment><USER2> Really fascinating piece. Most interesting medical paragraph in the piece:

 _ONE OF THE COMMON PITFALLS for clinicians who treat type two diabetes occurs when they prescribe metformin to young women. Metformin decreases insulin resistance, which helps reduce blood sugar. Insulin resistance is also what causes infertility in women with polycystic ovary syndrome, as well as type two diabetes. Often, women thought to be infertile become pregnant after taking metformin. Sometimes, of course, this delights them, but sometimes it does not. Contraception does not normally seem like one of the things diabetes doctors need to emphasize. But obesity commonly underlies infertility in women, just as it also causes the growth of facial hair. And, in men, the growth of breast tissue. Adipose tissue secretes estrogens and insulin resistance increases levels of androgens. Diabetes is overwhelmingly the most common cause of male impotence in the developed world. Men and women are designed to move, and when we do not, our immobility reduces us in every respect._

Most interesting non-medical paragraph:

 _THE OLDEST of the bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean have lived for two hundred years. We know this because when they are killed and examined today, we find ivory harpoon heads lodged in their skin. The implication is that they were large enough to be hunted prior to the arrival of the Hudson Bay Company and its steel harpoon heads in the 1830s. Isotopic analysis of the whales' eyes confirms the point: these whales were calves during the Napoleonic Wars. They are certainly the longest-lived mammals on the planet. Indeed, they may be the longest-lived complex animals of any sort._

Thank you for posting this.

<comment><USER3> I would argue the most interesting non-medical paragraph is this one:

 _The Polynesians did not have lodestones with which to make compasses, and their navigation system does not emphasize the stars, but the sea itself. The different wave patterns are studied and observed, as many, improbably, as fourteen simultaneously. (...) Navigating by wave train alone, the waves were best felt with the testicles; the navigator on each canoe had a special cabin he hunkered in. The idea, however, of making sense out of an interference pattern involving more than three or four wave systems is mind-boggling. The mathematical complexity of a fourteen-source interference pattern would appear more than can be held by any human brain. Or scrotum._

And apparently, it's true!

[http://www.cseg.ca/publications/recorder/2008/09sep/sep2008-...](http://www.cseg.ca/publications/recorder/2008/09sep/sep2008-science- break.pdf)

<comment><USER2> :-)

A) I started to say "best" but felt that would be more open to argument. So I used the phrase "most interesting" in hopes that it would be accepted that what an individual finds "most interesting" is personal.

B) I'm actually very fascinated by a lot of stuff having to do with human sexuality (though that is not really what this is about) and not terribly shy about discussing it. However, I have found that it is best to tread lightly in that regard as a woman in a male dominated forum. So I thought it best to leave out any references to testicles the article made. :-D (On previous occasions, making similar observations has resulted in downvotes here.)

I also refrained from speculating out loud about some of the causes of issues described in the article. I do have some thoughts and I read the article because it fits very nicely with my interests in getting myself well against very long odds, but what I believe to be true is very far from accepted/conventional wisdom on such topics. It often gets either ignored or downvoted here. :-/

But thank you for replying. Have an upvote. :-)

<comment><USER3> I did refrain from asking whether this particular navigation technique contributed to the prejudice that women can't drive...

> what I believe to be true is very far from accepted/conventional wisdom on > such topics. It often gets either ignored or downvoted here. :-/

I had a weird experience on HN some time ago when I tried to argue that death was actually a good thing and was immediately downvoted.

It seems people downvote comments they perceive to be "contrarian", ie insincere and artificially opposed to mainstream; the problem of course is that it's very difficult to discriminate ingenuous from disingenious contrarian opinions.

Just because one thinks different does not mean they do it on purpose. And in the end, only the truth should matter; even if a point is actually being argued disingeniously, this fact alone doesn't make it wrong...

<comment><USER4> _I had a weird experience on HN some time ago when I tried to argue that death was actually a good thing and was immediately downvoted.

It seems people downvote comments they perceive to be "contrarian" [...]_

You should probably choose another example, since "death is necessary and ultimately a good thing" is the mainstream view, not contrarian at all.

<comment><USER5> I, too, have never found appreciating the upside to death a common or popular view. I'd be interested to know your social circle; it sounds much more interesting than mine.

<comment><USER4> _My_ social circle mostly wants to live forever, but that's because I've surrounded myself with transhumanists and libertarians, who are a lot less deathist than the population in general. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When done well, articles like this subtly switch tone from beginning to end.

At the beginning, the tone is something like "we live in a great society, where wondrous things are possible, but we have problems"

At the end, the tone is something like "Progress hurts us. It is better to avoid modernity in its entirity"

Of course, the second statement is never fully fleshed out: to do so would show the many problems it has.

Everybody dreams of a simple world, living close to nature, part of a community and practicing a long-lasting culture. To see a native people in the South Pacific go from fishing to Big Macs and spam in a generation is ascetically displeasing.

But remember: the average life expectancy of an Afghan is _39 years_. These supposedly fit and healthy societies had entire generations that never saw the age of 50.

I used to be a big fan of a certain culture -- until I read modern doctor's accounts of members of that culture who relied on traditional remedies instead of modern medicine. I used to be a big fan of going back to some of the old ways of primitive peoples -- until I read "Culture cult" (A must-read if you are interested in this sort of thing) [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813338638?ie=UTF8&tag=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813338638?ie=UTF8&tag=whtofi-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0813338638)

The fact is -- it's never a simple comparison. You can pick and choose and make the case that such ways of living are better -- or you can do the same thing to make the case they are worse. Doctors can tell you horrific stories about all sorts of cultures and societies. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, that is, we always think the other culture or way of life is better. Many times it is not.

I am a firm believer that some trade-offs are better for societies than others. It's not all just the same. And these are extremely serious health issues. I do not mean to make light of them at all. Perhaps we can learn some lessons from more traditional societies that we can apply. But we need to be very careful about when performing such analysis that we don't step over the line from selecting good things to frank prejudice towards any sort of traditional or primitive society. We romanticize peoples instead of looking at them the way they really are. It's a feel-good thing, sure, but our feelings rarely match up to the actual state of things, no matter how many good essays like this we read. (And this was a great essay)

<comment><USER7> > But remember: the average life expectancy of an Afghan is _39 years_. These > supposedly fit and healthy societies had entire generations that never saw > the age of 50.

That's life expectancy at birth, because Afghanistan (understandably) currently has the highest rate of under-5 mortality. Life expectancy upon reaching age 5 is probably still over 50 years, although these are the rosier 1990-95 figures:

[http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/country-health- profile/af...](http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/country-health- profile/afghanistan)

<comment><USER8> That link is useful in refuting some of the article's other claims, such as suggestion that heart attacks are "almost unknown" amongst the Pashtuns.

The actual data suggests that Afghanistan is in the top 10 nations for numbers of coronary heart disease deaths per 100,000 population. The USA isn't even in the top 100. Sure, it isn't the leading killer out there, and it's lack of medical attention more than lifestyle factors driving that death rate up, but it's utterly false to insinuate that less fatty food renders heart problems irrelevant in that part of the world...

<comment><USER7> Great point. There are other lifestyle factors besides diet playing a part as well. Particularly, that Afghanistan is probably one of the most stressful countries in the world in which to live over the last 35 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My wife comes from a country that would be considered "third world" in many ways, and the diet there is much more traditional and seasonal: rice, lots of tropical fruit and veg, and a number of different fish. A variation on the Asian diet. Notably, there is not much obesity-- not nearly as much as in Western nations.

It's not just diet, it's also general activity level during the day, because only the wealthy own automobiles and average people walk and bike _much_ more than in the West-- where I'm from, people dress up in fancy "workout" clothes to go for a brisk walk, jog for 1 mile or km, or take a bike ride!

</comment><comment><USER10> The thing this article drives home, to me, is that in "impoverished" circumstances -- i.e. an environment where there is not a surfeit of resources -- the external environment serves to regulate the body, health, and longevity. In Western(ized) cultures, cultures of plenty, we shift from being regulated (and controlled) primarily by our environment, to having to regulate ourselves. Learning that self-discipline, as a culture and a species, is an arduous process, and as we've seen, the affluent and educated tend to have a leg up in doing so.

I think it could be a more productive conversation if we treated "diseases of affluence" as ones that required different human responses than the diseases we've faced in the past -- the search for the pathway to instilling the requisite behaviors for healthy survival seems to me like a better expenditure of energy than simply bemoaning progress's ills.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great article, made me want to run off to the wilderness and get moving building something, being self sufficient. I feel like I'm melting in my chair. But instead I'll go check out what's on reddit.

<comment><USER12> The cool thing is once you get the ball rolling, it keeps on rolling. Ever since I improved my diet and started exercising, I have times when I just _really_ , _really_ want to jump up and down, run laps, do pushups, lift something heavy...

