Someone Just Leaked Obama's Rules for Assassinating American Citizens - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/04/someone-just-leaked-obamas-rules-for-ass <comment><USER3> For everybody commenting on this article, please take 45 minutes to read the document. It applies only to the following scenario:

1) The US Citizen has to be a Sr. Operational Leader of al-Qa'ida.

2) An informed high level official of the US Government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of Violent Attack against the United States.

3) Capture is infeasible, and the United states continues to monitor whether capture is feasible.

4) The operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

This Document does not consider American Citizens who are not Sr. Operational Leaders of al-Qa'ida. If you are just an American Citizen who has become a low-level Al-Qa'ida terrorist who is planning imminent attacks on the United States, that the government has discovered, and they are unable to capture you, this document does NOT provide justification to target you.

It's a dense document, and hard to read with all that NBC NEWS watermarking, but take the time to read it before commenting on it.

<comment><USER4> It still violates due process.

<comment><USER5> It might, but it doesn't clearly do so. Due process does not mean a trial. It means what is reasonable under the circumstances. The length of the paper tries to show that there are no reasonable alternatives in the case capture is not feasible. It's a non trivial argument.

<comment><USER4> Yes it does, because the protections provided by the constitution allow for the deprivation of life, liberty, property, etc. in accordance with the "due process of law."

There is no law here. Only an arbitrary, internal memo.

<comment><USER5> Pursuant to the AUMF.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, there is no room for abuse in that little gem.

The US Supreme Court has already decided at least once that the AUMF could not be cited in defense of the goverment's actions (in this case, military tribunals) because those actions violated the principles of the Geneva Conventions, among others.

That's the whole problem with this. The accused never get a chance to defend themselves in court, are presumed guilty and sentenced without any reasonable defense.

<comment><USER5> None of those things are due process problems necessarily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This unchecked expansion of executive power is happening all over the world. Enabled by technology, but also lack of public outrage, soft, welfarish* dictatorships are in the works. Outwardly, it looks democratic, but the democratic principle rests on a limitation of power. Currently, there is no limit, so long as the right language and people are targeted (whistle-blowers, traitors and ultimately, "terrorists"). The public is not yet aware of the danger and by the time they are it may be too late.

 __*In a "guns and butter" sort of way

<comment><USER7> Sigh. What's this ideological drivel doing here?

Dragging welfare into this doesn't even begin to make sense. You do it purely for ideological reasons.

<comment><USER8> > Dragging welfare into this doesn't even begin to make sense.

If the state feels it's appropriate to take from one and give to another, then it must also feel that it is appropriate to simply take and eventually, not to merely take property but life itself. It's the taking mindset and mentality that's the problem.

<comment><USER7> Yes, that is the ideological view exhibited here. A near perfect description of it, actually.

What you say is not, in any sense, the truth or self-evident or anything like that, it's just one ideological view of many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think I see a problem with the reasoning on the very first page (second para.):

> The President has authority to respond to the imminent threat posed by al- > Qa'ida and its associated forces, arising from his constitutional > responsibility to protect the country, the inherent right of the United > States to national self defense under international law, Congress's > authorization of the use of all necessary and appropriate military force > against this enemy, and _the existence of an armed conflict with al-Qa'ida > under international law._ (emphasis mine.) <

An armed conflict under international law is a war; and war is a power of nation states, not non-governmental actors (NGAs) no matter how violent. Not very many years ago the US began imprisoning non-Citizens on the justification that al Qaida (an NGA) was ineligible for protection by the Geneva, Hague, and other conventions, and as such the prisoners were neither criminal nor military defendants but prisoners of the President.

Now they are arguing that war _does_ exist, permitting the US government to act violently against a US Citizen despite the Constitutional prohibition against punishment without trial. The administration's actions are inconsistent: despite a state of war now supposedly existing, prisoners of war still are not afforded the rights guaranteed to PoWs; despite the writ of habeas corpus not being suspended, US Citizens may be summarily executed at the order of the President.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious if people actually have more of a problem with this than invading Iraq which caused the death of thousands if not millions of innocents. Now history is being rewritten that Iraq was okay. Why are American citizens more important than thousands of innocent Iraqis?

We should be protesting war in all forms, not just assassinations.

But we're going to have enough problems domestically in a few years with drones everywhere.

<comment><USER11> Well, clearly, we invaded Iraq because it was run by a dictator executing his own citizens, so we were justified.

<comment><USER12> Saddam was US BACKED ! like Castillo , Pinochet , Palavi and countless others , armed and supported for YEARS by USA ! there is even a footage with Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.

And you wonder why people hate you all over the arab world ? your only strenght is fear, you definetly lost the cultural battle there.

The war in Iraq killed far more iraqis than Saddam ever did, and i'm not even talking about the 1 millions children that died during the oil for food program.

And yes ,they still call you the "great Satan" there. Ironic isnt it ?

<comment><USER11> I was being sarcastic. It's ironic that in this case Obama is doing what we claimed Hussein did in my comment above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You know what? Seems reasonable. An American citizenship should not be considered a writ of special treatment for a terrorist. If you're going to say that terrorists can be killed without judicial overview, which I think you have to, then you can't say that doesn't apply to those terrorists who happen to be American.

<comment> chao- _If you're going to say that terrorists can be killed without judicial overview, which I think you have to_

I vehemently disagree: You don't have to think that terrorists can be killed without judicial overview. I'm also willing to bet I'm not alone, and am curious about why you think the opposite.

