'A tortured heap of towers': the London skyline of tomorrow - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/11/city-of-london-skyline-of-tomorrow-interactive <comment><USER2> I don't understand what these people are complaining about. I walk across Waterloo Bridge twice a day, and it's the highlight of my commute. The view east down the river is stunning, and there are always people admiring it. I don't think London has ever looked better.

<comment><USER3> People hate change, no matter how good or bad. For instance, Arlington, VA has transformed massively since they ran the DC Metro through it. To someone who was alive in the 1960s the parts near the Metro lines would be almost unrecognizable.

Here's a letter to the editor complaining of all the changes in Arlington written a few days ago:

[https://www.arlnow.com/2015/12/09/letter-to-the-editor- arlin...](https://www.arlnow.com/2015/12/09/letter-to-the-editor-arlington- was-better-without-high-rises/)

TL;DR old woman complains of change, wishes there were still cows in land immediately adjacent to the nation's capital city.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Arlington is a Jane Jacobs nightmare. With the exception of places like Clarendon, it's all tall buildings with enormous lawns surrounding them at every angle. It makes walking almost worthless, even in a huge metropolitan area.

Contrast with Manhattan: much taller, much denser, with a greater concentration of shops and services per area.

It's not that change or densification is bad by any means, but there are ways to do it very, very wrong, and fixing those changes takes decades, if it is ever even done.

<comment><USER3> >With the exception of places like Clarendon, it's all tall buildings with enormous lawns surrounding them at every angle. It makes walking almost worthless, even in a huge metropolitan area.

When were you last in Arlington? I live in Arlington and I walk everywhere and bike to work. Arlington is actually used as a model in urban planning textbooks to show a transformation from a car centric area into a walkable one. The states are clear; traffic has fallen and it is almost at the point where a majority of people don't drive alone to work.

The Crystal City, Pentagon City, and Rosslyn (to a much lesser extent) areas have lots of work to be done, but N. Arlington along Wilson and Clarendon are very walkable from Rosslyn to Ballston.

I can't think of too many 'tall buildings surrounded by lawns' along Wilson or Clarendon Blvds. Look at it from the air. I know of one in Rosslyn that meets the description near the Safeway; it has a lawn. Other than that, there's not too much green space other than a small handful of parks.

Areas away from the Metro are mostly single family housing with a handful of places, like some spots on Columbia Pike, that have some slight walkability to them.

>Contrast with Manhattan: much taller, much denser, with a greater concentration of shops and services per area.

Of course, it's Manhattan. Anywhere in the greater DC metro area compares unfavorably given that nowhere in the area is nearly as dense, even in DC. Few, if any, places in the US could be compared favorably.

EDIT:

Here are some streetview links illustrating the built environment in Arlington for those outside of the area.

View on Clarendon Blvd. facing away from DC on western end of Rosslyn:

[https://goo.gl/maps/X96A2w9spsJ2](https://goo.gl/maps/X96A2w9spsJ2)

Wilson Blvd. near the Rosslyn Metro station:

[https://goo.gl/maps/owGGWu4ZyP32](https://goo.gl/maps/owGGWu4ZyP32)

Near the actual Courthouse

[https://goo.gl/maps/8dRAzVzEHf92](https://goo.gl/maps/8dRAzVzEHf92)

Another view near the Court House Metro station:

[https://goo.gl/maps/mz5Z7uE9JVs](https://goo.gl/maps/mz5Z7uE9JVs)

One of the remnant suburban style buildings on the Court House / Claredon border:

[https://goo.gl/maps/L295anQZ46H2](https://goo.gl/maps/L295anQZ46H2)

Clarendon:

[https://goo.gl/maps/9XfPUP76k4r](https://goo.gl/maps/9XfPUP76k4r)

Another view of Clarendon:

[https://goo.gl/maps/gHSk93EBfcD2](https://goo.gl/maps/gHSk93EBfcD2)

Ballston:

[https://goo.gl/maps/fo7hfint9qj](https://goo.gl/maps/fo7hfint9qj)

Another view from Wilson:

[https://goo.gl/maps/m2Jtt42uMnM2](https://goo.gl/maps/m2Jtt42uMnM2)

Virginia Square:

[https://goo.gl/maps/yCQHcv21CGm](https://goo.gl/maps/yCQHcv21CGm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> david-given Surprisingly interesting and really well presented --- the animations are inspired.

Personally, I love big, ugly skyscrapers (I've been trying to get myself onto a tour of the Gherkin for Open Doors Day for years). I do agree with the decision to limit them to one particular district, though. London's got a lot of fantastic buildings which don't want to be overwhelmed, and besides, skyscrapers look best from a distance.

(I didn't know that views of St. Pauls are protected by law! And I'm embarrassed to say that I never even knew about the Great Fire of London memorial...)

<comment><USER4> You haven't missed much. The Gherkin is as deprived of a soul as the other towers in the city; and the bar at the top is just a place to bring clients so they can say "I've been to the top of the Gherkin." It's just a really sad place, and I don't miss working there. (If you have to go though, I can recommend Association – a coffee shop around the corner which is really nice. Despite all the cheap suits.)

<comment> david-given I'm not surprised. There's a strange talent in modern architecture for buildings which on the outside are these amazing, breathtaking shapes, and then to completely waste those shapes when designing the interior.

Case in point: the Millennium Dome. This awe-inspiringly huge enclosed space... which was then partitioned up so that visitors couldn't see it.

<comment><USER4> Well, no one cares what goes on _inside_ the building I suppose. Most people – even clients – never enter them anyway. The most impressive office I've ever seen was an office in Chicago. Non-descript building, really couldn't point it out in a line up, but the interior was just amazing. Not the Google Disneyland oh-look-there's-cotton-candy kind of amazing; i.e. not so much novelty as it was just.. Classy I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Typical complaint about tall buildings

The other option is to follow Dublin's model where height is severely limited and companies can't find office space?

<comment><USER6> As opposed to London where companies just can't _afford_ office space ;)

<comment><USER7> In a sensible world, building loads of office space should decrease the price of it.

But welcome to London...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > These rigid rules first appeared in the 1930s, when the surveyor of St > Paul's came up with a precise grid of heights around the cathedral to > safeguard the panorama from the South Bank. "We've been able to calculate > where he took his views from, and most of them end up outside pubs," says > Rees.

The more times change. But it is interesting how some minor vices can have more than their fair share of consequences.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really enjoying the graphics on this page!

<comment><USER7> Agreed - what wonderful animations, especially the one travelling down fleet street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My personal fantasy is that they'll turn the Isle of Dogs in to an area that looks like Hong Kong.

<comment><USER11> Kowloon Dog City.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "We've been able to calculate where he took his views from, and most of them > end up outside pubs," says Rees.

That might be just because England has so many pubs. There are currently over 60,000, and this is after the closing of 28,000 pubs.

</comment><comment><USER13> When will city buildings stop being delineated by ground-level roads, and start extending thru the space over roads - making single vast structures instead of individual spires?

<comment><USER14> It'll be more acceptable to do that once there's a majority of electric or hydrogen cars on the roads. Otherwise those enclosed roads are air handling nightmares.</comment></comment>


Australia's new e-health platform crashes as people rush to opt-out - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/my-health-record-systems-collapse-under-more-opt-outs-than-expected <comment><USER3> As part of my work, I've had to read a fair amount of the legislation and reports coming out in this sector and also the "Consumer Data Rights" legislation (similar to the UK's open banking scheme.

What I found was a massive difference in policy coming out from the same government but in two seperate streams of work.

A) Consumer Data Right (legislation being built into Australia Privacy Act) focusing on banking, energy and then telecommunications: The user has complete control of their data. If a consumer asks a business to delete, they must do so (except for information that is legally required).

B) MyHealthRecords: The government has complete control of your data. You cannot delete your account or your data.

I'll add sources if I can, but its in the legislation.

<comment><USER4> > ... focusing on banking... - yeah. Commonwealth Bank Privacy Policy:

5\. Who do we share your information with?

\- Service providers — for example, mortgage insurers, loyalty program partners and our product distributors

\- Businesses who do some of our work for us — including direct marketing, statement production, debt recovery and IT - <USER2>

\- Organisations involved in our funding arrangements — like loan purchasers, investors, advisers, researchers, trustees - and rating agencies

\- Auditors, insurers and re-insurers

\- Current or previous employers — for example, to confirm your employment

\- Credit reporting bodies and credit providers

[https://www.commbank.com.au/security-privacy/general- securit...](https://www.commbank.com.au/security-privacy/general- security/privacy-policy-html-version.html?ei=gsa_generic_privacy)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, how would they delete data they've already sold?

<comment><USER4> Good one :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a problem every time the government launches a new service. They always have "an unexpected amount of traffic".

The last time we had a census the "census night" was totally bust since the majority of Australian internet users tried to use the online form and hardly anyone succeeded. They tried to blame it on "hackers".

Leading up to census night there were threats of fines if you didn't submit on time, but due to the shitstorm with their online failures people were still submitting their census data months later.

<comment><USER7> The census fiasco was a truly special kind of incompetence. The best inside analysis was from the folks behind the Risky Business infosec podcast:

[https://risky.biz/censusfail/](https://risky.biz/censusfail/)

Summary: The project was outsourced to IBM (that alone probably says it all), who didn't purchase any DDoS protection. A small attack crashed the first firewall, and the backup firewall didn't have rules loaded. That caused IBM's monitoring tools to flag system logs as exfiltration, so they called in the Australian Signals Directorate (ie national security) and turned everything off until intelligence agencies completed an investigation of the false positive.