You do have to keep it up though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was an engaging read. But the implication that urbanization causes obesity is not only unsupported by the author, but almost certainly fallacious. (Correlation, after all, does not imply causation)

The cause of obesity is quite clearly refined carbohydrates, and the greater prevalence among the less affluent is directly due to carbohydrates being less expensive per calorie than vegetables and meats. (This is exacerbated by a) 40 years of misinformed nutritional recommendations, and b) government financial incentives to the agriculture industry).

Not only is the author wrong about the cause of this problem, but he is wrongheaded in his demonization of urbanization. There are very clearly measurable negative environmental impacts caused by suburbanization and exurbanization. Urbanites, OTOH, have a significantly smaller per capita environmental impact.

</comment><comment><USER14> When the solution is "stop eating so many refined carbs", I'm sorry, but I have a had time then trying to penumbrically emanate the blame out to "urbanization" or "wealth". The problem is that the US government decided to blame fat, despite all the evidence to the contrary. If they had not done that forty years ago, there's every reason to believe that we would in fact be every bit as urban and every bit as wealthy (if not even more so), yet not fat. There's nothing but correlation for those things; the causation is confined to eating too many refined carbs. I reject modern-day Puritan's attempts to load their Puritanical views onto the really-rather-simple problem of obesity; the first order problem is too many carbs and if there's a second order problem it would be government, not urbanization or wealth.

<comment><USER15> The first problem is a society that doesn't, inherently, teach happiness to its newest members - we are reared with the idea that hard work and submission are the rules of this game. That in turn produces a large population of generally crabby, unhappy, and dependent people (dependent in the sense that everyone looks to everyone else for their happiness - people blame governments, people blame their spouses, for doing something that makes them unhappy).

Junk food, drugs, sitcoms, and strip malls are all the result of people discovering that a number of substances and emotional states can be cheaply produced (a result of industrialization/modernization) that excite the nervous system. Many often excite dopamine release in the brain which makes a lot of it addictive.

This is also a product of population growth - substances that are cheap and easy to produce make feeding and keeping alive a larger population much easier. You therefore, will always, have a large cross section of any given modern population that can only stay alive by consuming cheap sustenance that excites their nervous system to mask how nutritionally poor it is. Only sad thing is, it usually keeps them there.

I consider MSG and Wheat (the grain, yes) to be far worse that narcotics.

Obesity isn't the government's fault. It isn't the corporation's fault even, they are simply the _result_ of a condition. The fault is in the people. People need to start taking responsibility for their own happiness - as they do that, the conditions will improve. But it is the individual's journey, not the group's.

<comment><USER14> I don't disagree with the message that people are responsible for their own happiness. But right now, a "health conscious" person can go out, realize they need to eat a good diet, and be filled unto overflowing with actively harmful advice pushed by virtually every authority in existence. At some point they've done their due diligence and can no longer be blamed for the result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What can we make of an opening like this?

"Everywhere Western ideas touch down, people get fatter. Urbanization is literally making us sick."

What about China? It has had some large cities for several thousand years now. Did people in China get fat 3,000 years ago?

In the USA, since 1945, the trend has been away from the cities and towards. Why not write "suburbanization is making us fatter?"

The article is on solid ground when it writes about insulin and fat. But nowhere does it offer much evidence about what is causing insulin resistance in the West. The truth is that this is still a subject of much research. There are a lot of theories out there, but no one is sure of the cause.

The sentence "Urbanization is literally making us sick" is ridiculous.

<comment><USER2> I agree that the article didn't really make the point it initial indicated it would make and never really did get back to this initial assertion. I liked it anyway for other reasons. It is rich in certain kinds of information that interest me and which are often not put together. I don't think it did a great job of drawing conclusions and backing them up. I still felt it had a lot of value for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Quite interesting.

The fact that native people eating their traditional diet do not have the western diseases of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, etc., is well documented, as is the fact that those same native peoples who adopt a western diet do suffer from the western diseases.

Those facts alone prove that the western diseases not genetic but environmental and thus avoidable. Anyone who wishes to avoid them can do so, but they need to figure out how, which may not be obvious.

<comment><USER18> There was a study of the town Roseto, Pennsylvania in the 1950s that may explain why this is the case. They ate a traditional american diet, exercised the same amount as other americans, etc. But they had almost no heart disease, which was astounding at the time.

The difference was that everyone in town was very social. They would frequently share meals with neighbors, and several family generations would live together under the same roof. The conclusion the study came to was that the excellent health was from community and social connections.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/chapters/chapter- out...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/chapters/chapter- outliers.html?_r=1)

I think these social connections become necessary for survival in poor areas. So they are resistant to diseases of affluence when their diet changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _The women, when they want to be particularly biting about their men, complain that "he doesn't even own a gun anymore."_

Oooh, that enchants my imagination. I do hope I someday get a chance to live in a world where _everyone_ hunts, no matter how small that world is, even if only for a little while.

<comment><USER19> Yes. Everyone should run out into the woods with a six-pack in one hand and a gun in the other, kill a bunch of animals, and then leave their bodies in the woods so that the local authorities can't catch you as having hunted more than your alloted share of animals!

I'm of the mind that the number of hunters that want to conserve wildlife and 'be responsible' is far out-weighed by the number of people that view hunting as a way to, "shoot guns, kill things and get drunk." Those people have been hunting, and obviously haven't learned much from it (unless that's the kind of world you are implying that you want to live in). Why do you think that the majority of people will somehow take away _more_ from it then these people have?

While I have more respect for people that hunt their food than the people that just buy it at the store (but wouldn't have the balls to kill the animals themselves), I think that sending people out into the wilderness to kill a bunch of animals just so that they can 'learn valuable life lessons' is a morally wrong (or at least ambiguous) proposition. Why not bring to life The Running Man (or Battle Royale) as a real-life 'coming of age' instead? (Hint: Because of the societal view that animals are somehow 'below us' and that as humans we have the god-given right -- hey, it's even in the Bible -- to do whatever we want to non-human animals. Therefore killing an animal is no different than tearing a piece of fabric or smashing a light bulb.)

[Note: I'm not some hippie that "just doesn't know because he's never been hunting." I _have_ been hunting. I got over the "Omg! I killed an animal!" and spent a few years of my life killing and eating animals in the fall during hunting season.]

<comment><USER12> I meant hunts because you need to hunt to get the meat you need to survive & stay healthy. Not hunts for pleasure.</comment></comment></comment>


DHS planning to collect social media info on all immigrants - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/352421-dhs-planning-to-collect-social-media-info-on-all-immigrants <comment><AUTHOR> According to the article:

"The rule filed last week... would also apply to those who have already obtained a green card or gone through the naturalization process." Meaning, that even naturalized citizens are covered under this new rule.</comment>


The CTO made me sick – why I left Unity - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1czDbFa-1o2PT5u077vIfLILhLP0oQj8Dl5_tTYKTltM <comment><USER2> Calling people out publicly is potentially dangerous to your future career. In this context, if you are going to attack someone else's career you must annihilate it completely and preferably in secret. In this case the doxing has not achieved this goal and therefore comes off weak. Having said this I sympathise fully as I have been in a similar situation but in the medium to long run this public doc might come back to haunt you... the internet never forgets. The best advice I can give is to try and take it down and do your best to scrub it from search engines. You will undoubtedly be feeling terrible now but indeed you have been given a gift to grow and be more formidable against these types of people and situations.

I humbly suggest to finding another job ASAP and take a moment to read "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene. This will be the best time investment I can think of for not finding yourself in this situation ever again.

<comment><USER3> He already has another job. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is happening to a friend of mine too by the CEO of his company. There is very little you can do about it except quitting the job. Only the boss of the boss could do anything, being in this case the shareholders, who don't give a xxxx as long as the money keeps flowing in.

<comment><USER2> Firstly I sympathise with your friend. This is a rotten situation to allow yourself to be in... I know that sounds a little cruel but your friend has the ability to exercise his agency.

We are all captains of our destiny... which does mean that we have responsibility to avoid life's storms. Granted some storms are completely unavoidable but they are few and far between.

My greater point here is that the lessons taught by Machiavelli in The Prince (and made more accessible in the 48 Laws of Power) ring true in any group dynamic of humans... especially in workplaces. I know many detest office politics but by not playing you are indeed under the illusion of having a choice not to play having already choosen to work for that company. Employees therefore have no choice but to play and by not doing so have choosen the default part of a 'sitting duck' pawn.

I wish this wasn't reality but to be effective we cannot delude ourselves about human nature. The best way to be effective in a workplace is to accumulate political capital and strategically navigate office politics while also being effective at your job. This will also provide a margin of safety against office bullies and overly ambitious ladder climbers who prey on the weak and powerless.