<comment><USER14> To play devil's advocate the reason would be if the terrorist could otherwise not be captured or detained without serious risk to American lives. The problem is that it's hard to trust the executive to not push the limits of what this means.

<comment><USER15> This sounds right. I guess I would be in favor of drone airstrikes that froze suspects in carbonite so they could be collected for questioning.

However, focusing on current technology, I think the scary part about these rules for airstrikes is:

\- Suspected people can be killed without being told that they are wanted. This is made worse by the fact that the list of wanted people is not publicly available.

\- Suspected people can be killed without being given the option of submitting to trial (no "stop or I'll shoot")

The above two items make airstrikes unpalatable for me. Thankfully they don't seem beyond remedy (perhaps version 2 of the drone shoots down a ball-and- chain + warrant before resorting to a missile), but in the mean time I find it very disturbing. If this was happening in America I would feel like America was over.

<comment><USER16> _the list of wanted people is not publicly available._

<http://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/t11sdn.pdf> is a good proxy.

As for your other point, I'm no expert on the laws of war, but I don't believe one is required to abstain from acting against a legitimate enemy absent a reasonable possibility of taking them prisoner. This distinction is discussed in the white paper; it's against the laws of war to attack an enemy who you have taken into your confidence (eg agreed to meet under a flag of truce, or promised safe passage as one might to a plenipotentiary), but it's quite OK to ambush an enemy who is conducting their own operations against you.

<comment><USER15> I wasn't saying that no lists of wanted persons was publicly available... just that no complete list of people a drone would kill on sight was available. Are you saying the people on this list would be killed on sight? (if so, thanks for the link) Or are you just saying that they are wanted?

As for the laws of war, I think they were created for situations where the opponents could be easily identified. (Opponents wearing a uniform for example).

Applying them to a situation where 'enemy' has a stochastic definition is a dubious thing. Of course it creates benefits, but it also creates a lot of problems. Killing people without due process, in the long run, creates an incredible amount of ill will. I think this, beyond rhetoric about justice, is the reason we have due process for criminal procedures -- the people who knew the innocent person you just killed get angry with you. Even if it was an accident. Note that this definition doesn't really effect two uniformed opponents on a battle field -- at least not in the same sense as "John was killed by a drone while driving to Texas for his vacation".

The other good argument for providing due process is that without due process you give a huge weapon to your enemy... as it becomes easier to frame someone, and as that framing becomes more deadly, it becomes easier to convert people to your cause through blackmail.

In summary: laws of war weren't handed down on a stone tablet, they codify a way of being that reduces the long term negative outcomes of war. When a new form of war is crated, you probably new new laws. The old ways of minimizing negative outcomes are probably obsolete.

<comment><USER16> You did ask for wanted. I'd imagine you'd end up on this list first.

I think you're assuming that due process and judicial process are the same thing, but I don't agree with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The title of this is really, really misleading.

The first paragraph:

This white paper sets forth a legal framework for the...use [of] lethal force in a foreign country outside the area of active hostilities against an American citizen who is a senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida

<comment><USER11> Well if this justification is somehow valid for senior al-Qaida members, it would hold for senior al-Shabaab members, senior Zetas in Mexico, senior Capone members, senior Bloods and Crips, senior LulzSec and Anon, etc.

Then you apply the logic which hinges on it being a foreign country and parallel that to a condition in our own country and it gets ugly. After reading this whole memo, I actually see very little about geography or why this wouldn't be legal in the US. The bottom of page 4 and top of 5 seem to actually justify executions within our borders.

<comment><USER3> The difference is spelled out very clearly in the document. The United States is in a state of congressionally approved armed conflict with Al Quaida. Where they not in a state of armed conflict, then there would be no legal basis.

The consequences of going to war, is that the executive (President, acting as Command in Chief of the armed forces) is authorized to kill the enemy without judicial review.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes you have to kill people. One hopes that, as a nation of laws, the United States does so within reasonable constraints and at the appropriate time, and for the appropriate reasons.

See: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/us/boy-is-safe-after- alaba...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/us/boy-is-safe-after-alabama- hostage-standoff.html?hp) for a tragic example today.

I've skimmed through the entire document - it spends a lot of time talking about things that must be tried prior to these targeted killings - <USER2> multiple references to the fourth and fifth amendments of the constitution (Unreasonable Seizures, Due Process)

There doesn't seem any reason why this document shouldn't be made public. Seems pretty much reasonable (if somewhat overly legalistic for this layperson to totally follow)

<comment><USER18> > Sometimes you have to kill people.

This is not true.

<comment><USER19> > > Sometimes you have to kill people.

> This is not true.

The position that one must never kill someone else is certainly a defensible position, defended over the centuries by many honorable people. I respect that position. But, even though I have largely pacifist ancestors, I think as a father of a daughter that if the Taliban tried to set up their women- oppressing rule anywhere my daughter might have occasion to live or work, I would oppose them by all means necessary, up to and including lethal force. That's not because forcing women to be covered from head to toe when they go out of their homes is itself a capital crime, but because some Taliban fellow- travelers also commit capital crimes like murdering women who try to teach mothers how to vaccinate their children to keep the children from dying from infectious diseases. I would not be ashamed to kill a baby-killer or woman- murderer.

AFTER EDIT: I will now take time to give a careful lawyer's read to the document (white paper) linked to from the blog post submitted here.