<comment><USER8> All the marketing calling it "Census night" and encouraging people to do it on the same evening instead of over the week probably didn't help spreading the load out.

<comment><USER9> Furthermore, although it's true that IBM didn't purchase DDOS protection, neither did the government pay them to purchase it. IBM is incompetent but in this particular case I can't blame them for attempting to make a meager profit out of the pittance the Australian government chose to spend on their first act of digital governance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Australian government is _paying_ doctors to upload patient records to a centralised government controlled database.

The Australia government is incentivising doctors to _sell client data to the government_.

What part of this is ok in any sense?

<comment><USER10> It seems overall okay if you accept the premises that A) A centralized health record system can do substantial good by improving effectiveness and transparency of healthcare processes, and enabling medical progress through data re-use. B) Doctors won't lift a finger to do extra work if they have no selfish incentive for doing so.

<comment><USER11> It's really not that much money as an incentive. Doctors won't do it unless they believe it's a good thing.

Source: I'm an Australian doctor.

<comment><USER5> What are you doing, and what is your professional organisation (the AMA) doing, to counter long wait times for doctors visits?

<comment><USER12> So much entitlement in this post

Never the less, I'll bite because this is a topic of interest to me. What kind of wait times are you talking about?

Emergency room? Public non-emergent and elective surgery? Private practice specialists? Bulk billing or private billing general practice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I will be curious to see how this pans out - I have dual Australian and Estonian citizenship, and in the latter case I can tell you it's extremely useful to have centralised medical records, prescriptions etc. For my Australian medical records in MyHealth or whatever it's called, I have a couple of pages uploaded by my then cardiac doctor (after I had a suspected heart attack last November that ended up 'only' being something related to medication), and I've already used these pages with a related consultation here in Estonia. So, for me at least, this system has been quite useful already. I guess time will tell in terms of security and other important factors.

</comment><comment><USER14> Anything IBM can do (with the census) - Accenture can do better, huh?

Waiting for the claims it's government sponsored Chinese hackers attacking the opt out website...

</comment><comment><USER15> The Australian government gets away with a lot more authoritarian BS than other comparable governments, and there seems to be less of an emphasis on individual rights. I wouldn't trust them with medical records.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are problems with paper-based systems but they don't affect everyone to the same extent: * I visit another doctor when on holiday - they don't have my records * Certain treatments need the approval of my home doctor, it talkes longer than it should * Harder to collate statistics that are supposed to show the state of the nation's health

But there are problems with an electronic system: * A single point of attack * No way to assure people it is ultimately secure, because it can never be * Fluffy exemptions to the protection offer - especially if they are more far- reaching than existing exemptions used for accessing your paper records * Creeping requirements mean that a few years later, the government might change what they can use it for.

At the end of the day, neither system can be measured in terms of risk or reward in any meaningful way - many advantages are theoretical and risks are downplayed - so you pretty much have to accept the centralisation of the worlds systems or move to a Banana republic!

<comment><USER17> * A single point of attack

Totally the same with your data in that one primary doctor's office or whatever

* No way to assure people it is ultimately secure, because it can never be

Totally same with your paper records, someone could walk in and steal your data, imagine that.

* Creeping requirements mean that a few years later, the government might change what they can use it for.

Just like paper records, you can't say what they will use them for in the future.

<comment><USER5> I believe you've misunderstood the concept of _single point of attack_.

This means single point of attsck _for everyone with an ehealth record_.

With paper records, or in-house digital records, a hacker / thief, or malicious government, or what have you, has to compromise many systems.

The same applies to your paper record comment.

<comment><USER17> > I believe you've misunderstood the concept of single point of attack.

Single point in who's perspective though, OP worded it more like (s)he cares about his/her data not everyone else's (e.g. "I visit another doctor when on holiday - they don't have my records"). But yes, you are right about it being in general a higher risk endeavour. The question now is though, when other commenters here describe how their life and career could get in danger when someone steals _their_ data, which do you think is going to be much harder to breach, your local doctor's office or a central database that's guarded by armed guards and experts?

<comment><USER5> > which do you think is going to be much harder to breach, your local doctor's > office or a central database that's guarded by armed guards and experts?

Who's going to break in to a doctors office, then scan and upload your medical records? I don't think thieves in Australia would even bother with doctors offices because no drugs or cash.

Rather, it seems certain that this database will be breached and the data sold on the black market, and / or some future government using it outside its intended scope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It works now, opted-out, got email confirmation. [https://www.myhealthrecord.gov.au/for-you-your-family/opt- ou...](https://www.myhealthrecord.gov.au/for-you-your-family/opt-out-my- health-record)

</comment><comment><USER18> As well as opting out, if you're concerned about privacy it might be good to contact your doctors directly to let them know that you don't give consent for your data to be uploaded in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER19> I get that there's benefit to a centralized health database if you're in a country with socialized medicine, but if dealing with private doctors, why not let the market provide this capability? My primary GP uses one version [1], and I get that there would be several competing others until some convergence happens. But at least with these private providers, if one fails or falls out of trust, patients and doctors can move to another - your data isn't permanently locked with an untrustworthy government.

[1] [https://healow.com/](https://healow.com/)

<comment><USER12> You haven't established that the government is less trustworthy than the private providers?

<comment><USER19> I meant that as a hypothetical, as in if the government proves itself untrustworthy (or technically incompetent, as is the case of Australia judging by these comments), you can't legally switch to a new system, whereas you could if it were private.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> They even have a propaganda youtube channel

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8UWg1-qaHAOKrzJA17EHLQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8UWg1-qaHAOKrzJA17EHLQ)

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone know who is the contractor running this fiasco?

<comment><USER22> Accenture, AFAIK.

<comment><USER14> Accenture - with Oracle and Orion Health - according to this: [https://www.itnews.com.au/news/my-health-record- replatformin...](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/my-health-record- replatforming-talks-begin-494467)

Hilariously, they've already let on they're not going to renew the Accenture deal - which no doubt will _highly_ motivate them to provide exemplary support and security over the next two years:

"The Australian Digital Health Agency has begun talks to replatform the My Health Record system ahead of the 2020 expiry of its multi-million deal with national infrastructure provider Accenture."

<comment><USER23> Wow. What do they expect the take-up rate to be with that kind of vote of no confidence from the people who commissioned it in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > When citizens rush to opt out of an Australian government service, it says > something about their levels of trust. When the system falls over under > heavy load, it proves them right.

What a stupid conclusion.

<comment><USER25> The context is that there's a lack of trust about the system being stable and implemented properly. Hence why it falling over proves them right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Having a centralised system with health records is bad? I've had that since I was born in my country and I think it's useful and handy. Something happens to you, they know what could've been, if you're on meds, what things and meds you're allergic to, etc.

I guess the outrage makes sense when looked from an American point of view where you distrust the government by principle?

<comment><USER27> Its not the idea that Australians mistrust - its the implementation. No great technical project in the last couple decades has been successful.

Under the current government we have the broken NBN, the fractured MyGov that has been repeatedly hacked, the falling over census website, other broken health care systems.

We can't trust that they can build it safely.

<comment><USER4> Agree. AU Gov is failing in same way any big corporation fails. There is that strange notion that Managers know better than Engineers and can make technical Decisions.

Good engineers, who love coding, can design a big system, are unlikely to rule over the Design. It'll be bad engineers, now Managers, with good political skills, that got promoted because its their only way to survive, being otherwise useless.

It is totally upside-down, hence the mess.

<comment><USER4> If any AU Gov hot shot is here, I'll fix your mess, I'm good at it, did it few times before, drop a line at email@example.com, I'll try to vet you :))

It will be AWS, no nonsense like kubernetes, possibly a dash of OpenBSD for public layer, least privilege IAM, Cloudformation everywhere. Solid. :) Open Sourcing it is an option too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Best Freelance Tools of 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://2015freelancetools.com

<comment><AUTHOR> If I missed any links or you have a discount for freelancers let me know!</comment>


Ask HN: Why "database as a service" didn't succeed? - <AUTHOR> Even the database services from cloud providers, like Amazon RDS or GCE, are effectively thin wrappers over traditional database components. "Instances", "nodes", "hosts" are still present and not abstracted.<p>It looks like a database as a black-boxed CRUD API, with abstracted node/replication/failover handling, should be the obvious solution. I think there were tries to do it (Amazon SimpleDB, Google AppEngine's datastore?) but they are not widely used. Why? <comment><USER2> Amazon's DynamoDB is widely adopted. Google's datastore is widely adopted. And Google just added a generic interface to BigTable. And there's also Google's Firebase.

Database as a service works just like any other managed service today.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't say they are widely adpoted _now_. Maybe the switch is happening now?

And I'm not sure all the mentioned products are fully abstracted, for example BigTable docs mention "nodes".

<comment><USER3> There's also the hosted CouchDB offering by Cloudant (acquired by IBM).

Also, just because documentation mentions something that happens beneath the hood, or companies give you finer control over your service configuration, that doesn't mean it's not "fully abstracted". You'd probably want your database in a datacenter close to your target market, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Depends on what you mean. There are databases that are mostly handled by the hosting firm. MS Azure can be used in failover mode and you can scale up to more powerfull "servers" without taking the application down. Sql databases are normally hard to scale-out over many servers and often require some rewriting of the application to do scale-out.