You might then think that the solution is to be a CEO but if you get there you will find that it's worse and that politics becomes absolutely vital for dealing with customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders.</comment></comment>


We tested Europe's new lie detector for travelers and triggered a false positive - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2019/07/26/europe-border-control-ai-lie-detector/ <comment><USER2> So more ableism for the neurotypical. Great.

I fully expect to fail these sorts of things as a matter of course. I can't wait.</comment>


DRM Is Toxic to Culture - <AUTHOR> https://meshedinsights.com/2017/07/09/drm-is-toxic-to-culture/ <comment><USER4> Some background: I developed a software binary sandbox, in the 90's; patent cited 500+ times ... mostly by developers of DRM. Now, I am working on an open source project.

IMO, DRM extends a presumption of scarcity. Hunters share their meat, whereas farmers guard their harvest. For the hunter, the kill is a short term abundance of value; if it isn't shared, it will spoil. For the farmer, the harvest is a long term store of value. Scavengers exploit the asymmetry of effort in which to obtain that value.

Once value became easy to copy, the symmetry of effort has shifted. As a result, culture is shifting with it. Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Back to a short term abundance of value. When was the last time you posted on Twitter or FB? These are freshly hunted moments. Wait too long and that muse will spoil.

<comment><USER5> There is no presumption of scarcity, because scarcity is a real phenomenon.

There is a vast qualitative difference between the output of ten thousand amateurs and one highly trained and exceptionally talented artist (working in whatever medium.)

This an immensely unfashionable idea. But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it _presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied._

In fact artistic output - considered as the cultural influence of an entire career, and not as a series of copyable files or performances - is not fungible.

Not all content creators are equal. If you want quality as opposed to quantity, you need to set up a feedback function that makes some effort to reward and support quality, based on a more sophisticated metric than a lowest-common-denominator unit sales count in a mass market.

This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein.

And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.

By the time everyone is having the DRM or no-DRM argument they've already missed the point - which is that commodifying cultural output as "content" for industrial distribution mechanisms (including live tours) is to misunderstand how culture propagates and evolves.

And if you can't invent a system that finds and rewards talent - <USER2> reducing every transaction to the vapid foolishness of markets - then your culture, science, politics, art, and general joy in invention will stagnate and eventually disappear.

DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.

<comment><USER6> Your entire comment boils down to repeating Sturgeon's Law over and over, which can be summarized as "ninety percent of everything is crap," which is to say, your comment is obnoxious and off-topic to the discussion of Digital Restrictions Management and its negative consequences (DRM only has negative consequences).

However, there is an idea there. HN user [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maxxxxx](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maxxxxx) made a very astute observation as to why so many "industries" (rich people that control companies) are so adamant about ramming DRM down everyone's throats:

 _Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it 's the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don't need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12514611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12514611)

The system you propose to invent is redistribution of wealth and socialism: free education for those that want to advance their abilities, and universal basic income to allow them the time to express those abilities. Liberating knowledge from rent-seeking should be the prerogative of everyone that wants to improve the human condition and advance humanity.

<comment><USER7> It's not that 90% is crap, it's that there's inherently expensive classes of content that won't be produced without a revenue stream. Pewdiepie could still do his thing on a shoestring, but Star Wars could not be produced.

> Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for > capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, > robotics and so on are available to the masses

I tried to warn the capitalists, but they were too busy counting their $s from tracking you with AI and replacing your job with robots.

> Liberating knowledge from rent-seeking should be the prerogative of everyone > that wants to improve the human condition and advance humanity.

A discussion of "knowledge" is important, but DRM is 99% about entertainment.

<comment><USER8> And 100% about owning content after copyright expires. DMCA guarantees it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"\--permanent rightful _ownership_ vs a _temporary_ grant of monopoly on an idea.

But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of time greater than the duration of any human life means that for 99.99% of all works, the effective duration of copyright truly is forever, which reinforces the idea that copyright _should_ be forever. And if it's forever and it's "property" why shouldn't strong, user-hostile DRM exist? It's the barbed-wire, severe- tire-damage, border-wall of electronic media.

<comment><USER10> And the really weird part is that while the propaganda puts it as "protecting property", it really has exactly the opposite effect. When you buy a physical book, that book is indeed your property, and you can do with it whatever you want. Now, with DRM-infested ebooks, you are actually just licensing it for very restricted use.

You might as well be claiming that making private home ownership illegal would strengthen property rights.

<comment><USER11> The physical book comparison is interesting. Imagine there would be a way to publish physical books with DRM that all publishers would embrace. You open such a book without authorization and it's all gibberish. To read it you would need to have bought a special strip that you lay over the pages in order to read (don't matter the technical aspect, it's gedanken-experiment so let's consider such a strip magic for now). You buy this strip and enter a user agreement to only use it for yourself (you are not allowed to lend it - <USER3> to your children), it could easily be reverse-engineered but no-one would do it because that would be a felony.

No sane person would agree to such state of affairs but somehow now because our books are digital it's all off a sudden okay with almost everyone?

<comment><USER12> RMS has been warning[1] about that specific problem for decades. Unfortunately, very few people listened. Now we have the additional problem of people already giving up property rights for shiny digital baubles. -sigh-

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to- read.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html)

<comment><USER13> I'm getting a little exhausted in every thread about DRM and the likes to read about how "people don't listen to RMS". People don't listen to RMS because he makes no effort to be listened to and constantly takes absolutist stances which only harm what he defends.

In the case of DRM, _many_ people have been talking about this problem for a long time. It's not a matter of consumers not listening, it's a matter of alternatives not developing in the market.

DRM in video games is a lesser problem as alternatives _did_ develop. Steam, the #1 platform, doesn't enforce DRM. GOG and Humble Bundle have been running their platforms on mostly DRM-free games.

Who do you fault for alternatives not developing/not catching on in the ebooks/video world? Consumers for making the wrong choices? Companies for not trying hard enough? Governments for not regulating consumer rights?

<comment><USER10> > People don't listen to RMS because he makes no effort to be listened to

So ... you should only take advice from people who put in extra effort to specifically reach you?

> constantly takes absolutist stances

The concept of an absolutist stance as an accusation is nonsense, as it's orthogonal to whether it's right. If you are not willing to compromise on slavery, you are taking an absolutist stance. So should people have fought for only partial slavery in order to not harm what they defended?

> Governments for not regulating consumer rights?

How about governments not destroying consumer rights by making it illegal to understand how your own computer works?

<comment><USER14> I can only listen to so many people. It makes sense to focus my efforts on people who are going to provide the best return on my investment of time.

Meanwhile, absolutism, while not a proof, is a pretty powerful heuristic in the messy real world of economic policy. And yes, this is also a human rights issue, but mostly in the same way that a food or housing shortage is a human rights issue: the roots are economic.

Slavery in particular is a red herring. In almost any other question, compromise is the way to go, so bringing up the extreme case of slavery adds more heat than light.

<comment><USER15> I think the other poster sufficiently deconstructed your argument one way, but I want to point out that you haven't made any case that slavery is a red herring. Like, at all.

If this debate were taking place just prior to the civil war, there would be significant debate over whether slaves had human rights, _and_ many making the economic case for slavery.

RMS is trying to tell you the same thing right now: that DRM is a tool that takes away some basic human rights, and instead of taking a moment to think about it, you simply dismiss it out of hand merely because you can see an economic case for it.

So take a few moments to consider the worst possible outcomes of adopting DRM, and whether history will regard the economic case for DRM as harshly as it regards the economic case for slavery.

<comment><USER14> You're responding to a bunch of things I didn't say and don't believe. I'm not a fan of DRM, just defending the position that RMS isn't the best source on it.

Also, you yourself haven't made an argument that DRM is anywhere near as bad a problem as slavery was. It's nowhere close, and to imply otherwise is to cheapen the suffering of slaves in America. Is that enough of an argument that it's a red herring?

<comment><USER15> > Also, you yourself haven't made an argument that DRM is anywhere near as bad > a problem as slavery was.

This judgment was made with perfect hindsight in one case, and no hindsight in the other, so the conclusion is immediately suspect.

Like I said, consider the worst possible nightmare for DRM, and then judge whether the comparison is actually fair.

Finally, whether RMS is the best source on it is itself a red herring. If he makes a reasonable case for a nightmare outcome, his perspective is absolutely worth considering when weighing the pros and cons of DRM, regardless of how absolutist you think he is.

<comment><USER14> You have the same lack of time machine as I do in regards to DRM. For the rest, I think I've made the points I care about well enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lately, I wanted to buy an eBook. I usually buy prints, but this time I needed it as soon as possible.

Upon searching, every book store told me, I would need to install some Adobe stuff on my computer to read the file. I am neither a fan of Adobe nor of the idea of being locked in to an application to view a book. After realizing that there is no other digital way, I simply bought the printed version and waited the two days it took to ship.

It's a very frustrating situation for someone who just wants to read something.

<comment><USER17> Did you consider pirating the e-book?