[http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_W...](http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf)

<comment><USER20> > _I would not be ashamed to kill a baby-killer or woman-murderer._

So your ends justify their means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The strength of your principles is only tested at the extremes. I hate Westboro Baptist Church, but I'll support their right to say what they want, because that's how much I believe in free speech. And even terrorists deserve the right to a speedy and public trial if they're American. It's part of our constitution, something we're supposed to stand for as a country. It even makes me sad the way we handled the whole Osama Bin Laden assassination. How much of a bigger statement would it have made to the world if we had pulled him out and made him sit trial for his crimes? What happened to our principles that we used to care so much about?

<comment><USER22> W/re WBC, I think while they have a right to hold views, express them, share them, I do not think, and others have agreed[1], that they have the right to disrupt other people's proceedings (funerals) as part of their right to free expression.

[1] [http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/16/3870092/appeals- court-d...](http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/16/3870092/appeals-court- delivers-westboro.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The following questions come to mind.

1\. What is "an informed, high-level official of the US government"; is it the President only, or does it include Cabinet Members? Is it restricted to political appointees, or does it extend into civil service roles as well?

2\. "imminent threat of violent attack against the United States" sounds like a definition of a legal standard, what are the elements of such a standard and would the mere possession of weaponry sufficient to carry out such an attack meet it?

3\. The phrase "senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida or an associated force" is used repeatedly in the document; what qualities put one in the category of an "associated force"? Would it be plausible to say that Wikileaks could be described as an associated force with al Qa'ida? Could the Syrian government be so described? What are the strictures here?

4\. Given that several known killings of American citizens seem on the face of it to violate the guidelines of this document; most notably the death of Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Aulaqi> it would behoove the government to explain the apparent contradiction. Or if the definition of "operational leader of al-Qa'ida" has been watered down to "military aged male"; to state that publicly.

There is no question that dealing with non-state paramilitary actors undermines the nation state paradigm that the existing law of war assumes and that there are a number of edge cases where it is hard to determine whether a given individual should be treated as a combatant or as a criminal; however we as a nation and as a society cannot afford to let our leaders become mere killers without restraint; no matter how heinous the opposition.

<comment><USER24> The "military aged males" killed by drones aren't US citizens. This memo does not suggest that the US can kill any military aged male regardless of nationality.

And no, it would not be plausible to say that Wikileaks could be described as "associated with al Qaeda". You could have used the same reasoning in the 1930s and 1940s to suggest that the US could have killed Charles Coughlin; after all, he was on the radio advocating for Mussolini and Hitler!

<comment><USER23> In the particular case I referenced, he was, Abdulrahman al-Alauqi was born in Denver and was aged 16 when he was killed.

Coughlin could have faced the death penalty for sedition; but he was silenced by his bishop before that was necessary. And the logic in this document is perniciously close to that used to incarcerate thousands of US citizens of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor.

This is why we should not vest the executive with untrammeled ability to kill on their own authority, but should restrain them to a procedure that asks them to justify the exigency to a judge at the very least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's a response from the ACLU - [http://www.aclu.org/blog/national- security/justice-departmen...](http://www.aclu.org/blog/national- security/justice-departments-white-paper-targeted-killing)

</comment><comment><USER26> This memo spends the entire time talking about the 'evil' al-qa'ida and how even if a US citizen joins them then legally they should get to kill them. It goes into deep detail about this scenario for a number of pages.

But it skips over, in 5 lines at the very beginning, that it also applies to anyone they arbitrarily say are associated with al-qa'ida. No details about that.

The important issue isn't the legal justification of some mythical US al- qa'ida as this document tries to stress. It's about the fact that they decide who is an 'associated group' they can also kill and that decision is secret and arbitrary.

</comment><comment><USER27> I am just wondering but can people in Occupy Wall Street be targeted for assassination just as well as as a 'potential terrorist' in a foreign nation who happens to be a US citizen? If so we may be seeing a new form of US Government.

BTW I thought President Jimmy Carter made assassinations illegal when he was President? Has that law been lifted?

<comment><USER28> Read the paper. The issue is not "potential terrorist" but rather swearing allegiance to Al Qaida, between whom and the United States there exists a present state of armed conflict. The US is not in a state of armed conflict with OWS.

Also note that the application here is with regard to US citizens outside the US - picture someone training terrorists in a cave in Afghanistan, not someone camping on the streets of New York.

<comment><USER29> The paper starts off dealing specifically with high-level Al-Qa'ida operatives. However around page 4 or 5 the language changes to "and associated forces". That definition is too broad to be meaningful, which is a bit creepy.

<comment><USER28> Reading the original 2001 AUMF explains where this language comes from.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milita...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists)

<comment><USER29> It doesn't explain anything. In fact it is even broader than this whitepaper:

>the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons

Hamlily v. Obama (2009) crystallizes the legal interpretation of the phrase a bit. Some key points:

>The key inquiry, then, is not necessarily whether one self-identifies as a member of the organization (although this could be relevant in some cases), but whether the individual functions or participates within or under the command structure of the organization

>The Court also concludes that the authority claimed by the government to detain those who were "part of ... Taliban or al Qaida forces" is consistent with the law of war

>the government has the authority to detain members of "associated forces" as long as those forces would be considered co-belligerents under the law of war

But note that _Hamlily_ applies to detention and not execution. And in this execution whitepaper, it clearly states that the definition of associated forces " _includes_ a group that would qualify as a co-belligerent under the laws of war". The phrase _includes_ leaves a lot of room for the term "associated forces" to apply to other things.