IBM Cloudant can scale-out to many servers that are all handled by IBM. I'm sure a lot of other cloud based documentdatabases can do this too.

Regarding why it hasn't become really popular yet organizations are generally very slow to change their data storage solutions. Changing to nosql from a relational database also requires a large rewrite of the system and it is not only upsides of going in this direction (some says that it is almost only downsides). It is for exmaple usually harder to get acid guarantees from a distributed db and it may be harder to create (secondary) indices.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like RDS because I get control over the app-specific things (structure, indexes, etc.) and don't worry as much about general DB issues (backups, slaves, I/O performance, etc.)

That's really only possible if the DBaaS is a "thin wrapper" as you describe.

But, other than that, I think ronreiter is right -- there are DBaaS that have big user bases.

</comment><comment><USER6> FWIW, if you configure AWS RDS for Multi-AZ support, you essentially get a black box "cloud database" with synchronous replication and automatic failover. You're right, though, in that you're still essentially being allocated a fixed-sized single-node deployment of your favorite RDBMS.

I think the "obvious solution" is just not super easy to implement. If you want ACID compliance as with traditional RDBMSs but in a auto-scaling, distributed setting, it's not going to happen. Early RDMSs were built with a single node in mind, and any database-as-a-service will have to make some compromises. DynamoDB gives you the flexibility of not having to worry about scaling, and even offer strongly consistent reads, but without support for transactions, for example.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Database" is not specific enough. You have to get to very specialized consistency requirements before you can start talking about what you mean by a database.

Once you do that, things like instances/nodes/hosts become important because you cannot abstract certain consistency requirements away from them.

</comment><comment><USER8> Latency. If you're already hosting on AWS or GCE, using their databases is commonplace.

But if you host your frontend, it doesn't make sense to talk to a database in a different datacenter when you could instead put it in the same rack.

</comment><comment><USER9> Most of the MBaaS market is basically database-as-a-service.</comment>


How to promote a startup on the cheap? - <AUTHOR>

I'm on a team of 3 which has been developing a small startup on the cheap. By on the cheap I mean well under $200 for everything on the site.
We've had about 100 non-affiliate signups and have 11 active non-affiliate users (to clear up any confusion, when I say "non-affiliate" I mean users who were not in any way related to the site's creation. A few designers and illustrators that we talked with have accounts on the site)
Our growth has been steady ever since the initial surge came with our launch announcement. How would one go about promoting this site further while not exceeding our ridiculously small budget (the promotion should, if at all possible, cost less than $30/month)
And in case it matters, the site is: http://shutttr.com/ <comment><USER2> I would be willing to help you if you were willing to help me. I've recently booted up my own company, NGO, and designed two applications for a total of $0. I am a one man team that will soon be three. My philosophy is to be agile and dynamic, using my applications to benefit others.

I would be willing to promote you via my blog if you were willing to use my application, Merchant Words. It would be free for you but I would request some bounties (part of the application). If you are interested e-mail me at email@example.com and I can explain my ideas, skype would work best for me.

Synergy, Dynamic, Agile.

</comment><comment><USER3> Let me preface this by saying this is just my opinion and in no way expert (or even correct) advice.

You can always start from posting on reddit.com/r/startups thread, over facebook, twitter etc. Once you've exhausted those resources, making a very creative promo video might help you guys.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> The cheapest way will be with e-mail. Build a targeted list of photographers' email addresses and send to them a few times a month. If done correctly you can easily send around 300,000 emails a month for $30.

</comment><comment><USER5> Couple of things: 1) Your domain name has too many t's. Hard to remember. 2) Your site has a chicken and egg problem. This makes it doubly hard to get traction if you're not willing to spend money.

</comment><comment><USER6> tumblr, instagram, and pinterest. Build profiles on those sites. Put your best photos up. Become those guys with all the awesome photos. Interact with other people with awesome photos. Find the people that are known on these websites for having great photos (and a lot of followers) and get in contact with them and show them your site.</comment>


We are giving out water - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/06/iphone4 <comment><USER2> Apple loves this stuff. I was in an Apple store a few weeks ago to buy a gift. Aside from the "Genius" Bar, there were five employees helping customers and another two employees fiddling with boxes and displays. There were seven or eight customers ahead of me impatiently waiting to be served. There was a lot of ostentatious yawning, foot-tapping, and watch-checking. In the ten minutes I stayed, the employees on the floor managed to serve and check out _four_ customers. Seven employees, ten minutes, four transactions. That isn't incompetence. That's policy. They're inflating perceptions of their popularity and their importance. If someone can see you without waiting, you aren't important. If you hurry for someone, that makes them more important than you, so don't do it.

My question is, is this _ever_ a good idea? People put up with it because they have to, but what happens when they don't? (I walked out of the store, but I bought the damn iPad online anyway, because it's a Father's Day gift, and I can't tell my mom and sister we're not getting it just because Apple ticks me off. They've never heard of Android, plus my dad is a perpetual noob who needs the most mainstream device available.)

Would people buy _less_ if they were well-treated? That seems to be the premise. Or maybe not -- maybe the abuse is not intended to maximize sales, but rather to intensify loyalty among hard-core fans. That might make sense: banking loyalty and prestige to prepare for a contingency when they have to move clearly inferior products.

<comment><USER3> That isn't policy. It's in-and-out at any of the NYC stores, and the one in Rosedale, Minnesota.

<comment><USER2> I don't exactly have high efficiency standards for retail employees at the mall. What I saw was shocking even by those standards. What was most offensive was that not a single employee in the store, and I mean not a single one, was sensitive to the impatience of the customers. Looking at the body language of the people around me, I think the mood varied from "grumpy" to "murderous," but the employees were calm, happy, and unhurried. Just from a psychological point of view, that seemed unnatural and offensive. Or sociopathic. When someone who's been waiting forever, during lunchtime (hence probably on their lunch hour,) marches determinedly up to a sales guy and tells him precisely what he want to buy, and the sales guy, instead of immediately getting the guy what he wants, starts demoing the product for him, and the guy says, "Uh huh, uh huh, yeah, I've got one already," in a pissed-off tone of voice, at that point the sales guy should, you know, give up and just sell the guy what he wants. To keep stalling and trying to make chit-chat, maybe start demoing a slightly different product, and to do all this calmly and slowly and beatifically, is offensive. Or sociopathic. Take your pick. A whole store full of guys acting like that, I don't know. I just don't know. Maybe it's the culture of the individual store, but I can't imagine it happening anywhere other than an Apple store.

<comment><USER3> Do you happen to smell extremely bad? Maybe it's you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it really, _really_ so bad to wait a couple days or weeks longer to get your precious fucking iPhone?

I hate queuing in general, but this is the kind of line-waiting that literally makes no sense at all to me.

<comment><USER5> > but this is the kind of line-waiting that literally makes no sense at all to > me

This is a cultural thing :) put a couple of us brits together and we will form a queue. And we will do it with minimal fuss and lots of solidarity.

We are damned good at it - and very proud of that.

(my "best queue" was 8 hours for a Leeds Festival ticket :))

<comment><USER4> Oh, I totally get lining up for an event. It's a one-time thing, and you literally HAVE to line up to get a ticket/get in.

But a phone? It'll last a year or so, depending. And it's not necessary to queue.

If I could sum up my thoughts in one word, that word would be "GAH."

<comment><USER5> Pish. Who cares what it's for, you can't beat the beauty of a good queue. :-p

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, personally, I agree with the article's interpretation of events... but: does anybody else see the irony inherent to The Economist, of all publications, complaining about something like this?

I mean, this is the free market at work, right? Nobody's forcing these people to queue for hours. Both Apple and its customers are making choices based on costs and benefits. Apple, on the one hand, apparently sees financial benefit to treating a certain segment of its customer base like crap. Those same customers have apparently decided that being treated shabbily is worth getting the new shiny a little bit sooner than their friends.

If that ain't capitalism, I don't know what is. Seems like it'd be right up The Economist's alley...

<comment><USER7> It's not quite about capitalism though. Had the people known they would end up in a 6+hr queue they may have decided not to bother.

The fact that they had reservations means they were probably expecting a different experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The picture couples well with the revealing self-description in the first sentence: 'like a dutiful customer'. As a _customer_, you have no _duty_ to the vendor. Oh, wait, it's Apple we're talking about. Never mind. :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Also, by forcing people to invest time like this, they build customer loyalty. The customers don't want to admit that they were wrong.

On the other hand, this could backfire if someone gets fed up. It only builds loyalty if the customers tolerate this abuse -- because then they need to explain to themselves why they did.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it would be a difficult task to organize reserved units by time, as the author is implying. What would Apple do? Give you a specific time block of when to be there? Would it be ok to be late by 1 minute due to traffic? Would 20 people be in a particular time block, giving a little buffer. What happens with everyone is a minute late? It takes time to activate these things too, so what about delays in previous customer's transactions that push your appointments back? Ever been to your doctor after six peep ahead of you were late or their appointments ran long?

It's just not sustainable to schedule hundreds of thousands of people into time slots in a given day. Perhaps they could schedule you into thirds of the day, but then people will bitch and moan about that. They could schedule people for specific days, but then you know people will complain about that.