To check the ethical box, I would've just used the pirated e-book version immediately and ordered a hard-copy.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I considered it out of my frustration, but I always try to give back for good work.

<comment><USER18> Maybe just send a tip to the authors directly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is just the tip of the leaf of the IP tree that is destroying culture.

Since the advent of permanent copyright there is no more commons. The commons stopped in 1923. Disney will continue to buy the US government into guaranteeing there is no common heritage of America for as long as they are able.

It will be interesting to see how, in a thousand years, (hopefully) scholars of the time will reflect on how systemic the damage was to American society to artificially constrain creativity so fundamentally and for so long. It is human nature to take your experiences and reinterpret them in new ways. That is how creativity is defined. But copyright and IP, especially in perpetuity, prevent that, all for what is claimed to be the protection of profits by the original creators, even for decades after the creators are dead.

</comment><comment><USER20> DRM and advertising tech have a similar problem of bad execution. Sure, _there exists_ a way to do each of these that many may consider "reasonable" but _in practice_ industries have shown that they would rather be obnoxious and make everything annoying or just much more difficult than necessary. This means they can't be trusted to do it well, and the solution must be to avoid it completely (DRM-free content and ad blocker).

<comment><USER21> I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature?

The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and ( _GASP_ ) give the tape to your friends to watch too!

What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside? What kind of irreversible damage is done by existence of torrents when WB, Netflix and other content providers earn record profits?

Why are we even debating DRM as something that has a right to exist and helps anyone?

EDIT: Ergh, sorry for the tone, by DRM is something that really touches my nerves a bit.

<comment><USER22> DRM and other anti-piracy measures are all about making piracy harder, not impossible. It's not an all or nothing venture.

Every little bit you make copying harder results in fewer people copying.

Cntrl C Cntrl V makes it so my mom can pirate. And she did during the Napster days. But she can't figure out BitTorrent on her own. Well, she could, but there is a learning curve, and most people aren't interested in it.

They don't have to make it impossible. They just have to make it annoying.

Easy piracy destroyed the music industry. The other media industries are rightfully suspicious.

<comment><USER23> The DRM approach to piracy _is_ an all or nothing thing. Once one person cracks a DRM setup they can distribute any movie protected by that setup to as many people as they want in whatever medium they want.

I think propagandizing piracy has had a lot more to do with its decline than ease of use. Try using popcorn time. It is incredibly easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The usual spiel about DRM is that you don't own what you "bought" but in the case of subscriptions and rentals, why would anyone think they have a right to _ownership_ when they are clearly paying for _access_?

Why should I have a problem with paying Apple for DRM free music from iTunes and paying for a subscription to DRMd music for Apple Music?

I haven't pirated music since the iTunes Store opened in 2003. Even from 2003-2008 when it was DRM encumbered, there was a simple built in way to remove the DRM -- burn it to a CD and rip it.

I also don't have a problem paying to rent a movie from Apple/Amazon, but I would never "buy" a movie from Apple/Amazon with restrictive DRM. I also wouldn't have thought about buying a physical disk without an easy way to rip it to my Plex Server and use in the way I see fit.

<comment><USER25> I suppose people in general are not yet used to have everything in their life be some kind of _service_. With DRM, the part of the issue is how quickly we went from ownership (buying paper books, or even music/video on physical media) to renting.

Personally, I'm not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, one could argue that everything becoming a service is a sign of a maturing society. On the other hand, it makes individuals less autonomous, and society more fragile. Currently I lean more towards thinking that service-oriented economy is a _problem_ , and in particular that SaaS and DRM are cancer.

<comment><USER10> > it makes individuals less autonomous

Really, I think the problem is not so much the decreasing autonomy of the individual, but rather the increasing concentration of power. In a modern society, you are already massively dependent on other people, in a normal day you get into contact with the direct result of the work of thousands of people (as in: not just people who had the idea to bake a bread, but actually people who contributed to the specific bread that you are eating now), and I think that's perfectly fine. What is problematic is if a small group of individuals/companies get a massive amount of centralized control over a large part of the population.

<comment><USER25> Maybe. It seems like a parallel concern.

For example, if I get hold of a textbook about baking bread, and go to my farm to produce crops for the bread and then bake it myself, using only the things my soil provides for me, I'm still using the accumulated knowledge and experience of thousands of people. If I decide to buy the same bread from someone else, I'm adding more accumulated human touch into the mix. In this way, there's a difference between services of contemporary people and the sum of accumulated human experience I can access. The second one is additive, and I believe society progresses as fast as it can add to it. Here, DRM directly slows humanity down.

That said, I agree - we're not too autonomous anyway, and modern lifestyle is directly dependent on being plugged into the socioeconomic machine. Still, economy was meant for man, not man for the economy; I'm worrying about how much economic interests restrict us for no other reason than lining someone's pocket. Technology enables individuals to do cool ways, to build the world around themselves as they see fit, but then comes the business models that start restricting these abilities in order to squeeze more money out of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government).

For example, my local library buys a set number of digital licenses for ebooks, so there's a waitlist system for ebooks and each digital copy is time gated to a certain number of days before becoming unusable. In that time, though, you can read the ebook offline once downloaded through the library's app. Annoying sometimes, but overall seems reasonable.

How would that example translate to a non-DRM version while making sure that the library isn't distributing an unbounded number of licenses to customers?

<comment><USER10> > I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with > DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is > within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights > given by the user's local government).

Play it on my linux machine?

Copy it to a different medium for my own personal use?

Inspect it for security vulnerabilities?

Build and sell a device that allows you to split the video signal into multiple parts so I can watch it on multiple screens arranged into one large screen?

Buy a device that allows me to inject home automation information onto the display on which I am watching it?

Do you need more?

<comment><USER12> > more?

How about the highly experimental, expensive, poor-user-interface, precursors to whatever the next truly innovative killer app will be? We don't know what the really important use cases will be; we don't even know[1] which events or innovations are in the general direction of the next killer app.

The very idea that some _ideas_ \- aka information, intellectual works, or (bleh) "content" \- can be owned is already offensive enough. For DRM to make any kind of sense you first have to presume you can enumerate the ways an idea will be used. If we knew that, we could skip most R&D.

Instead of trying artificially re-create scarcity, the Silicon Valley startup culture should be worried about of DRM fencing off next-decade's products.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Content)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My only concern with DRM in browser is that, as far as I understand the technology, any website can put a small piece of arbitrary DRM content and your browser will send information to that website uniq to your device, and your device will be tracked by DRM providers and probably also by that website.

Firefox gives you the option to disable DRM in the settings. Chrome also has it but it is buried deeply in advanced settings. Safari does not seem to have it at all.

<comment><USER28> I think I found this as "Protected Content" in the Chrome advanced settings. (Searching for "DRM" didn't work.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> _We offer research reports and white papers for your management and Board from experienced advisors_

Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain...

<comment><USER30> _Strangely, I couldn 't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain..._

No, but I bet if you pay for them you get them as PDFs, unencrypted, which you can view on a vast breadth of devices and OSes and applications, annotate/modify, clip parts out of, convert to other formats, and otherwise manipulate as you please, with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way. (Compare to, say, Adobe Digital Editions wrapped PDFs, which can only be read in designated apps and limit you to the capabilities of those apps.)

<comment><USER29> _with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way_

How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? To me they are the same thing - mechanisms for saying "you might've bought this but the original owner still has a say in what you do with it".

The world IMHO is a better place because there are mechanisms by why IP creators can be paid. Yes there is poorly written DRM (Sony, we're looking at you) but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.

<comment><USER10> > How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from > the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would > insist upon, should you decide to republish their work?

One of those is decided by a democratic process, the other is dictated by one party.

> but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.

Actually, it is a problem of the concept. It is asking for computers to be robbed of their defining characteristic, and to be put under dictatorial control.

See also Cory Doctorow's talks on the topic, like maybe this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI) (he gave this and similar talks in many places, you can find quite a few of them on youtube, I have no clue whether this particular one is good)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Thus your children won't get to play your music, show your favourite films, > read your books, share your culture, with your grandchildren because they > won't inherit anything digital from you that's usable. Historians won't be > able to track the influences on an event because the sources have digitally > corroded. You'll not even be able to share what you like with your friends.

Even Kodi assumes by (sane) defaults that the user does not want to save _their own particular copy_ of the relevant media on their own particular device.

Imagining a future where grandchildren can't inherit the digital libraries stored on their family devices is early-2000's futurism that somehow skips completely over the year 2017 where the greater bulk of these future grandparents are streaming everything.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Travelling frequently in Europe, I've had the chance to use two approaches to the underground/metro/subway, the Paris Metro and the U-bahn in various German cities."

The author failed to understand the actual cultural issue driving the two approaches: In Germany you don't need a gate to have people pay the ticket, most people will do it anyway. In Paris, most people won't pay and just ride for free, and tragedy of the commons ensues.