But anyway, IANAL.

Link to Hamlily v. Obama (PDF): [http://scholar.google.ca/scholar_case?case=15512898181635760...](http://scholar.google.ca/scholar_case?case=15512898181635760339&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr&sa=X&ei=MpUQUaXcF82ayQGAyoGYDw&ved=0CC4QgAMoADAA)

Link to AUMF (PDF): [http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/10/Author...](http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/10/Authorization-for-Use-of-Military-Force-2001.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Unfortunate automatic URL generation.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is it really that fair to describe this as "Obama's rules"? They were prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel, after all.

In any case, good to see this out there- it appears that the New York Times brought a court case to release these papers but were unsuccessful.

<comment><USER32> They were written by officials of the Obama Administration for policies established and enacted by the Obama Administration and used to evaluate decisions the Obama Administration is making.

It seems quite logical to call them "Obama's" whether they are rules or justifications..

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Good thing all that energy has been put into preserving the 2nd Amendment.

</comment><comment><USER19> The full text of the purported Justice Department white paper mentioned in the submitted blog post:

[http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_W...](http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER34> Without reading the memo (only the linked article), wouldn't top Al Qa'ida operatives be classified as traitors and enemies of the state? (Maybe that's the legal angle expressed in the memo.) Within the country's borders, the government kills its citizens all of the time when the judgement is made that the suspect represents and immediate threat to the safety and well-being of others (see: hostage situations and police shootouts). Otherwise, the state's decision to end someone's life is a long and arduous process filled with courts and laws and appeals (and rightly so!).

</comment><comment><USER35> Let's turn this around. Suppose that an American citizen believes they're on the list, and the president is plotting to kill them. In what circumstances should it be legal for them to assassinate the president?

The president is supposed to be just another citizen: one who's very certainly plotting to kill Americans. It's curious how few people apply his reasoning to his own case. Do people believe in some kind of divine right of presidents?

</comment><comment><USER36> Just curious...do people usually title their white papers with the words "White Paper"?

<comment><USER37> Every white paper I've ever seen has the words white paper in the title.. but I don't think its expected, just a convention some organisations use

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice to read a treatise on how the Fourth Amendment doesn't prohibit executing citizens without trial. Neither does the First Amendment. The Fourth is about "searches and seizures". That it applies to taking possession of someone's life so as to extinguish it is a pretty twisted premise.

</comment><comment><USER38> If the war is over, then assassination would seem to be possible breach of the Geneva convention.

If the war isn't over, then when will it be over? And is it even legitimate? The U.S. declared war on the concept "Terrorism" during Bush Jr's presidency, not on specific terrorists or al-Qa'ida. The U.S. also declared a war on "drugs" during the Reagan years. Though I'm in support of both "wars" because I'm in favor of the well-being and defense of the U.S. people, I don't think Congress or the president should have a right to declare war on something that cannot end, i.e. cannot terminate via treaty, surrender/capitulation, complete destruction, or victory.

I am a little concerned that we are declaring that it is ok to kill our own citizens without due trial, although I understand there are conditions.

<comment><USER12> well the point you are missing is , it takes place outside a war context. AlQaida is not the army of afghanistan , in fact most of its members are saudis , egyptians or from yemen. So the Geneva convention "doesnt apply" , that's the why of the enemy combattant status and all that illegal crap made legal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> These are not "rules", these are _justifications_ should the political fallout be of the atomic type. Rules is a horrible euphemism for this absurdity, it implies that there is someone to enforce these rules, which is what is so conspicuously absent from the picture here.

</comment><comment><USER40> Best. Permalink. Ever.

<comment><USER41> In case they change it: "[http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/04/someone-just- leaked-obamas...](http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/04/someone-just-leaked- obamas-rules-for-ass)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This isn't the outrage. The AUMF, which fairly elected US legislators enacted, and this white paper simply attempts to interpret, is. What's it been, 11 years now? We've always been at war with Oceania.

</comment><comment><USER43> This power grab will only continue as governments lose their grip on the digital realm - mainly their ability to keep secrets and collect taxes. Real crypto currencies and encrypted communications will change human organization and governments will fight back with everything they have. These new laws over the past several years have been to address the above - they have nothing to do with 'terrorism' - cyber or otherwise. Government's only effective role is to maintain its power. Everything thing else is secondary.

</comment><comment><USER44> Can someone explain to me how citizenship comes into play for any of these things? I was always under the impression that non-citizens also had basic rights.

</comment><comment><USER45> When you consider that humans have been on the earth some 150,000 - 200,000 years it's interesting that only in the last heartbeat of humanity's existence (4,000 or so) did we decide en masse to grant a monopoly on the use of deadly force to someone else, namely bureaucrats.

</comment><comment><USER46> I had to giggle when I took a look at the URL, "someone-just-leaked-obamas- rules-for-ass." Which made me wonder if this, rather lengthy, but clearly truncated URL was hand chosen. Either way makes you think about more intelligent filters for URL generators.

</comment><comment><USER11> [https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/impeach- president-...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/impeach-president- obama-unconstitutional-execution-united-states-citizens/Rdq942HF)

</comment><comment><USER47> I love that this title is so unbiased and doesn't at all blow the document out of proportion or make it appear more sinister than it actually is.