The reality is, most people who want it on launch day, want it on launch day, and as early as possible. They want to wait in a fair FIFO queue, however long it takes to get through it. This is evidenced by multiple years of multiple products delivered by Apple. A few people will complain about everything. If the guy wants one so bad, he can buy one on eBay, or better coordinate his travel arrangements ahead of time, right?

In all sincerity and open-mindedness, how is this Apple's problem when the world wants to buy their product all at once (even if they do emit mind control to cause it)?

</comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of a scene several years ago during the PS3 release. At the Metreon in San Francisco, outside the PlayStation Store that has since closed, Sony was handing out not only bottled water but hamburger meals, real hamburger meals, not fast food, to people waiting to purchase PS3s. I wasn't in that line, but I happened to be walking by the Metreon on the way to my destination, which I don't quite recollect. Pretty incredible to juxtapose that with an event like this.

</comment><comment><USER12> Restaurants and clubs do this all the time. It's not so surprising or ingenious. It is kind of a bitch, though.

<comment><USER13> isn't that due to actual full capacity (restaurants) and fire code (clubs)? i don't think either one has the ability to schedule their customers throughout the day or take another approach to reservations.

<comment><USER12> Clubs will keep a line out the door by instructing the bouncer to slowly let people in or to randomly decide to not let anyone in at a given time (when the line is not long enough).

Restaurants will do this by having the waiting area artificially small. Restaurants where you order before you sit down will have the cash registers near the door, and understaff the registers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I reserved one at the store in hopes of being able to get it earlier and more reliably than those having it shipped.

The extra inconvenience must be worth something, right?

Nope, most people who got them shipped received them in the comfort of their home / office a day early.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why does Apple get blamed for this? It's the AT&T signup process that takes all the time. I queued for 2 hours for the first iPhone but I walked right into the store for my iPad. The only difference was the lack of AT&T in the process.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm really confused as to why people are not getting this.

Pre-Order: You paid for a phone. You had the option to have it shipped to your door (most people did this obviously). You could go pick it up if you want but why would you do that, anyone who has paid attention to Apple releases for the past 4 years knows the lines are insanely long. Thus the shipping option.

Reservation: You haven't paid Apple a DIME. You simply reserved a phone. You get to show up and wait for a phone on a first come, first serve basis, but you are guaranteed to get one if you do. You know what you're getting yourself into. The long lines were a result of each activation taking anywhere from 5 - 15 minutes because of the micro-sim change.

Walk-Ups: You didn't pre-order and you didn't get a reservation in time. You decided to camp over night for a phone. You obviously knew exactly what you were getting yourself into.

As for the waiting in line experience itself: Apple extended store hours into the wee hours to fill all reserved phones. Apple paid for free drinks and free food to be handed out the entire time. I could have eaten a dozen chicken sandwiches if I had wanted them. I met a bunch of cool people while waiting, it wasn't a bad experience in any way other then the actual waiting... which I knew was the case when I got in my car to head to the Apple store.

Apple didn't force anyone to wait in a line. This is absolutely absurd.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hm, if I was an iPhone developer I would try to create an app for that. Organizing the queuing, I mean. Could we come up with some self organizing numbering scheme (assuming the shop doesn't collaborate, and everybody in the queue already has an iPhone (pre-4), which seems reasonable)? A problem could be that people would forget to check in once they had their turn at the counter, so maybe it would have to be some kind of dead man's button ("yes, I am still queueing").

<comment><USER18> How about selling your reservation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> People who reserved this item know from previous experience they were most likely going to wait in line for it.

They _knew_.

I'm not saying that Apple couldn't have handled this differently, but there is a _value_ that was attached to this item by the people in line. The cost of time lost/waiting in line for hours was something factored in to the value they were expecting for their iphone.

Some of the more pragmatic and practical types scoff and write articles about how much all horrible lines are going to affect Apple's reputation (and bottom line), yet history has and will prove them wrong. Did the horrible lines for the iPhone 2G affect the sales of the 3G? The 3Gs, the iPad? It did, _positively._

<comment><USER20>
      > People who reserved this item know from previous
      > experience they were most likely going to wait in
      > line for it.

I haven't followed previous launches, but were customers reserving their iPhones during this launches too? It seems really odd to me that as the author stated, Apple knew the number of people that had reserved their phone in advance. They can't claim that they "didn't know" how many people would turn up on launch day. They could easily have tried to design a way to better facilitate people getting their phones, or at the _bare minimum_ tell people beforehand that they are expecting there to be long lines.

      > Did the horrible lines for the iPhone 2G affect
      > the sales of the 3G? The 3Gs, the iPad? It did,
      > positively.

The article states that all of the press that Apple gets from this is good for them, but bad for their customers. So I don't see how you are contradicting the article here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yeah. This is why I don't buy anything that I can't get from Amazon.

Step 1: find product Step 2: click "2-day one click" Step 3: the product arrives at my house

<comment><USER22> Ironically, apple is actually one of the few companies out there that has licensed one click purchasing from Amazon. (everyone waiting in line, btw, could have chosen to just have their phone shipped to them)

<comment><USER20>
      > (everyone waiting in line, btw, could have chosen
      > to just have their phone shipped to them)

True, but I think most of those people felt that they would just be able to walk in and pick it up since they had a reservation. Handing out reservations implies that Apple has set one aside, just for you. You just have to walk in and get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I pre-ordered mine for shipment from the local AT&T store (would have done it online, but the web site was unusable on pre-order day). It was waiting for me when I got home last night, all I had to do was charge it, activate it and sync it.

This time, it was just luck that I decided not to ask for an in-store appointment. But, next time I'll be sure to take the free shipping FTW.

</comment><comment><USER24> I just had an epiphany. Here's what I'm going to do when I need to make a critical decision about how to operate my business. First, I'll spend days doing market research to develop a keen sense of what would be the right and fair thing to do to make my customers happy. Then I'll throw that out and do whatever I think Apple would do.

<comment><USER25> It doesn't really work for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Folks - waiting in line in front of an apple store is part of the experience (I am standing 3 hours back right now in palo alto.). Half of the fun is launch day socializing, enjoying the spectacle, etc...

Seriously, if I didn't want to wait in line, I would have just had them ship me my iPhone. Zero wait.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's also something to be said about how the more effort you spend attaining something, the more valuable it becomes (e.g. the psychology behind hazing in fraternities).

So Apple gets free marketing AND increased loyalty. Hurray.

</comment><comment><USER27> I understand that the iPhone is also available at some AT&T stores.

Do they have lines? Or is buying at the Apple store part of the experience?

</comment><comment><USER28> I am surprised that nobody sees here a recipe for downfall : Apple is a very incompetent company when it comes to product massification. This is the most anti-Henry Ford strategy possible: overpriced premium products for a cult-like base of customers. They sell gadgets like Louis-Vuitton sells handbags and Prada sells shoes. And that's exactly the strategy they followed with the Mac and got them cornered in a niche. I wonder how long will it take until Dell, Asus or EeePc eats their lunch with a cheap Android.

<comment><USER29> You forgot about coupling their premium products to some best-in-class services: the iTunes Music Store and App Store.

<comment><USER30> Sorry but those are not best in class. iTunes doesn't play nicely with windows and there is no way to use my Ipod as an usb device, something that every single mp3 player I have even brought did.

Face it, Apple makes shiny things but they are crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If Disney can create Fastpass, Apple can create something similar. But then they won't end up in the newspapers and on tv.

</comment><comment><USER32> How is this any different from any other high demand product?

<comment><USER33> In many similar situations people don't have reservations. Guaranteeing they receive a product requires them to be one of the first people through the door when the store opens. Taking reservations may have created the false impression that one could show up later in the day without the need to wait in a long line.

The other difference I can think of is that in similar situations the manufacturer and the retailer are two completely separate entities. It's more difficult for me to imagine getting angry at Nintendo because Best Buy is making me wait in line.

I don't really see the point in taking reservations if people are going to have to stand in line all day anyway.

<comment><USER34> _Taking reservations may have created the false impression that one could show up later in the day without the need to wait in a long line._

I concur with you in everything you said, but I think it is important to remember that that impression was false only because Apple arranged it that way deliberately.

As others have stated, they knew the maximum number they could serve in a day and could have refused to reserve more than that, or made reservations for specific times of day and then ensured they had enough staff to cover those reservations.

If they truly got overwhelmed by surprise (say some employees got sick), they could have started handing out numbers so people could be free to walk away for a bit and return closer to time based on their number. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It is pretty surprising that Apple hasn't been called on this cheap PR. Every person standing in line is being used as a stooge by Apple to get press, and the media always abides. This is the first article I've seen yet that points out this obvious exploitation of the Apple faithful.

It's positively archaic.

Just to be clear, as the article notes the people standing in line RESERVED a phone. They already have their spot. Apple makes them prove it by standing in line for 6 hours for the television cameras.

When the Motorola Droid was released, in comparison, I remember a lot of articles mocking the lack of lines. Yet somehow they sold 250,000 in the first week. It's kind of amazing what modern fulfillment processes can do, even if it doesn't lead to cult-like turnouts.

<comment><USER8> Makes one miss the truly passionate product fans of days gone by:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajlTIMBbdTg&feature=PlayL...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajlTIMBbdTg&feature=PlayList&p=B13069A3A910C603&playnext_from=PL&index=11)

<comment><USER36> Anyone know any studies on what makes people do this? How come a product (especially a particularly stupid one that's not much different than its analogues) gets so demanded before it comes out?