So by his own argument, DRM is a product of the culture of a people.

</comment><comment><USER33> Just don't use it, today it is entirely within your power not to use DRM. If you want it to stay that way, you'll have to be the demand you wish to see in the world.

</comment><comment><USER34> _The problem with technology-enforced restrictions isn't that they allow legitimate enforcement of rights; it's the collateral damage they cause in the process._

Indeed, but the problem with not making any effort to enforce restrictions technically is that typically you then aren't enforcing your legitimate rights.

The metro analogy was interesting. If the system in Germany works, it is because people are honest and pay for what they are using without physical compulsion.

Sadly, if you try to start a business creating original content and making it available online in the same spirit of trust, you will quickly learn that many people in the world are not so honest.

You will also learn that unlike a citywide metro system, it is all too easy for someone of less noble intentions to not only take your content for themselves without paying but also set up their own redistribution channels and steal your customers and your revenues.

A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed, particularly if they speak a different language and don't necessarily understand the deal being offered. DRM can be quite effective at deterring this sort of casual and often unintentional infringement.

<comment><USER35> > Sadly, if you try to start a business creating original content and making > it available online in the same spirit of trust, you will quickly learn that > many people in the world are not so honest.

Counterpoint: gog.com

Moreover, I have yet to see a movie that wasn't available on an illegal streaming/downloading site the day it was released on Blu-Ray, DRM or not.

<comment><USER34> GOG is great. I buy from them myself sometimes. However, it's also an anomaly, and much smaller than the obvious comparison in this case, Steam.

And in terms of things being available immediately, the economics of mainstream movies are quite different. There's a whole world of niche content out there that doesn't generate gazillions of dollars and that won't be leaked when it's barely reached theatres. For smaller operators, deterring casual infringement even to a moderate degree can literally be the difference between making enough money to continue operating and going out of business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's all true--but it does nothing to explain how artists can be paid for their stuff at prices they set.

</comment><comment><USER37> Interestingly the DMCA prohibits creating software to bypass DRM. It is completely unconstitutional, violating freedom of the press. That part of the law should be struck down.

</comment><comment><USER38> _It's like checking the lift ticket, yes, but also the guy checks you are only wearing gear hired from the resort shop, skis with you down the slope and trips you if you try any manoeuvres that weren't taught to you by the resort ski instructor; then as you go down the slope he pushes you away from the moguls because those are a premium feature and finally you get to run the gauntlet of armed security guards at the bottom of the slope checking for people who haven't paid._

How is this at all an accurate analogy for DRM?

<comment><USER39> How do you play your blu-ray discs on linux btw.?

Bonus question if you succeeded: did you break any laws doing so?

<comment><USER40> 1\. Realise that you don't have a blu-ray drive. 2\. Install Transmission and download a rip.

Bonus answer: I probably broke laws making my morning coffee.

<comment><USER41> "The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day."

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three- felonies-a...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a- day)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> DRM only hurts legitimate customers. It seems increasingly rare that people aren't able to crack DRM's fairly quickly. So the only people that even see the DRM are the paying customer, and there is always some sort of inconvenient drawback for them.

<comment><USER43> A good example of this is the Denuvo DRM for games. As I understand it, game data was temporarily decrypted, while playing which led to poor performance. Denuvo games were cracked and the pirate versions performed better. Developers paid a lot for Denuvo DRM which didn't even fulfill the promise of stopping piracy.

<comment><USER44> Once the game has been cracked some publishers/devs have opted to release an update that removes the DRM and the potential performance hit (eg. Mass Effect Andromeda, Hitman, DOOM). The performance hit in question, however, is an implementation detail that some developers handle better than others (Rime comes to mind as a game that performed Denuvo DRM checks many many times per second, it's speculated it was tied to per-frame update calls).

Denuvo still has a place (if it stays effective) in reducing the number of day-one pirates, which is its main selling point at this time. On Steam, interested players have a choice to put money down on release (with the potential to refund), or wait an indeterminate number of days (weeks?) to download the cracked version. This uncertainty period has a conversion rate that Denuvo clients balance against the costs of the DRM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> All forms of DRM can be defeated by pointing an iPhone at them.

<comment><USER46> It depends on what the goal of the DRM creators is. If their goal is to prevent copies that most people would consider watchable, then they would not consider the iPhone to defeat the DRM. But some screen recording technique with framerate sync would defeat the DRM. If their goal was to prevent sharing of the original compressed stream, then they would consider even screen recording to not defeat the DRM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I disagree with the characterization of all this media as "culture." They're entertainment products that exist for the sole purpose of generating a profit.

<comment><USER48> Shakespeare didn't write all those plays for free.

<comment><USER47> If a modern day Shakespeare wants to create "culture," they can license their works appropriately. But for the most part the stuff that people want to copy are entertainment products.

<comment><USER49> I think the point he was trying to make is that you don't start out with culture. You start out with profit generating entertainment products, and then via the market bringing lots of people to this enterprise and survivor bias, you end up with "culture".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask Hacker News: Looking for CS Learning Buddies - <AUTHOR>

Where does one go to find others with an unhealthy interest in computer science? I'm 27 and I'm gearing up for school but it'll be a while till I start learning the cool stuff.<p>Are there any good user groups or local Seattle clubs you guys know of that would fit the bill? <comment><USER2> me too! I was thinking of studying on my own for the A-plus certification, but it would be great to study with a group of people over the internet, who are at the same level, maybe we could exchange flash cards with each other

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome... email me at darkxanthos at gmail dot com

<comment><USER2> Lets text here, and get points! I have a more immediate commitment, I have to modify the general wordpress theme to fit a non profits future website. Do you want to dissect wordpess online together? I'm a newbie on wordpress.</comment></comment></comment>


The System We're Living in Is Crony Capitalism. Not Capitalism - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@JeffBooth/the-system-were-living-in-is-crony-capitalism-not-capitalism-that-s-the-problem-1916e64682aa <comment><USER2> No. Try Crony Kleptocracy.

</comment><comment><USER3> The problem, as Richard Wolff[1] better explains than I can, is that the capitalists always have the incentive (profits) and the means (money) to bend the system to further benefit themselves. There isn't some pure form of capitalism that will stop it.

[1] [https://www.rdwolff.com/yes_we_can_do_better_than_capitalism](https://www.rdwolff.com/yes_we_can_do_better_than_capitalism)

</comment><comment><USER4> Problem is that we have lived with crony capitalism too and long and have mostly accepted it. Perhaps we need to step out of the traditional definitions and our understanding of existing economic systems, "zoom out of the forest" if you will to see if we can really fix it or do we just need to evolve to (or adopt) a whole new system.

</comment><comment><USER5> Capitalism is whatever the winners of the system want it to be.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, Crony Capitalism is Capitalism. Let's face it.

<comment><USER7> Not for the crony class. Isn't that the point of distinguishing "crony capitalism" from "ideal capitalism"?</comment></comment>


Linus Torvalds on HFS+ - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+JunioCHamano/posts/1Bpaj3e3Rru <comment><USER2> While I really like thristian's explanation of why case insensitivity adds massive complexity to a system: ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8876873))

I have to point out that case sensitivity offloads a bunch of that complexity to the user. This is almost definitely why OS X uses case-insensitive HFS+ by default.

As a ultra-simple example: with a case-sensitive file system I can have two directories, "documents" and "Documents". Which one are my documents in? Half in one, half in the other, probably.

I'm not saying Linus at al. are _wrong_ that case-sensitive is the way to go, but there are some reasonable arguments for trying to take that complexity back from the user and deal with it in the file system.

Source: I'm a long time mac user, and I just switched to a case-sensitive file system last year. The win of having my dev machine match my deployment environment (iOS) is bigger than any downsides I've seen yet.

<comment><USER3> > As a ultra-simple example: with a case-sensitive file system I can have two > directories, "documents" and "Documents". Which one are my documents in? > Half in one, half in the other, probably.

That only really happens if you're an idiot who just haphazardly throws documents into any directory that looks like it can still hold files. And it's not an indictment of case sensitivity; you can achieve the same sort of stupidity in plenty of other ways if you're determined to do so.

<comment><USER4> Idiot here. I like to save downloaded files in a directory called "downloads". Firefox has decided it would prefer to save them in a directory called "Downloads". I can tell Firefox to save them in the downloads directory, but sooner or later, it inevitably decides it's tired of that and goes back to saving them in Downloads.

<comment><USER5> That's just a problem with the application (and it just happens for that problem to be hidden by a case-insensitive file-system). For a solution, if you can't bend your application to your will, bend yourself to it and rename your "downloads" to whatever Firefox likes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Several years ago, when I'd first moved to SF, I got a scholarship to WWDC for working for ACM, and I took advantage of the opportunity to go to a Birds-of- Feather for people interested in "Darwin filesystems" or something like that. It was basically a little conference room with the FS team, and I asked, flat- out, "Why case insensitive?"