Thank you for not misleading readers with your title in order to get views and points.

</comment><comment><USER48> "Because I feel like it" would be less vague than this travesty.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is really a biased source. Reason.com has a clear agenda

</comment><comment><USER50> How long until someone makes a flow chart out of this?

</comment><comment><USER51> nice slug, someone-just-leaked-obamas-rules-for-ass

</comment><comment><USER52> The president is black. I don't see how this this story is relevant.</comment>


Show HN: Flaggy – Super idiomatic subcommands for Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/integrii/flaggy/ <comment><USER2> That link gives me a 500 error: [https://cl.ly/665819947aaa](https://cl.ly/665819947aaa)

</comment><comment><USER3> I literally had this problem yesterday - this is a great idea.</comment>


High-DPI displays and Linux - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/619784/ <comment><USER2> Somewhere in the 90's, games were in 320x200 pixel resolution, and the Windows 3.11 desktop was 640x480 pixels or so on a typical 386 computer.

Then up to around the year 2000, resolutions increased, going through such stages as 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 (your CRT would flicker if much higher, and then LCDs came along pinning it at 1280x1024 for 17").

Then the resolution (or especially DPI) growth basically stopped for 10 years imho ("HD" was not really any higher at all than what a year 2000 CRT could do).

But now there's some growth again :) Why the problems though? has 10 years of the same DPI made developers forget about different DPIs?

<comment><USER3> I am guessing - is it because of HDMI and its abysmal bandwidth? Before with VGA the actual resolution of CRT monitors was limited by RAMDAC. And 10 years ago I was able to to have 2048x1536@70Hz on a top-end 15" CRT already.

I guess as nowadays all digital signal is routed through content protection filter, the technology processing these streams wasn't performing well, causing stagnation in display resolutions for a long time (well, there was also a limit in DPI of CRTs and immature LCD tech). I guess only nowadays with HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.3 or Thunderbolt we are getting to the point the digital signal can be "properly" controlled by content-protection chips, hence allowing 4K+ resolutions (though it's still a mess).

EDIT: spelling

<comment><USER4> It was/is because LCDs have fixed resolutions. High DPI displays was a niche, with CRTs you could satisfy that niche without sacrificing the mainstream audience since you didn't have to force people to run any specific resolution.

The reason for why high DPI was a niche was because of one thing, and one thing only: software. You had to have good eyesight and seek a large screen real estate to even be able to make use of it.

Software didn't scale well. We had small laptop screens with 1920x1200 in the early 2000s. It barely cost more than lower resolution displays (back then you typically had three different resolutions to choose from for every laptop (then came apple)). It was real apparent even back then that high-DPI wasn't costly at all, it just wasn't mainstream enough for anyone to care.

Fast forward a decade and we have the exact same problem. Software can't scale shit. The only reason apple was first with high-dpi was because they controlled the software, and they took the easy way out. They just scaled everything up 4 times and look at that, exactly the same screen real estate with just higher DPI. Same thing with iPhone 4 - the only reason they increased the resolution so much was so that they wouldn't have to bother with scaling ("retina" was just an added bonus). Remember that niche that sought large screen real estate and that bought high-resolution CRTs in the 90's? Well, they are still waiting for a decent LCD...

As for HDMI, no, firstly HDMI was never intended for computers at all. But the hype in combination with small laptops forced it upon us anyway. But HDMI came much later anyway, the battle for high-resolution/high-DPI displays was already lost (because of software). The real technical hurdle was the OSD and scaling chips. Again, the reason for why apple was first with the 30" 2560x1600 display was because they were the first ones that could ditch both the OSD and all scaling from the monitor. It only had brightness adjustments (no OSD) and all of the scaling was done on the graphic card, that way you couldn't pair it with a regular PC - if you did you would have to use another monitor to be able to enter BIOS, install the OS, enter safe-mode, or game on any other resolution (which you pretty much had to). Of course, eventually most graphic cards could do so but apple were the first to be able to assume that the monitor would be paired with such a graphic card.

That and the fact that Dual-Link-DVI was quite rare (hardly surprising since there were no monitors on the market that used it).

Oh and people, I hope you (not parent, but lots of others) didn't run 1280x1024 on your 4:3 CRTs. The only 5:4 monitors that existed were 17" and 19" LCDs. You should have used 1600x1200 or 1280x900, that is, if you didn't want to stretch everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised that nobody has talked about using the Xorg -dpi flag. I am a MacBook Retina user (but exclusively run Linux -- a long story) and i actually find the results reasonable. I had to go to a bit of effort, but finally i managed a reasonable result by changing the way the X server is started (adding the -dpi 227 flag) and modifying Firefox's devPerPx option. The rest sort of "automagically" worked IIRC. I should however add that my setup is minimalistic -- Xmonad and very few non-terminal apps.

<comment><USER6> If you ever had time to put together a blog post with your config files, I'm sure more than a few people would be interested. I know I have struggled with setting up a reasonably looking Linux on the MBP Retina, and in the end given up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a Thinkpad Yoga 2 Pro (3200x1800 @ 13"), and often use an external monitor. My "solution" is to turn off HiDPI and rely on the zoom features in all of my apps. (terminal, emacs & browsers)

Browser windows on the laptop usually run at a zoom of 200%, whereas windows on the external display run at 90%.

Annoying, but the beautiful text is worth the bother.

<comment><USER8> What OS/Distro do you run? I've read some rather worrying things about the linux support and haven't taken windows off yet. I've been living in VMs, which are surprisingly snappy.