<comment><USER18> There should be something about this in the PR literature. After all it's each PR guys dream to create such a hype.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What if Covid-19 were a Jira ticket? – A Lesson in Bug Prevention - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tygertec/what-if-covid-19-were-a-jira-ticket-a-lesson-in-bug-prevention-ad87db828dd0 <comment><AUTHOR> Canonical link: [https://www.tygertec.com/covid-19-jira-ticket-bug- prevention...](https://www.tygertec.com/covid-19-jira-ticket-bug-prevention/)

<comment><USER2> Best thing written yet about what to do after we survive this crisis!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Compass to find nearby water refill stations - <AUTHOR> http://www.findtap.com/compass <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I'm on a personal mission to eliminate the single use plastic water bottle.

I always carry my refillable bottle but don't always know where to refill it. In fact, water fountains currently aren't points of interest on Google or Apple Maps.

So, we've plotted ~270,000 of them and created a compass to find the nearest water refill station where ever you are in the world using the phone's GPS and orientation.

I'd be very appreciative and grateful for your feedback and thoughts!</comment>


Ubuntu 10.04 Released - <AUTHOR> http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ <comment><USER2> I have been running lucid on my desktop for about two months know fully knowing the caveats. Here are some things ive found a) Its visually the most slick linux distro I have used so far. b) Ubuntu now has a cloud offering for consumers which allows you to sync data between computers much like dropbox. c) Ubuntu now has a enterprise cloud offering where the act of maintaining multiple ubuntu computers has been simplified. You can install packages / run commands on multiple machines at once from convenient web interface. You can even check on the machine load from this interface. - <http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private> d) Plymouth now comes standard. This means the entire boot experience from bootup to X is very seamless. Kudos to the fedora folks for coming up with this, props to the ubuntu folks for integrating it. e) The only issue ive had with lucid is that 2 of my 1.5TB SATA drives are not detected. Ive opened a ticket for this sometime back but the ticket hasnt received any love so far.

All in all, lucid is a great release. It will make it harder for my osx using friends to make fun of my desktop. Tux has shiny new clothes :)

<comment><USER3> _"... The only issue ive had with lucid is that 2 of my 1.5TB SATA drives are not detected. Ive opened a ticket for this sometime back but the ticket hasnt received any love so far. ..."_

Can you post your ticket number plz. No way am I going to risk an upgrade without SATA support. What drives are you using?

<comment><USER2> You dont need to worry if youre not on a nvidia chipset mobo. Also the bug is not a regression, the drives havent been detected in 9.10 either. The relevant bugs are - <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/501950> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/396738> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/540939>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Release Announcement:

[https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu- announce/2010-April...](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu- announce/2010-April/000133.html)

Technical Overview:

<http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1004overview>

Release Notes:

<http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1004>

</comment><comment><USER5> The look and feel is much improved. The default theme is great -- some of the reds/oranges could be tweaked, tasteful use of transparency (Win 7's is pretty gaudy, IMO), useful desktop effects (alt-tab, desktop switching, minimize/restore). My favorite improvement is all the stuff they did to get rid of the system tray and consolidate the "notification area". It looks better and is much more useful. Occasionally the battery icon disappears which is annoying but hopefully that's fixed in the final release.

Everything (almost) worked out of the box on my Thinkpad SL410. The mute and mic button on the keyboard don't work by default. Hibernate on lid-close, power saving, and all that jazz work perfectly. It cold boots incredibly fast. Noticeably faster than Windows 7.

I haven't figured out how to disable the track pad yet (it isn't in the mouse settings). :/

I've been using the RC for almost a week and had it crash once because of (I believe) Pulse Audio. _shakes fist in air menacingly_

Before I was using Arch and it never crashed (in a year) but I was using fewer programs and it was very utilitarian.

<comment><USER6> There is a package you can install called gpointing-device-settings that I've been using to tweak my touchpad. I believe it has an option to disable.

<comment><USER5> It has the setting but doesn't appear to do anything...

If I can get it to work I'll follow up later.

<comment><USER7> In gconf-editor, set /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/off to true.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, that one worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My Iphone 3GS now syncs with Rhythmbox on Ubuntu 10.04 straight out of the box.

<comment><USER9> I wish I could be excited about that, but because the iPod and iTunes don't support FLAC I have to maintain duplicate, MP3-encoded copies of all of my FLAC-encoded files, and I don't want the duplicates cluttering up my Rhythmbox library.

So, sticking with iTunes via WinXP in VirtualBox here, sadly.

<comment><USER10> You'll love this:

 _MP3FS is A read-only FUSE filesystem which transcodes audio formats (currently FLAC) to MP3 on the fly when opened and read. This was written to enable me to use my FLAC collection with software and/or hardware which only understands MP3. e.g. gmediaserver to a netgear MP101 mp3 player._

<http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/>

I have a ~/mp3_music directory which provides an exact duplicate of ~/music except for transcoding non-mp3 audio files on read. It's seriously kickass.

<comment><USER9> Yup, you (and the author) just made my day. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My relationship with Ubuntu is always the same:

      1. A release of Ubuntu comes out. Hey, this sounds cool.
      2. I download a live CD and try it out.
      3. I realize it is in fact pretty cool, really fast, very full-featured.
      4. It critically fails to support some essential piece of hardware.
      5. I go back to OS X and the cycle repeats a few releases later.

The fatal flaw in this release: My trackpad dies every time I sleep my MacBook Pro.

<comment><USER12> Waging a wild guess, Mac hardware isn't the easiest to support. I don't think Apple is cooperating?

<comment><USER11> This trackpad isn't all that special. Ubuntu supports it (right down to the two-finger gestures) — it just supports it in a buggy way.

At any rate, I could buy pretty much any laptop and we could make a similar excuse when something goes wrong. "That piece of hardware that isn't working isn't the easiest to support. I don't think the manufacturer is cooperating." It might be true in a given case or it might not, but like all excuses, it doesn't change the fact that I can't use my extremely common model of laptop with Ubuntu.

If Ubuntu wants to rely on that excuse (and that's not too bad — Apple does), it needs to set up a project to provide clear compatibility guidelines. "It works with these computers. It doesn't work with these others. Set your expectations accordingly." Because as it is now, the implicit guideline is, "You can't really expect it work 100% on any mainstream laptop."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My biggest gripe with the new theme is the taskbar. I confuse which window has the focus. It seems to me that the colors should be inversed.

<comment><USER14> I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that. I've have several times where I thought I was switching applications only to minimize an active window due to the "inverse" colors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh dear, I still have a server on 8.04 and a desktop with 9.04. I'm falling behind the times, it seems, but I'm too paranoid about doing something to kmail to upgrade. the server, well, I'm too paranoid about doing something to anything to upgrade that.

<comment><USER16> In my experience, `do-release-upgrade` works seamlessly and you shouldn't fear upgrading. It's part of the upgrade-manager-core package.

<comment><USER17> You've been lucky. Every single computer I updated to 9.10 would not boot initially. I had to spend hours on each one resolving the problems.

<comment><USER18> Actually, what would best describe it is that you have been terribly unlucky.

Every single computer I installed Ubuntu, since the 6.x releases, has worked flawlessly with one exception - an IBM desktop that has a buggy HDD controller that requires some time to properly boot. One line in grub and it was solved.

And that was it. The only glitch I ever had installing Ubuntu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am very grateful and supportive to Ubuntu but this thing of the six months release has always been a pain in the neck. I switched to Arch a year ago and never looked back. Now I have the latest version of all softwares, always.

<comment><USER20> Last time I used Arch, they had just moved to libjpeg7, which removed libjpeg6 and immediately broke a small army of programs that still required 6.

The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager.

Suddenly, a 6 month release cycle didn't seem like such a bad thing.

<comment><USER21> In Arch, there is never a reason to "manually manage a copy outside the package manager". You can and should install everything via PKGBUILDs -- the format isn't very hard, just keep a template around, fill in the metadata, and make tweaks to the commands to run if necessary. Then everything is always kept in pacman and easy to find and/or remove.

You don't even have to do this; there was a PKGBUILD added to AUR, so all you had to do in this (and most) cases is download the PKGBUILD from AUR or use something like yaourt or clyde that does this automatically.

For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6.

And despite Arch's rolling release cycle, I still have much less pain with it than I do with Ubuntu's custom-hybrid-half-versions, based on a release already 4-months-old, with about half of the changes in the newer versions backported, and including handfuls of patches never added upstream. See the Debian SSL fiasco for why this is a bad idea. The system is much feistier than Arch in my experience, even though Arch will occasionally perform upgrades that necessitate lots of rebuilds.

<comment><USER20> >> "For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6."

Which makes it all the more disappointing that all I could find were needlessly complex solutions instead.

yaourt looks very helpful. Seeing it listed as the 20th "AUR Helper" (<http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Helpers>) didn't exactly make it jump out at me and scream, "this is what you want!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is anyone aware if the left-justified max/min/close buttons are still left- justified, or if that was corrected? There was an article about a month ago discussing this (and its inherent silliness) but I'm not sure if it still exists as such.

Looking at <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand> seems to indicate that it still is, and perhaps as trivial as this may seem, it is discouraging me from upgrading.