And they answered, flat-out: "Microsoft Office"

Even this past week, I was talking with coworkers about having trouble with nothing but Valve Steam on my Macs that have a case-sensitive filesystem[0]. That's particularly odd, since it works on Linux now, but that's another matter.

What I found most notable about this thread, is this quote from Linus:

"And Apple let these monkeys work on their filesystem? Seriously?"

I'm pretty sure Apple actually _fired_ anyone who wanted any of the things done anything close to any way that Linus Torvalds would agree with.

ext* not being particularly perfect, I'm happy to have both. I mean, ext2 is hard to complain about, but it comes from an era where basically all filesystems were terrible, literally the era when SGI started installing backup batteries to race with fsync().

ext4 has an alarming number of corruption bugs, but I'm sure it's not because of insane unicode handling, though I take Linus' description of how the OSX filesystem works with a grain of salt. He can't possibly _care_ to know as much about it as he knows about Linux's.

[0] achievable by formatting HFS+X in Disk Utility in Recovery Mode, then installing onto that drive

<comment><USER7> > ext4 has an alarming number of corruption bugs

Which bugs are these?

> though I take Linus' description of how the OSX filesystem works with a > grain of salt. He can't possibly _care_ to know as much about it as he knows > about Linux's.

[http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...](http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/fs/hfsplus)

<comment><USER6> "Which bugs are these?"

My favorite is, at least a couple years back, if you had a KVM guest with an ext4 filesystem in an image file, on an ext4 filesystem, the guest OS could corrupt the host OS.

#winning

Obviously, ext4 is largely a very good FS, but at least twenty people I've managed hundreds of servers with agree that if you do not need huge filesystems, huge files, or directories with tons of files, ext3 is a safer choice.

I'm not saying Linus is incompetent, just that his criticism of other filesystems shouldn't be processed as if his work has no faults.

One thing I wonder is, is it the filesystem, or the C library, that determines things like how unicode is interpreted in paths - his overwhelming rant focus.

<comment><USER7> > at least a couple years back, if you had a KVM guest with an ext4 filesystem > in an image file, on an ext4 filesystem, the guest OS could corrupt the host > OS.

Your "alarming number of corruption bugs" is one bug from a couple of years back?

ext4 is fairly well established now. A few years ago it might have been new enough that there were edge cases that needed investigation, but it's robust enough now.

And there's a difference between a decent design having some bugs that can be fixed and a fundamentally broken design. Linus seems to be arguing that HFS+ is the latter.

The problem with HFS+ is precisely that it needs to handle unicode in the filesystem because it needs to consider different names as the same. And, seemingly, it does it even worse than NFTS does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain to me why case insensitivity is a bad thing? Clearly Linus believes so but didn't explain why he believes so.

Most UNIX and Linux systems seem to have an "all lowercase" or "all uppercase" convention, so the fact that they have case sensitivity is often not utilised.

In fact the biggest reason you'd want case sensitivity off the top of my head is legacy support but that's just a circular argument (since you never really reach WHY it was that way originally, just that it was).

I guess based on what he talks about next he is worried about how case insensitivity interacts with other character sets (i.e. does it correctly change their case), but for most sets isn't the lower and upper case defined in the UNICODE language spec itself?

<comment><USER9> The prime number-one concern in kernel programming is managing complexity. Well, in most programming really, but in kernel programming unmanaged complexity leads to lost data and sometimes broken hardware instead of "just" crashes.

Case-sensitivity is the easiest thing - you take a bytestring from userspace, you search for it exactly in the filesystem. Difficult to get wrong.

Case-insensitivity for ASCII is slightly more complex - thanks to the clever people who designed ASCII, you can convert lower-case to upper-case by clearing a single bit. You don't want to _always_ clear that bit, or else you'd get weirdness like "`" being the lowercase form of "@", so there's a couple of corner-cases to check.

Case-sensitivity for Unicode is a giant mud-ball by comparison. There's no simple bit flip to apply, just a 66KB table of mappings[1] you have to hard- code. And that's not all! Changing the case of a Unicode string can change its length (ß -> SS), sometimes lower -> upper -> lower is not a round-trip conversion (ß -> SS -> ss), and some case-folding rules depend on locale (In Turkish, uppercase LATIN SMALL LETTER I is LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE, not LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I like it is in ASCII). Oh, and since Unicode requires that LATIN SMALL LETTER E + COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT should be treated the same way as LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE, you also need to bring in the Unicode normalisation tables too. And keep them up-to-date with each new release of Unicode.

So the last thing a kernel developer wants is Unicode support in a filesystem.

[1]: [http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/CaseFolding.txt](http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/CaseFolding.txt)

<comment><USER10> _" And keep them up-to-date with each new release of Unicode"_

I agree with the rest, but that is one thing you absolutely shouldn't do. Once there are disks 'out there' that were created with some idea about what case insensitivity is, your choice has been set in stone. The risk of dhanging any rule is simply too high. Somebody might start reading hat disk using the previous version of the file system.

For example, the precursor to HFS+, HFS, like HFS+, kept directories sorted by name. However, it had a filename sorting bug that the Finder had to work around (see [http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.ht...](http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.html#UnicodeSubtleties))

<comment><USER11> > _I agree with the rest, but that is one thing you absolutely shouldn 't do._

And now you have a file system that is case sensitive, BUT ONLY IN SOME UNICODE RANGES. Somehow, that's better than just not being case sensitive in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Also a longer critique by John Siracusa here: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac- os-x-10-7/12/#hfs-p...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac- os-x-10-7/12/#hfs-problems)

I wonder how this ties in with the whole Apple philosophy of "Design is how it works."

Clearly the innards look nothing like the facade.

<comment><USER8> > File system metadata structures in HFS+ have global locks. Only one process > can update the file system at a time.

Holy heck! How does that work in practice? Do operations get queued and then a single kernel process who can take the lock do the atomic updates?

I have to imagine that is going to cause a bottleneck however, as all non-read operations need to update the metadata (e.g. timestamp, maybe size if it is stored).

That all being said I haven't noticed OS X being particularly slower to do things than e.g. Windows. So if that is the case they're hiding it well.

<comment><USER13> HFS+ is an oddball filesystem among FSes that anyone actually uses. Since the earliest days of the Mac, it's been able to e.g. track file identity even as a file is moved around, and the metadata to support this lives in a volume-wide tree called the Catalog File. So, there's your global lock. (Add an SSD as necessary for better performance.)

OS X already has some pretty high-level file and metadata APIs not found on other systems, so maybe Apple's future plans don't look like a traditional Unix file system at all. They've already demonstrated they know how to make a very weird, non-Unix filesystem look like one. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Scroll down for Linus' commentary.

> "The true horrors of HFS+ are not in how it's not a great

> filesystem, but in how it's actively designed to be a bad

> filesystem by people who thought they had good ideas."

There doesn't seem to be a way to deep link to comments in G+?

<comment><USER14> G+ is a train wreck for a number of reasons, this included.

Yeah, he's not a fan of HFS+ at all. Wasn't the plan to move to ZFS prior to the Oracle acquisition of Sun? Hopefully that ends up back on track somehow.

<comment><USER15> Project predated oracle, back in the osx 10.5-10.6 days when there was the dtrace integration as well. There were internal builds of the zfs kext and at one point I saw leaked source on the Internet. Project was abandoned because of legals disagreements over cddl licensing, as I recall.

<comment><USER16> CDDL licensing? more likely NetApp scared Apple off with patent aggression

[http://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp%27s_filesystem_patents](http://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp%27s_filesystem_patents)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm rather amused (and, as always, a bit saddened) by the comment of Terry A. Davis, of TempleOS fame/notoriety.

"linux doesn't have to search parent directories for file-not-found, but I do."

wat

Edit: further parsing reveals he implemented a (read-only) overlay system in his FS. Interesting, I wonder what the side-effects (vulns) could be?

<comment> iso8859-1 The word "vulnerability" doesn't make sense when talking about TempleOS, since it does not even attempt to offer any kind of security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Quite frankly, HFS+ is probably the worst filesystem ever."

Can anyone summarize why he thinks this?

<comment><USER19> HFS+ has been patched with duct tape and pieces of cardboard for 20 years; receiving journaling, support for Unix attributes, extended attributes, 64 bits sizing, multi-processing, multi-users, hard links, etc. over the years. Really it's a sort of monument to kludge. It should have been ditched like 10 years ago.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure that's terribly different from ext4's lineage, which is generally accepted (AFAIK) as a pretty good file system, even if not cutting-edge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> HFS+ is probably the worst filesystem in common use right now; even FAT has the benefit of simplicity. Most of its issues, however, are with its horrific implementation; the Unicode naming is kind of bad but Linus manages to be wrong about several things.