<comment><USER9> You can probably boot it up from a USB stick and check whether everything works. Did that on my last Dell before getting rid of Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Regarding the problem of the external display, the DPI disparity is "easily" solved by configuring the external display with a high apparent resolution but down-scaling to what the device actually supports[1]:

xrandr --output <output_name> \--scale 2.0x2.0

The output_name can be found just by running "xrandr".

A related and more powerful feature is specifying an arbitrary matrix for the screen-display transformation (e.g. rotation by any angle, shear) (xrandr --transform).

[1] [http://superuser.com/questions/825688/down-scaling-high- dens...](http://superuser.com/questions/825688/down-scaling-high-density- image-for-standard-density-external-display)

</comment><comment><USER11> Firefox on Linux currently doesn't support a mixture of HiDPI and non-HiDPI monitors, it has a single DPI setting. I think it will be supported when this [1] bug is resolved.

Shameless plug: I have written an addon to workaround this [2].

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975919](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975919)

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/autohidpi/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/autohidpi/)

<comment><USER12> AutoHiDPI seems to look at the width of the active window rather than the size of the screen. This behavior seems like a bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> OS X has the best highdpi implementation at the moment, and use the pixel scaling approach. It seems to work well there.

<comment><USER14> It does work well. The other day, there was an article on someone who did an extreme test on pixel scaling, and an Apple software engineer wrote the following comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634895](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634895)

The part of the comment that I found the most interesting was his take on a solution:

 _1\. Make everything vectors. You 'll have to choose between weird antialiasing artifacts and potential pixel cracks; either way things will look bad. And you'll encounter bitmaps eventually, and have to deal with the necessities of resampling and pixel aligning at that point. 2. Scale only to integral sizes, and resample. You'll avoid antialiasing and pixel alignment issues, but pay a performance penalty, and things may look slightly blurry._

<comment><USER15> I'm curious about this. Aren't fonts vector files with some hinting?

<comment><USER16> I do t know about the "some", but that is what that Apple engineer says:

 _Which leads to the problem of centering. I wish to center a bitmap image within a button 's border. The image is 101 logical points high, and the border is 200 logical points high. With a 2x scale factor, I can center absolutely, and still be aligned to device pixels. With a 1x, 1.25, 1.33, etc. scale factor, centering will align me on a partial pixel, which looks like crap. So I have to round. Which way? If the goal is "make it look good," then the answer is "whichever way looks good," which depends on the visual style of the bezel, i.e. whether the top or bottom has more visual weight. So now we need hinting._

 _And that 's where things start to get really nasty. In order to make things look good at arbitrary resolutions, we want to round to device pixels. But the rounding direction is not a local question! Consider what happens if we have two visual elements abutting in logical coordinates, and they round in opposite directions: now there's a device pixel between them. That's very visible: you get a pixel crack! So you have to coordinate rounding._

Question: even with hinting, is it actually possible to make a font where two glyphs align perfectly without white space between them?

 _WPF is a good example of a framework that attempted resolution independence and encountered this problem. Initially it has the "SnapsToDevicePixels" property, which triggers rounding behavior at draw time. But draw time is too late, because of the "abutting elements rounding in opposite directions" problem. So they introduced the "UseLayoutRounding" property, which does...something. And the guidance is basically "turn it on and see if it helps, if not, disable it." Great._

I think a way out of this is way higher DPI with some blurring as the last step. That's what print does. At 1000 or 2500 DPI nobody will notice aliasing anymore, and he blurring would take care of small cracks between objects that supposedly are abutting, make cases where two objects that shouldn't accidentally do overlap less obnoxious, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The saddest thing about this is that X11 was intended from the start to support multiple DPIs (see e.g. xdpyinfo(1)) and originally shipped with rasterized fonts in multiple resolutions. Sadly the "year of the desktop" crowd has been absolutely consistent in forcing *nix UIs down into the Windows mold.

</comment><comment><USER3> If your display is over 1080p (I use 1920x1200), Linux (at least Mint 17) switches to HiDPI by default, reducing my effective resolution to 960x600... There is some obscure setting that can switch HiDPI off, but it's a mess overall for the time being as some apps still use HiDPI (like gdm).

<comment><USER18> I have the same display with Debian and no issue. So it's either introduced by Mint or Ubuntu (Mint is Ubuntu derived). Most likely by Mint, as the UI customization is very distro specific.

<comment><USER19> Must be Mint. Ubuntu's Unity has an adjustable slider for scaling under Display settings.

Or more precisely, this is a Desktop Environment thing, not a distro thing. So whatever DE /u/bitL is using in their Mint (Cinnamon?) is the culprit.

<comment><USER3> Yep, it's Cinnamon, I've just installed a Debian on a new server and switched to Cinnamon, and the same happened there as well... Cinnamon has scaling slider as well, HiDPI is a bit different thing (and a different option in general settings).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For web browsers I thought CTRL+ and CRTL- were for dealing with this, but I think that is stored on a site by site basis. Something similar for the UI would be nice too, but IMHO should be kept independent of the "data" the app displays.

<comment><USER19> > _For web browsers I thought CTRL+ and CRTL- were for dealing with this, but > I think that is stored on a site by site basis._

CTRL-+ can really break the page layout in surprisingly varied ways.