(edit) I haven't yet had a chance to download a live CD of a release candidate.

<comment><USER23> They are still left-justified, but they fixed the horrible padding they had in one of the beta releases.

I'm basically used to them, but kind of annoying that my primary app in Ubuntu (Chrome) has them on the right side, as it creates inconsistency. Yes, I realize I can use the native title bar with Chrome but then it's not as pretty ;-)

<comment><USER24> You can download a Chrome extension/theme to match the Ubuntu one (it's called Ambiance if I recall) and have Chrome use the system window decoration (right click on a free spot in the tabs area). This way Chrome integrates perfectly.

<comment><USER25> [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/elnmibmpefhmfgph...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/elnmibmpefhmfgphdphdncoogpbfmlbp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ubuntu.com could use some work. "What's new?" link on the front or tour/product pages would be a good start, even if it's a LTS release.

</comment><comment><USER27> I am downloading the ISO right now - I have a new hardware laptop that I have had problems getting wireless working, and I have happy expectations that 10.04 will recognize my hardware. It helps a lot to not buy the latest hardware to give the Linux community time to get drivers. Lesson learned.

<comment><USER27> Sweet: I got my wireless working even before updating: Realtek had a new Linux driver available on their site :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Last week only I downloaded the RC version of Ubuntu 10.04. Quite happy!! Mac inspired design :) I am running in Virtual Box apart from resolution I didn't face much difficulties going smooth!! though I m not using much feature apart from learning Ruby & RoR...

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone know if the MD5 hashes are available for the 10.04 ISO's to check them?

<comment><USER30> Here are the ones from the iso's I downloaded

        d044a2a0c8103fc3e5b7e18b0f7de1c8  ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso

        3e0f72becd63cad79bf784ac2b34b448  ubuntu-10.04-desktop-amd64.iso

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> From the announcement ([https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu- announce/2010-April...](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu- announce/2010-April/000133.html)): "Users of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS may wish to wait for 10.04.1 LTS, due in July 2010, before upgrading."

Anyone know why? Surely we're not adopting the 'wait for service pack 1' approach?

<comment><USER32> It's just about the LTS -- whether that's for IT governance issues or the desire for warm fuzzies. The LTS release is meant to be essentially no-touch for 3 years, so it won't be stamped "gold" until there is a significant public deployment of the normal stable release and time for bug testing in real-world user hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ubuntu's homepage still lists this as an RC.

<comment><USER34> They probably have to stage the iso's and everything on the servers. So we can probably pull the final images down before it's announced for a couple hours.

<comment><USER35> Don't forget to contribute to bittorrent with your iso afterwards.

<comment><USER36> In fact, don't download over http, just use bittorrent. Leave http for people who don't know how to use bittorrent or otherwise can't (firewall restrictions).

<comment><USER35> Do you know whether you can use something like bittorrent for the upgrade as well?

<comment><USER37> This link is a little old and I haven't tried it, but here you go:

[http://torrentfreak.com/use-bittorrent-to-upgrade-to- ubuntu-...](http://torrentfreak.com/use-bittorrent-to-upgrade-to-ubuntu- intrepid-ibex-081029/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm thinking of getting the Pangolin Performance from System76, any thoughts?

<comment><USER9> I am very happy with the Serval (v3) I've been using for about two and a half years.

A great resource for evaluating the available models and gauging customer response is the official support forum: <http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=341>

Feel free to enter your own call for feedback by posting your requirements and expectations and a request for opinions.

<comment><USER38> thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Just downloaded the amd64 version (from The Netherlands). It's very strange, it looks like this is not a bootable CD.

It's more like an autorun CD with Wubi. Anyone else got the same problem?

(downloading it as torrent right now)

<comment><USER40> The Live CD wasn't working for me but then I realised I downloaded the amd64-alternate version not the amd64-desktop version. The desktop version is a LiveCD whereas the alternate version is not. Don't know if the same applies to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hate the dark theme. Feels like a skinned desktop from the nineties.

Changed to a light theme which looks ok but like the same I used in the last 10 years...

When will I install an Ubuntu that doesn't make me feel so "Oh this is still Linux"...

Also, why isn't VLC the default video player yet?

<comment><USER41> Hm, it was quite easy to install more window borders. If only I could get fonts to look like Windows...

<comment><USER42> I raged against the fonts for a long time, but I actually prefer the Gnome ones now. You might grow to love them. You probably do want the fonts from Windows though (just put them in ~/.fonts)

Window borders as in colours? Or window borders for resizing & moving? Alt-L/M/R is much more usable. I reassigned to Win-L/M/R also.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a "What is new in 10.4" kind of article?

</comment><comment><USER43> Ugh the world is against me today. I'm at work, got the iso, can't find a USB key to install the new version on my netbook, fingers crossed this version actually boots. O well, 2 hrs till the desktop upgrade completes. EXCITEMENT!

</comment><comment><USER44> upgrading as we speek

</comment><comment><USER45> Woot finally</comment>


Ask HN: Writing parsers that run in multiple languages - <AUTHOR> I wrote a sort of natural language parser for electronic component descriptions [1] and am interested in porting it to multiple languages. I have a way to port it to Python but the solution involves translating JS to Python using Js2Py which is quite ugly and probably a bit brittle.<p>I want to re-implement it, and define the grammar in EBNF (or similar) but have it run in multiple languages. I am especially interested in JS, Python, Go and Java but as many languages as possible would be good. Is there a parser generator that can do that?<p>[1]: https://monostable.github.io/electro-grammar <comment><USER2> Perhaps Antlr?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer. I'll look into it though I haven't met anyone that has used Antlr and was happy with it.</comment></comment>


Record-Breaking Galaxy Cluster Discovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/record-breaking-galaxy-cluster-discovered.html <comment><USER2> NASA is making a lot of "record-breaking" news in the past few weeks and it is increasingly difficult for me to think how these news affect me and my relationship to the Galaxy. I understood many of these discoveries translated to "current science could be wrong". But if counting stars isn't my hobby, what am I supposed to take a way from this and digest the meaning of 11.1B light years distance?

<comment><USER3> That's just how science is. It doesn't need to be driven by a business or human "need".

<comment><USER4> The drive to satisfy our curiosity is a human need and what drives scientists.

<comment><USER3> To me that is more of a desire than a need, but I digress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always wondered about these measurements. Excuse me if this is rookie astronomical information. I have read that we gauge the distance through brightness. That is we know how bright such an object should be at the source, and estimate the distance based on actual brightness at the instrument. How do we know it's not just brighter than we believe, instead of being as far away as we believe?

<comment><USER6> Let's distinguish redshift from (the more murky notion of) distance.

Astronomers usually just think in terms of redshift and might never convert into "X light years from Earth" until they write a press release. Red-shift is measured directly, because we have all kinds of ways of knowing about the spectrum expecte from various things, and we just see the expected pattern shifted.

The calibrarion from red-shift to distance is done by considering the brightness of objects. But here astronomers can just pick and choose those objects for which they have good models.

An example is the type 1a supernova ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder#Superno...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder#Supernovae)). These are stars that were actually _growing_ until the tripped over a very specific mass threshold and went nova. Because they all had the same initial mass, they all have the same brightness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not "wrong" \- just fractally revealed details. What I find amazing here is thatit shows the fractal nature does not only work by looking into ever smaller regions - we also are discovering fractally larger structures exploring in the other scale direction.

</comment><comment><USER8> As our instruments get better, are we going to find these clusters further and further out until we hit the supposed age of the universe @ 13.7B years? Then what? When do we start thinking that maybe the models are potentially wrong?

<comment><USER9> When we have evidence to the contrary. Speculation about what we might find in the future doesn't change anything.

<comment><USER10> Exactly right. Its exciting because we get new data and if it contradicts theory, it forces us to reconsider what we think is the correct answer. And in that reconsideration our understanding grows.

It is unfortunate that we cannot image this object once a day for 5 years and then watch its changes over that time period in one 30 minute viewing. Telescope time is too valuable to "waste" but I wonder what it might show us.

<comment><USER11> Let's say our telescopes get better and better. Are there any hard limits for how well we can resolve the light from such a galaxy?

<comment><USER12> Practically, yes, telescopes are limited by the diffraction limit. This depends on ratio of the wavelength of the light being captured to the size of the optics. In theory one could make larger and larger perfect lenses/mirrors, but practically there is a limit somewhere. More information at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution)

I suppose at some point quantum effects will take over, but I'm guessing the manufacturing requirements for perfect optics will be the limited factor long before then.

<comment><USER13> For large-aperture ground-based telescopes operating in the visible spectrum, the seeing limit is the dominant effect. Atmospheric turbulence is a bigger factor than the precision of your optics, in other words. See [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_seeing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_seeing)

(Space telescopes are diffraction-limited but have other constraints, like mass budget and cost, that keep them from being as large as ground based facilities.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Acxiom: the company that knows if you own a cat or if you're right-handed - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/5231752/Acxiom-the-company-that-knows-if-you-own-a-cat-or-if-youre-right-handed.html <comment><USER2> "FYI man, you can sit at home and do absolutely _nothing_ \-- and your name goes through like 17 computers a day, man. 1984? Yeah, _right_ , man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and he's livin' large. We have no names, man, no names. We are _nameless_. ...Can I score a fry?"