Regarding case sensitivity: it is generally accepted among the user interface crowd that (Western) users don't really understand that 'C' and 'c' are different things; they're "both" 'c'. Case-preserving is thus the accepted practice. However case manipulation is not an operation that can be done absent a locale; my go to example here is that 'i' upcases to 'I' unless you're a Turk in which case it upcases to 'İ'. Similar although not quite as bad is the fact that 'ß' upcases to 'ẞ' U+1E9E in some exotic circumstances; see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_ẞ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_ẞ) for details. Similar limitations apply to sorting, which users also expect.

Regarding Unicode: NFD is a normalization format; it converts 'é' U+00E9 and 'é' U+0065 U+0301--which are semantically identical--into the same coding. As it happens NFD picks U+0065 U+0301 for that string; NFC picks U+00E9. Any time there is ambiguity, NF[CD] will retain the original ordering. Calling it "destroying user data" is meaningless histrionics. Most of the time we tend to use NFC. I am told that NFD has certain advantages for sorting, where one might want to match the French word 'être' with the search string 'etre'; in NFC this requires large equivalence tables but in NFD the root character is the same in both cases. Linus's claim 'Even the people who think normalization is a good thing admit that NFD is a bad format, and certainly not for data exchange.' has a big [citation needed] tag attached.

As it happens, my personal belief is the following: Given that users expect case sensitivity and locale specific ordering, which complicate filesystem design tremendously. Given that users mostly interact with the system through GUI dialogs, which already hide system files (files with the hidden bit in HFS+, or files starting with '.'). Therefore, extract the case sensitivity to a layer, used by the GUI, which can understand the user's locale and so fold case properly. This layer should be available to command line applications so that they can use the same rules if they so choose. The underlying filesystem will then be case insensitive, but is still used to encode Unicode data; the right thing to do here is to normalize. Either NFC or NFD is fine, really.

For pedants: the related NFKC/NFKD forms add a canonicalization step and are absolutely not semantically safe in any way, for all that they're useful for sorting.

<comment><USER10> And then, you receive a zip file from Linus that has file.c, File.c and FILE.c files on it. You extract it, and then? They either end up on disk, breaking your case-insensitive UI layer (yes, you can see those files, but can you copy them elsewhere?), or they don't, breaking the makefile that's also in the archive. Here be dragons.

Locale-specific ordering of course _must_ be done outside the disk because disks may move between systems with different locales, locales can be changed at will, and multiple users could read the same directory with different active locales (well, must: one could store a locale for sorting per directory and force that on he user, but that is madness)

Also, reading [http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.ht...](http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.html) (which I can't find anymore on Apple.com), HFS+ doesn't quite use full NFD because it sometimes destroys information that Apple deemed worth keeping.

<comment><USER4> Creating three files named file.c, File.c, and FILE.c seems like being user hostile for the sake of being user hostile. Even for people using a case sensitive filesystem, it's a dick move. Imagine talking about your project over the phone. "Yeah, the problem is in file.c. No, not File.c, file.c. Idiot! I clearly said file.c, not FILE.c!"

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do even if you can do it.

<comment><USER22> I've seen both Makefile and makefile in one archive.

<comment><USER4> Which is pretty ridiculous. Convention dictates that people use Makefile so that's the file people read and edit, yet the make utility reads makefile first by default. Including both is a great way to confuse users.

<comment><USER22> Yep. It definitely had that effect on me :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 1) What are the odds Tim Cook or Craig Federighi will here about this?

2) What are good filesystems for OS X to adopt? OS X supports other filesystems. Is there a way to force it to install the OS onto a different filesystem, like ext4?

<comment><USER13> Re: 2), there are significant parts of OS X that seem to either check for HFS+ or rely on its implementation and bugs, and those things don't work properly on other filesystems. OpenZFS, for instance, still doesn't work with Spotlight, on which a surprising number of things depend these days.

[https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/FAQ#Limitations](https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/FAQ#Limitations)

If you want to use all the software features of your Mac, your only option is HFS+.

<comment><USER24> Soon it will support Spotlight. See [https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Changelog#1.3.1-RC5](https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Changelog#1.3.1-RC5)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I agree with Linus from a technical point of view but I think Apple had many considerations here.

A number of games (and possibly other programs) on the App Store alone specifically mention that they will _not_ work on Macs configured with case- sensitive file systems. My guess is that this aids programmers who may have ported something from Windows and not tested all possible file/path dependencies.

This may also help users when copying files from Windows network disks or Mac legacy systems where (from their point of view) they expect things to work.

</comment><comment><USER26> I agree that HFS+ and its API is outdated.

Case insensitivity I find useful, OTOH.

</comment><comment><USER27> _Ding!_

</comment><comment><USER28> BTW, one other stupidity is that Linux's HFS+ implementation refuses to mount journaled volumes when Apple designed it to be backward compatible.

<comment><USER29> How could that possibly work? I presume by "backward compatible" you mean that the data outside the journal remains consistent, and the journal layer is capable of detecting modifications made by non-journaled mounts.

That's... fine, I guess. It prevents the obvious corruption cases. But the only plausible recovery mechanism after such a mount is to throw out the journal! That's not likely to be acceptable to most users ("I booted to linux and back, and now a bunch of new files disappeared!").

That's stretching the meaning of "compatible" too far.

<comment><USER28> Pretty much. Look for lastModifiedVersion in: [http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.ht...](http://dubeiko.com/development/FileSystems/HFSPLUS/tn1150.html)

<comment><USER29> Then I fail to see how this is a stupidity. Linux is doing the right thing: there's no way for it to mount the filesystem without damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> DING

</comment><comment><USER31> Thank God we have someone like Linus to keep BIG TECH in line. It's not all about marketing Apple, Microsoft. It's about good design, and openness.

<comment><USER31> I would expect far more downvotes than that! Come on what's wrong with you "Hacker News". Only 1 downvote when I'm slammin' Apple for their shitty strategy? Surely some of you have at least some downvotes available to use against that!!!

<comment><USER31> Even after a good night's sleep, I'm happy I decided to post this comment. The people hiding behind their karma scores to downvote perfectly legitimate and contextually relevant comments are one of the most frustrating and annoying things about Hacker News.</comment></comment></comment>


Matias Click Switches: Tactile mechanical keyswitches - <AUTHOR> http://matias.ca/switches/click/ <comment><USER2> This article is lying or perhaps I am misunderstanding.

The article states: "Cherry switches are linear — by definition, not tactile. They lack a click leaf, which is required for tactile feedback."

I have used and built several mechanical keyboards with Cherry MX Blue switches. They _are_ non-linear and _do_ include a click leaf which gives the Cherry MX Blue [1] its characteristic "bump" feel and click.

[1] [https://ergodox-ez.com/pages/keyswitches](https://ergodox- ez.com/pages/keyswitches)

<comment><USER3> They are also not very honest about "Cherry copied our backlighting idea" \- all the MX I ever saw have a hole for a 3mm LED, and I'm sure I saw other vendors selling backlit keyboards with MX switches even if Cherry itself was late to this game. I think it's all retarded, and it's not very innovative by itself to replace blue diodes or whatever with multicolor diodes. Whatever will sell to kids eh?

<comment><USER4> Cherry has been around for decades, far longer than the idea of backlit keyboards existed. Obviously at some point that became a thing so they would have added the hole.

<comment><USER3> Before the backlit keyboards became a thing, the hole was meant for a lamp to shine through a window in the keycap, like caps lock.

The first Alps keyboard (Zenith SuperSport) I had actually had a lamp and window on the caps lock key!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a Matias Ergo Pro. It's a brilliant split keyboard. Great quiet but tactile switches, tenting, etc.

But the QC is terrible. The interconnect cable had connection issues, keys are often 'stuck' (not physically, just keeps repeating until I press it again), etc.

And the internet is full with complaints. It's a pity, but I would not recommend them right now. (I've sent it back then got a new one with exactly the same issues, then I didn't bother in the end even though I paid more than 200 Euros for it.)

<comment><USER6> for me, the problem is the key (pressing 1 time resulting in 2 chars, not sure what's the proper term for that)

<comment><USER7> key chatter is the term you're looking for. You can usually fix it in your OS keyboard settings (increasing a bit the repeat delay)

<comment><USER6> but it just happens to a single key. i think it's defect rather than os settings

<comment><USER8> It is a physical problem with the key. You can fix it by disassembling the key and cleaning the contacts:

Original guide - [https://imgur.com/a/elAFF#0](https://imgur.com/a/elAFF#0)

Thread with context - [https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/2hjct6...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/2hjct6/help_opening_a_matias_switch/)

However, this is really Matias's problem to resolve. Supposedly the switch or the assembly process has been redesigned to prevent this problem in the newest batch, but I don't know if it's a proven success.