<comment><USER20> That's why HTML was intended for dynamic layout. People who want to specify fixed layouts are doing it wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have a Thinkpad Yoga 2 --- 3800x1800 I think --- I find that the GTK-based stuff works well on HiDPI, but not automatically, so you need to fiddle with the GTK settings a bit.

The QT stuff is worse since they cannot be fixed by adjusting only the font size.

The older (Xaw3D,TK) stuff is really bad.

I have never seen different DPI on different displays working.

99% of my day is spent in the terminal (xfce4-terminal) though and the crisp text makes it all worth while.

<comment><USER22> It's 3200x1800, so that with pixel doubling you can an effective 1600x900.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I see that phrasing all the time:

"Well, KDE can do what we are looking for, but GNOME does it in a hackish way. As we use GNOME, our review is all about it, and as a conclusion, Linux is no good."

Why do these people insist on using GNOME after all?

<comment><USER24> I assume you haven't used both GNOME and KDE on a high-DPI monitor, because KDE's support for it is certainly not better. Qt themes don't scale, web views don't scale, icon, window, plasma panel, etc sizes need to be configured independently of font DPI, some applications just fritz out at high DPI font sizes. I've tested both 4.13 and 5.3, and haven't noticed any significant improvement in the latter. I'm a fan of KDE, but on my high-DPI laptop, I'm using GNOME purely because its "hackish" solution does work a lot better.

<comment><USER23> Well, I didn't. I don't have any HDPI display.

But I've seen that from people complaining about workflow, supporting non- usual options, and accessibility.

Anyway, yours is the first review I see about KDE in HDPI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I thought the whole point of High-DPI was to was to free us from the need to render graphics pixel-perfect at native resolution. While scaling bitmaps will probably be necessary for photographs and most video for a long time, can't everything else be rendered using SVG? Does such an environment already exist?

<comment><USER26> There was a good discussion of this topic yesterday in the iPhone screen thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634662)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Its a good article about High-DPI displays and Gnome, as the author writes "Your editor's experiments have mostly been with GNOME, so this article will have an unavoidable bias in that direction."

I've had 1600x1200 CRT or LCD on my main desktop since... 00s? Late 90s? If you make money typing at a desk, you're foolish not to splurge on desk, chair, lighting, quiet, keyboard... and monitor. I've been dealing with this class of problem since the 80s although it was a little different back then...

If gnome-less, "linux" or more accurately, FOSS in general, has no problem with high res displays, in fact its really nice, far from a problem.

I don't know if KDE in general has resolution problems. Konsole looks beautiful at high res and decent font. The only thing more flame war-ish than emacs vs vi is font choice, however I have noticed visible quality differences such that random font A in 2005 at 24 pt size looks much worse than it does at 10pt size, and this varies by font and over time.

An example of the above I have freebsd on the other machine on my desk and displaying Monospace in a konsole font size 12 is "normal" but when you kick it up to 13 it looks perma bold because thats the 1 pixel to 2 pixel transition for Monospace on that platform and exact config. Luxi Mono displays "normally" at 11, permabold at 12, and at very large sizes like 17 it looks very peculiar randomish parts of letters display as 1 or 2 pix wide. Nimbus Mono L Regular 16 looks nice to my eyes and thats mostly what I use on that machine at 1600x1200.

The biggest problem I have is finding really good UTF8 fonts. There's a nice test file called UTF-8-demo.txt Its mirrored and copied all over, here is one link:

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt)

I find this a true test of difficult display rendering on linux.

The ergonomics of widescreen for long term anything, including movie viewing, is another topic and I believe my multiple high res 4:3 monitors are a productivity booster for me, so until they break I'll keep them.

</comment><comment><USER28> My 12 year old irix fuel v10 that I used for my phd has full vector graphics and fonts and supports monitor resolutions much higher than I can afford/justify today.

I miss working on my irix :(

</comment><comment><USER29> Another interesting angle is that it's not only application software we need to change, but also the hardware drivers are not quite there yet:

I have a Dell UP2414Q (3840x2160 resolution, driven via DisplayPort 1.2) connected to a nVidia GTX 660 card, which was one of the cheapest ones that support DP 1.2.

With the proprietary nvidia driver, I need to manually edit the xorg configuration file to have the correct modes and most importantly disable XRandR in favor of Xinerama.

This in turn breaks e.g. GNOME shell on Fedora 20 (without RandR, you'll just get an exception in your syslog), and in general prevents plenty of use-cases (e.g. redshift for controlling display brightness, or changing rotation settings without restarting X11).

The reason for having to disable RandR is that there is not currently a standard way on how to represent multi-stream transport (MST) connections, and 4K displays require 2 streams (1920x1080 each) at the same time. With RandR enabled, what you'll see is 2 connected outputs, and all applications will treat them as such, even though you have only one monitor connected.

Fixing this requires changes in RandR (i.e. the X server) and each driver. AFAIK, on the intel driver this should work, on nouveau there's work under way, no clue about the proprietary nvidia driver.

<comment><USER30> I'm running 3840x2160 on a Samsung U28D590 with the GeForce GTX 780 6GB card over DisplayPort 1.2 with 4 lanes @ 5.4GB/s.

Driver version: 346.16 XOrg server version: 1.16.1 (11601000)

The only issue I've ran into is that Gnome Shell won't respond to clicks when I run in 30bits/pixel mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Random mom-and-pop folks have been able to buy high-DPI laptops at Best Buy for well over a year. (And higher DPI than discussed in this article; for example, 3200x1800).