Seriously, this goes on all the time. I used to work for a company that could divine your age, sex, race, marital status, and income and education levels from your cable TV viewing habits.

</comment><comment><USER3> I launched my career at Acxiom... it's a fascinating company that deals in HUGE database problems.

It's also terrifying to know just how much information they have, and how aggressive they are in using it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have created a startup that attempts to break this model of selling your information without your knowledge. It's called MyInfoTrader [www.MyInfoTrader.com]. The service is fully voluntary and pays back the users when a user's address is sold for a mailing list.

Please check it out; I am very interested in your comments.

<comment><USER5> I like the idea, but not the faux-wood visual interface, which reminded me of a Flash game at first blush. I think the weak part is you're offering coupons, rebates and special offers. These are already used and abused by many websites, and my first reaction was 'meh...more spam' - which is unfair, because such things do offer a value to the consumer...but it's just that I seem to get special offers when people have something they want to promote, rather than when I want to buy.

Suggestion: give users points, then let them claim the rewards they actually want. This would be a source of more saleable data in itself. Alternatively, give out cash. Since the amount owed to any individual user is miniscule, you could adopt a lottery model and give 1 user out of 1000 a $100 every month, or whatever your numbers allow.

It's a good concept, I just think you need something to set yourself apart from other information marketing companies and give you an unusual angle.

<comment><USER6> I want to second this suggestion. With some good advertising and some bad math you could probably convince some users that they're practically guaranteed(!) to earn money from one of the lottery's run whenever there data is sold. Tie that to some instand credit card (paypal account?) and you could also track what they choose to buy with their winnings.

Does anyone remember the name of that new credit card company that is sopposed to be competing with paypal and Google Checkout?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're interested in all of the different classifications that Acxiom came up with, I documented them last year in a blog post:

<http://seanmountcastle.com/2008/01/01/whats-your-segment/>

</comment><comment><USER8> " "You're using Facebook to say all kind of things that you wouldn't say in public," he says. "My grandmother thought that the phone was an intrusion into her life. Why would this person call rather than knock on the door? Now we just accept it." "

That doesn't necessarily make it a good thing though... At least with facebook or a phone you get to choose some of the data that is held on you.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't speak for all of their data but they quality of their address and geocode data for Canada was not very good (as of 2005). The formatting was fine but it was outdated by as much as a few years.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's crap like this that makes me want to go Amish.</comment>


How To Power The Entire Country With Renewable Energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.blog.thesietch.org/2008/07/22/how-to-power-the-entire-country-with-renewable-energy-fun-with-maps-edition/

<comment><USER2> Love the maps. Where is the author getting them from? Are they available for other parts of the world?

And a little more on topic: when travelling through the south of Germany, you'll find about 50% of larger buildings in the countryside have solar panels on the roof. With the right incentives, you can spread this sort of thing pretty quickly. (as far as I know, they get to feed unused electricity back into the grid at the same price at which they draw from the grid; I suspect the initial investment might be subsidised, too) Cross the border to Austria and you see nothing of the sort.

<comment><USER3> Have a look at the legends on the map images. E.g.

<http://www.nrel.gov/gis/il_csp.html>

isn't found anymore, but this appears to be a current index for items from the same source

<http://www.nrel.gov/gis/maps.html>

NREL == National Renewable Energy Laboratory

"The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is the nation's primary laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development (R&D).

"NREL's mission and strategy are focused on advancing the U.S. Department of Energy's and our nation's energy goals. The laboratory's scientists and researchers support critical market objectives to accelerate research from scientific innovations to market-viable alternative energy solutions..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would certainly be nice to be able to hit the 10-year goal, but I think it's going to take longer than that. The thing I wonder about is how hard it will be to scale up the manufacturing of the required components of such a system: PV cells, wind turbines, etc. I can't find any good numbers right now, but iirc a lot of the factories and material suppliers are oversubscribed as it is, with multiple-year waiting lists for parts like high-quality solar panels. Building more factories is of course possible, but will take a fair amount of time considering the processes necessary to produce components of the required quality.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that solar panels generally contain fairly rare elements. If everyone in the Western World decided overnight to put solar panels on their roofs, we'd run out of those elements very quickly. It simply isn't possible with the current technology AFAIK.

Wind Turbines are a different matter; they are relative simple machines from a commodities point of view.

<comment><USER5> Having said that Nano Solar are quite interesting - not sure if they are reliant on obscure materials but they are a fascinating company - huge levels of investment in them too...

<http://www.nanosolar.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks like Illinois bribed someone to inflate their wind numbers.

(For those outside the US, it is the suspiciously yellow state below the flacid red lake and is well known for corruption in government.)

Interesting rule of thumb: The solar power delivered to a typical house's roof is about equal to the electrical demands of that house even at 20% or so conversion efficiency. (Rule breaks in the dark and cold of winter if you try to heat with it.)

<comment><AUTHOR> _Interesting rule of thumb: The solar power delivered to a typical house's roof is about equal to the electrical demands of that house even at 20% or so conversion efficiency. (Rule breaks in the dark and cold of winter if you try to heat with it.)_

Nice... combine that with solar passive design, and you become a net producer of energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> the author speaks of this like if we dont send the money to the middle east we can immediately use it on renewable resources. but, economically there is a reason for the money to be going there, and that's because it is cheaper to use oil. until research can make renewable fuel cheaper (or oil runs out), it will not be economically viable regardless of whether or not the resources and tech exists.

<comment><USER5> It's not a case of when oil runs out, but when it _starts_ running out. As that happens the price goes up, and things like cars and aeroplanes get more expensive to run.

It's currently a lot cheaper to run an electric car from the domestic electricty supply than it is filling it with petrol, and has been for some time.

<comment><USER8> What country are you in?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where's the tidal flow / Gulf Stream power?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream#Possible_renewable_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream#Possible_renewable_power_source)

</comment><comment><USER10> And so if you could just plug your TV into the sun, the wind, or a compost heap, all our problems would be solved.

<comment><AUTHOR> ... as opposed to now, when you have to plug it into a lump of coal, some radioactive stuff, or some natural gas [http://www.theoildrum.com/files/US%20Electric%20Generation%2...](http://www.theoildrum.com/files/US%20Electric%20Generation%20by%20Source.png) ?

<comment><USER10> Actually, I plug my TV into the wall. Which is my point. That we get a lot of sun, wind, and poop is kind of besides the point, isn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure I'm following you... the article talks about how the US can switch to wind and solar energy (as well as biofuel for the lulls on non-windy, cloudy days) and meet 100% of our energy demands that way. So yes, the author is advocating solving our problems with sun and wind instead of coal, natural gas, and radioactive material.

If done right, this will be rather transparent to you, the end user[1], it will reduce our dependence on non-renewable fuels, and create jobs in the process. You will still be able to plug in your TV to the wall and have it work.

1\. Except perhaps for the price...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scribd Streamlines Embedded Docs With iPaper 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/10/scribd-streamlines-embedded-docs-with-ipaper-2/

<comment><USER2> Congrats JR!

I know that many folks on HN much prefer raw pdf's to a flash viewer, but JR (sole programmer for iPaper) has done an amazing job single-handedly replacing a multi-billion dollar company's product: Macromedia's FlashPaper.

JR is a quiet, but very friendly french canadian, an avid roller-blader, and was previously one of the programmer's on the Assassin's Creed ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed> )

When I worked at Scribd, JR and I shared an office while he was writing the first version of iPaper. The sheer complexity of getting all the fonts worked out and embedded images and searching and compression and streaming in the document for faster load times etc etc was quite a feat for a single developer. He would come in early and leave late, all the day working with an amazing focus. He's a real work horse.

I remember when his Programming Erlang book arrived - he devoured it in a couple of days and re-architected the iPaper system to more efficiently stream the documents to the viewer. Despite the iPaper viewer being in flash, there are some very sexy technologies under the hood.

Anyway, just wanted to shed some light on the guy behind the product. It's not a team of highly paid flash code monkeys - just JR quietly working away to make billion dollar company's products obsolete.

<comment><USER3> Hi Matt, thanks but I wasn't directly involved with this new iteration of iPaper, it's the work of Ed, Michael and Barish at Scribd. Good to hear from you!, cheers :)

<comment><USER2> He he, I'm clearly behind on the project changes in the last year! Either way - iPaper 1.0 was an excellent foundation :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still don't get scribd: <http://blog.bradgessler.com/i-dont-get-scribd>

<comment><USER5> Can't agree more. And they want me to sign up in order to see or download a plain PDF, thats not going to happen.

<comment><USER4> Scribd would be much more useful if they supported predictable URLs of a document in their various formats. For example, if I uploaded My_Awesome_Document.docx, it could throw it into an URL like <http://www.scribd.com/bradgessler/My_Awesome_Document.docx> and let me enter URLs like

      http://www.scribd.com/bradgessler/My_Awesome_Document.pdf
      http://www.scribd.com/bradgessler/My_Awesome_Document.doc

to download the various formats of the doc. an URL shortner would sweeten the deal for tweeting/sharing docs. iPaper could just be another option for sharing/embedding a doc.

I'm probably just a vocal minority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While it's nice that it doesn't look like a shit Flex app anymore, the interaction behaviors are still awful -- let me use my goddamn scroll wheel!

Google's PDF viewer used for attachments in Gmail is better by leaps and bounds -- I hope they start using it in SERPs at some point. I wonder if an API could be hacked together for use from a Firefox extension...