<comment><USER6> thanks for the tip but i have moved on to other boards. this was a few years back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've gone through a lot of keyboards. IBM, Unicomp, Sun Type 4 and 5, Apple ALPS with ADB converter, a bunch with various Cherry switches including Filco, Leupold, etc.

I had two Matias keyboards, the tactile pro (I think original) and the 2, and while the switches are okay neither held up to daily use with keys that wobbled, cracked plastic, and both suffered from keybounce and had poor NKRO (enough that I noticed it in Emacs). No thanks.

I settled on a KUL tenkeyless board with Cherry Green key switches[1] which feel similar to buckling spring and it takes up less deskspace. The caps have worn slick and the printing nearly gone but the feel is still good.

[1] [https://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX_Green](https://deskthority.net/wiki/Cherry_MX_Green)

<comment><USER10> Did you manage to try HHKB Topre ?

<comment><USER9> > Did you manage to try HHKB Topre ?

I used a colleague's for part of a day. I didn't like it-- key feel or layout-- which saved me a few hundred dollars. As a bit of a collector, I'll probably get a Realforce eventually.

<comment><USER10> The layout is a bit awkward at first, mainly due to no arrow keys. I switched to HHKB from Poker 3 (another keyboard with 40% layout). Even then I had a brief amount of hard times adjusting to HHKB. Nowadays, I use both of them at home and office and love them.

I heard Realforce are pretty good too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I loved my Matias keyboards, but they just did not last.

After a while I'd start getting dead keys and double-characters. Pulling the key caps, blowing some air, and putting them back on helps... for a while. Ultimately, it was too frustrating and now I'm back to an un-clacky keyboard :( oh, well.

<comment><USER12> Yeah the Matias Alps clone switches are notorious for accumulating crap inside the switch causing them to need to be cleaned to maintain working order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love matias switches, however my experience with them is terrible. i got replacement twice (3 boards), however, none of them work properly.

<comment><USER13> I have a keyboard with a mathias silent switches, but I'm replacing it with a Pok3r with browns. I like the browns better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have two mechanical keyboards. One is a Corsair K70 with Cherry reds that I use for gaming at home. The other is a Velocifire T11 with brown (non-Cherry) switches that I bought for $37 on Amazon, which I use at work.

The K70 I've had for at least 5 years now, and it still works flawlessly. The T11 I've had for about a year and a half, and it also works flawlessly.

<comment><USER15> My first (and current) mechanical keyboard was a Corsair K70 non-RGB with Cherry MX Browns. I don't game so I use it mostly for work-related tasks: programming, writing docs, books. I'm quite happy with it so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a Matias Quiet Pro Mini (2016) and it's by far the most comfortable mech I've tried (Cherry brown, red, blue and black. Would like to try clear and green).

From what I've heard their QC has improved over the past couple of years, and I've not had any problems with mine. They're also working on PBT keycaps which should arrive in a few months.

The dream would be a Planck or Preonic with Matias switches...

<comment><USER17> I do recommend trying Clears. I have a natural heavy typing, I do hammer keys with extreme force if they have any more way than cheap rubberdome keyboards.

The clears are very nice to type on though I wish I would have had a chance to try the superblacks. I'm looking into ways to increase the force on the switches for a while now, springs have been suggested at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Halfbaked idea: somebody should start a service where you upload a 3d design of a keyboard, including a mapping of keys to keycodes, and they will build the keyboard for you.

<comment><USER19> so while it's not exactly the all in one service you describe, you can do something similar already:

[http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/](http://www.keyboard-layout- editor.com/)

to design your layout, then

[http://builder.swillkb.com/](http://builder.swillkb.com/)

to design a layer case, files go to a laser cutting service,

then you would need a controller of some sort (commonly something like a [https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/](https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/)), switches, diodes, usb ports, etc.

then hand wire everything together.

tmk/qmk is more or less a defacto standard in custom keyboard firmware:

[https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware](https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware)

here are some examples of people generating firmware with webtools, I don't know what they use on the backend.

[https://www.massdrop.com/configurator/ergodox](https://www.massdrop.com/configurator/ergodox)

[http://qmk.thevankeyboards.com/](http://qmk.thevankeyboards.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Matias switches are knockoffs of the classic Alps switches you might find in an older apple, dell or SGI board. However their tacticle is nowhere near as good as classic brown alps. They also have a reputation for collecting dirt, causing them to need to be cleaned to stay in good working order.

My suggestion, just go with cherry or their knockoffs unless you really really want to use a classic set of alps keycaps.

</comment><comment><USER20> Having tendon issues in my wrists, I would love a linear keyboard with gentle push down force. Or at least just gentle push down force. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER21> The Gateron Clear switch is the lightest linear switch currently available, with an actuation force of about 30g - half that of a typical membrane key switch and 50% less than the Cherry MX Red linear switch. It's not a particularly popular switch, because it's so light that the weight of your fingers tends to cause accidental keypresses on the home row. Nonetheless, you can buy a KBParadise V60 keyboard with Gateron clears. The Qisan Magicforce 68 is occasionally available with Gateron clear switches. Alternatively, you could buy the keyswitches and build a keyboard to your own specifications using a bare keyboard PCB.

[http://www.mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_...](http://www.mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_list&c=248)

[https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gateron-Clear-switch-3-pin-for- mech...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gateron-Clear-switch-3-pin-for-mechanical- keyboard-65-90-110-200-pcs-/253338042226)

[https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_det...](https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=536)

<comment><USER22> Seconded Gateron Clears (though I've heard the activation force is more like 35g than 30g). I use them on a Noppoo Choc Mini.

I'm a fast typist (around 130wpm) and use these switches just to try to improve speed, rather than anything relating to health. They're also great for gaming for me, playing Starcraft 2.

Another option around 35g is non-mechanical electro capacitive switches in the style of Topre, e.g. [https://www.nizkeyboard.com/product/plum-84-ec- mechanical-ke...](https://www.nizkeyboard.com/product/plum-84-ec-mechanical- keyboard-rgb-or-non-rgb/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> anyone participated in their 60% groupbuy? it's been 4 years but nothing is concrete yet :(

[https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=65528.0](https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=65528.0) [http://matias.ca/60/pc/](http://matias.ca/60/pc/)</comment>


Kicking My Caffeine Addiction - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/kicking-my-caffeine-addiction/?amp <comment><USER2> I totally agree with the idea of caffeine being more destructive than beneficial to one's life. We think it's a mild addiction but it is not.

I didn't start until my 30's but I regret I did.

I've tried to quit a few times but each time I start again a few months later. I can get past the physical withdraw symptoms but mentally I continue to crave it and ultimate return to it.

If you have not started be smart and never start. It makes for a better daily life experience and ultimately it does not help. Also, you'll save 1000's of dollars in the long run.</comment>


Rockets help build Chinese bridge higher than Empire State Building - <AUTHOR> http://deputy-dog.com/2008/11/rockets-help-build-bridge-higher-than.html <comment><USER2> I constantly find the Chinese inspiring. Their construction seem to span an interesting divide between high tech and low tech. Their high availability of cheap labor being one of the primary factors enabling construction which would be considered prohibitive in the western world.

</comment><comment><USER3> So if I lay a plank over the 300ft deep well on my property, it is "a bridge higher than a 30 story building"?

<comment><USER4> the article says the bridghe is that high -above- the ground. The depth below is not factored in, at least as I read it.

<comment><USER5> _the deck of the bridge has just recently been connected over the valley below and is so high above the ground that you could fit the empire state building underneath it, and still have 360ft spare._

No, they're referring to the distance from the lowest point in the valley... so, yes, the plank over the well would be on-par with this Chinese innovation.

<comment><USER6> Only if he used a rocket to lay the plank.

<comment><USER7> And only if his well diameter is some 1+ km across.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems pretty innovative, but how do they stop the rockets when they get to the other side? Seems like a very dangerous method.

<comment><USER9> Giant catchers mitt ordered from ACME!

In all seriousness, the mountain takes care of that for them I suspect. It's probably burned all the fuel in flight and thus they just have to stand clear once it lands on the other side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a natural extension of an idea that dates back centuries. One old- fashioned way to build a suspension bridge is to use a bow-and-arrow to get an initial rope across. Once that's done, you can attach a stronger rope to the end of it and pull it across. This is the exact same solution in a more high- tech guise.

</comment><comment><USER4> This really goes to show that the chinese can and do innovate, contrary to the preconception.

<comment><USER11> Yes, except that, as with the Beijing Olympics, I can't shake the knowledge that as they perform these marvelous feats, deep problems linger.

<comment><USER12> as with the 3 gorges dam, I have a bad feeling about any shortcuts or cost cutting methods taken...

seems that even with the threat of the death penalty for company officials, it still doesn't stop shady practices

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, duh, they have Yao Ming.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's really cool.

</comment><comment><USER15> This looks like digg. What is happening to this site?</comment>