<comment><USER7> In what browser does your scroll wheel not work? It works for me in firefox and safari.

<comment><USER6> The Firefox 3 + Flash in the current Ubuntu.

Something else might be fucked, as none of the buttons on it's little toolbar seem to do anything.

<comment><USER7> Do you have js disabled?

Will try to test on ff / ubuntu

<comment><USER6> I do not have JS disabled, as I am not a mouthbreather.

Just checked at home on Gentoo x86_64 / FF-3.0.10 / Flash-10.0.22.87 -- and got identical behavior.

The old iPaper works, except that when embedded normally the scroll wheel doesn't work (but it does when viewing the swf directly).

The new iPaper fails embedded or directly -- clicking / dragging and the contextual menu works, but none of the toolbar items work. Scrolling doesn't work at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, this is much better. Loads quicker too.</comment>


Electron considered harmful (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://sircmpwn.github.io/2016/11/24/Electron-considered-harmful.html <comment><USER2> I don't have enough skin in the game as a JavaScript developer to have an informed opinion but I do like the writing style.</comment>


What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/fashion/25love.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> I think I learned more about elephants than relationships. It might have been because I couldn't get past the author's condescending tone and found myself wondering what the husband thought when he read his wife's article in the NYTimes. Did he notice how inferior she makes him seen? The non-witty the comparisons to animals just made it hilarious.

I'm young, I'm female, I don't have the answer to what makes relationships work, but thinking you are better than your partner isn't desirable in a relationship. My man lived a successful life before I came around. Hopefully we make each other better people, but nagging about shaving or talking down to them when they lose the car keys isn't how to improve your spouse.

 _edit: Am I just being immature and stupid and grouchy that I didn't get anything out of the article?_

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> btw: back then this article made it to NYTimes #1 most emailed for several weeks</comment>


Momentum Builds Against N.S.A. Surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/us/politics/momentum-builds-against-nsa-surveillance.html <comment><USER2> _...who is rallying an increasingly unified Democratic caucus to his side, as well as 61 House Democrats who voted no on Wednesday but are now publicly signaling their discontent._

That's HUGE. Does anyone have any more details on this?

The tone of the whole article seems to indicate that change is inevitable. We need to stay vigilant and make sure the changes aren't just window-dressing.

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised people find this hard to believe. It's less than 2 years after the defeat of SOPA, a bill that enjoyed incredible, nearly unprecedented bipartisan support and in the end, after the blackout, faced massive, unprecedented bipartisan opposition and retreat.

Politicians may be slow, but they'll respond to momentum.

<comment><USER4> Respectfully, I don't believe the momentum angle; I believe in the tipping point premise whereas Snowden became the human face for this continuing failure of the republic.

It's my belief that skilled politicians equate the Edward Snowden revelations and the fears he has of losing his life to that of the "rape of Lucretia" in Ancient Rome. (The rape and suicide of Lucretia toppled the monarchy in Rome and brought in the Republic.)

60-minutes, Wired Magazine, the New York Times have been talking about Patriot Act abuses and even the signing of the NDAA which gave Obama the right to imprison anyone without a lawyer or the right to trial. It also gave him the right to drone-kill anyone if so desired.

All of this has gone over the public's head because a real life example wasn't involved - BUT - when Edward Snowden, a real person said, "I may be killed for telling you all of this" and then abandoned a sweet paycheck because he couldn't live with myself if he didn't that got people's attention much like the aforementioned rape and suicide of Lucretia in ancient Rome.

Just a thought.

<comment><USER5> I've been watching the NSA story closely for years and I disagree. Snowden provided documentation. Until now all the whistle-blowers who were telling the same stories were easily dismissed because they couldn't provide solid evidence. And the administration was able to confuse and mislead Congress by assuring them that they were not doing anything more than a Grand Jury could do during an investigation. The members of Congress who knew better were either complicit or they were silenced by the rules covering classified briefings (a weak excuse in my opinion.)

Granted, Snowden is an important part of the story, and he will be remembered very favorably by history. But for people who are predisposed to buying the administration's fear mongering, he has been easily dismissed and used as a distraction in the short term.

<comment><USER6> I think Snowden's utility (in terms of historical significance) is in being relatively hydrophobic to the mud that's been slung at him. The only thing that's stuck (from what little I've seen of broadcast/print news reflected off the people I know who consume it) is his failure in formalized education.

He's a good looking heteronormative guy with no criminal record nor obvious sexual improprieties. He had nothing to gain from making the disclosure and apparently quite a bit to lose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And while this "momentum" builds, Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) engages in further character assassination of Snowden: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post- politics/wp/2013/07...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post- politics/wp/2013/07/28/feinstein-suggests-snowden-might-have-given-info-to- china-russia/)

<comment><USER8> Many a Bay Area native is offended that Feinstein is one of our senators. The sanctimonious blow hard is only out for one cause -- herself. Just google conceal carry and feinstein. Not to mention, many hated her as mayor of SF.

I look forward to the day she is no longer "serving" the people of California.

<comment><USER9> Put your money where your mouth is. Support a primary challenge against her. If the challenge gets any real momentum at all, she will be forced to recant and change her tone. Consider that the Tea Party actually beat several decades-long Republicans in primary challenges and that our privacy is a nearly universal concern among voters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's really no danger for the NSA. If a law is passed prohibiting mass surveillance, they'll just secretly reinterpret the law to say that it allows mass surveillance.

<comment><USER11> This is very true and the reason that outrage and reform efforts need to focus as intensely on the idea of secret courts and secret law ( _especially_ secret law) as on the surveillance itself.

Say what you want about the "balance of security and civil liberties". Secret law and democracy are plainly 100% incompatible and a third grader can understand why. Secret law all but guarantees an eventual transition to outright totalitarian fascism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The sudden reconsideration of post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism policy has taken much of Washington by surprise"

It shouldn't have. But this is how these things happen. People don't act immediately on them, even if they think differently. They just build and build up frustration inside of them, while the politicians keep stepping on them more and more, growing ever more brave in doing that because they see no one protests against their actions - until one the people day blow up and the move seems "sudden".

Politicians should consider themselves lucky this is not a violent revolution meant to overthrow the government, and they should fix the problem as soon as they can.

</comment><comment><USER13> If there is one thing I would most like to see changed it is this secrecy required of companies compliant in this surveillance.

<comment><USER14> I'd also like to see an end to secret interpretations of laws by the executive branch, secretly approved by the FISA court. If a law is passed by Congress, its meaning should be clear, and known to the public.

And I'd also like to see the PATRIOT Act seriously scrutinized from the point of view of civil liberties.

<comment><USER15> I found it interesting that even the author of the Patriot Act (probably not a huge friend of civil liberties) thinks the NSA is overstepping and said [how they interpret the provision for collecting phone metadata] "got to be changed … otherwise in a year or year and a half you're not going to have it any more" [http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/07/nsa- admits-i...](http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/07/nsa-admits-it- analyzes-more-peoples-data-previously-revealed/67287/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's the case, historically, that civil liberties restrict during time of war and expand again in peacetime. Lincoln suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, Espionage Act of 1917, Japanese American internment camps during WWII, Smith Act, Subversive Activities Control Act, McCarthyism, etc.

Recent re-expansion has included the New York Times' successful defense of the publication of The Pentagon Papers. I think we're seeing another example of this here. 9/11-like attacks have not reoccured, and the public pendulum is shifting back.

If no more significant terrorist attacks occur, eventually I predict that significant portions of the Patriot Act will not be renewed. This is somewhat like firing your gardner as unnecessary because you don't see any weeds in your garden, but, even so, I suspect the Patriot Act is overkill.

<comment><USER17> The difference is that now our war is not against a regime or distinct nation of people, so how can we ever say that we have "won"? There will _always_ be people that hate our country, and will be labeled as terrorists. Our government can maintain on this pretext that we are in a state of emergency, conceivably indefinitely.

I feel so cynical, and dearly hope that I will be proven wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here is what I want and perhaps someone can code it, since I don't have enough time on my hands right now.

I want a website where I can read about all politicians against PRISM/ deep surveillance systems, and all those scumbags who voted this thing in, and continue to go with it.

Then when it comes around next election, I want to go to this website, connect my mailbox with it just like Facebook or LinkedIn ask me to, and send email to EVERY CONTACT from my mailbox as of WHY they should not vote on those people with link to a nice page with description on each and every one of those scumbags.

Go!

</comment><comment><USER19> Indian has its own set of cyber security is it somewhat the problem similar to NSA and should Indians protest against it [http://www.techcrump.com/indian- national-cyber-security-poli...](http://www.techcrump.com/indian-national- cyber-security-policy-released/)

</comment><comment><USER20> We absolutely must be relentless with our complaints to our elected representatives, as is our right, lest we lose them all.

</comment><comment><USER21> The real issue isn't just the NSA but having a secret court than makes secret laws we can't even be told about: this is what is fundamentally inconsistent with a democracy (or republic).

</comment><comment><USER22> Okay, does anyone have a Chrome plugin to bypass the NYT paywall? It's annoying to have to open a Incognito window every damn time.

<comment><USER23> I use 'ghost incognito' [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghost- incognito/ge...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghost- incognito/gedeaafllmnkkgbinfnleblcglamgebg)</comment></comment>