In computer lifecycle terms that is a _long_ time and it is a little bit embarrassing that Linux works as poorly as it does in these situations. (Windows ain't so great at it either, which reflects poorly on Microsoft, but it still handles the situation a lot better than Linux does.)

</comment><comment><USER32> My 11 inch asus laptop has a full hd display. So it's somewhere in the middle.

Gnome's hidpi support doesn't allow float values, making this a serious issue to me. On top of that, you'll have to change the cursor size manually by diving into the config.

The iphone 6+ display uses downsampling, so perhaps that's the way to go. But as things stand, I don't see my self using an external monitor in the near future, even after wayland becomes mainstream.

<comment><USER33> You have a 200dpi screen. Using a scalling factor of 2, you'd still have a higher than average dpi.

<comment><USER32> Unfortunately, that's not the case. I have tried it and the usable screen real state is so small, that gnome is unusable. I like big fonts, and found that a scaling of 1.5 is about right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Because the article mentions that Chromium doesnt have HighDPI support right now: You can actually compile it with the -Denable_hidpi=1 flag which at least displays most web sites in the right way though the menu/navigation is broken (which is probably the main reason it isnt enabled by default).

<comment><USER35> There's also a setting in chrome://flags (ctrl+f search for dpi: "Overrides the device scale factor on the device"), although the dropdowns no longer work and the tabs look ridiculous when set to anything above 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> unity8 on ubuntu has a good resolution independent framework and high dpi support. legacy apps are a bit harder to sort out

</comment><comment><USER37> Imo Linux, KDE and most other software works nicely with HiDPI.

A small issue is GTK apps that don't respect DPI settings.

The most significant problem AFAIK is for people who switch frequently between different displays. There are a few settings here and there you have to adjust every time you switch between Hi and Lo-DPI.

<comment><USER38> > Imo Linux, KDE and most other software works nicely with HiDPI.

Having written some Qt apps and used them on scaled screens... eh. It's got some work to go, but we're making progress. Apparently Qt 5.4 will have further improvements in this field too.

<comment><USER37> If we are talking about complete resolution independence I agree.

Currently on two monitors with the same physical dimensions but different resolution you can't get a common rendering. But you can get a decent rendering from both of them, albeit a bit different; one for example will have a tad larger icons, the other maybe a little larger fonts,etc.

<comment><USER39> I suppose this is why Apple went to 5K for the 27" iMac. It's exactly double the pixel dimensions of the non-5K version, so everything looks exactly the same size but with higher fidelity.

Not necessarily a big deal for consumers, but vital for professionals that have preferred working screen layouts on their old machines and don't want to change that on the new ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What a mess. I didn't know HiDPI was so spotty on Linux. It's unclear to me why people would subject themselves to such an experience. If you want a HiDPI laptop, why not spend a little more to get a retina mac? On a developer's salary, the difference is a rounding error.

<comment><USER41> I would not call it a mess. I run Ubuntu on Lenovo X1 Carbon and Asus Zenbook UX31A and on both machines all the software that I run except Steam work just fine.

And OSX is not Linux. I don't want non-Linux OS.

<comment><USER3> How do you survive with UX31A's touchpad in Linux? On my UX32VD it's the most horrible part of Linux experience (also battery drained while idle in 2 hours (2 SSDs) doesn't help)

<comment><USER21> I don't have an UX31A, but an UX31E --- the touchpad is brilliant (I think mine has the elantech one)

Also, I get 7.5 hours on the battery, I wonder what went wrong between the UX31E and the UX31A?

<comment><USER42> I have a UX31A and my experience is like yours with Ubuntu 14.04.

Only quirk I have with the touchpad is that on Windows, with 1 finger idle on the touchpad and another finger moving the cursor would still move with the moving finger. On Ubuntu, the cursor remains stationary any time there are two fingers on it. I probably would not have noticed it if I weren't already so used to the Windows functionality so it isn't a big deal at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


See Websites Differently With Invisible Text, Only Pictures  - <AUTHOR> http://wordlessweb.com/

<comment><USER2> It's slightly buggy for Twitter. When I'm in my timeline and apply the bookmark, the age of a tweet gets updated and is shown for about 2 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have my bookmark bar showing so the arrow pointed nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't drag the button on my Firefox 7 toolbar. Oops.

<comment><USER5> I made this. FF does weird things with non-text bookmarklets so I used the user agent to show a text-based link as the bookmarklet, only for FF users, but it seems it is still finicky. If you want to see the effect, I'd try Safari or Chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool idea. It doesn't work for Gmail though.</comment>


Drone flown 20ft from landing Heathrow jet - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-30446136

<comment><USER2> Isn't drone a buzzword and this type of craft is just a radio controlled plane. This tech is ancient. I thought drone implies it's self guiding.

<comment><USER3> It is a buzzword, one that's very great at fear-mongering, and is getting RC planes grouped with UAVs that are killing people overseas.

It's unfortunate. Assholes like the guy flying this drone aren't helping, either, for hobbyists that want to fly legally and responsibly, which as you note, has been going on for a very long time.

<comment><USER4> The threat of a drone that can fire a missile at an airline seems to have the same net result as the threat of an RC plane that is flown illegally in restricted airspace dangerously close to an airline.

I don't see it as fear mongering, given that both outcomes are bad, and I believe and the public should be aware that because RC tech is becoming cheaper and more popular, more idiots will get their hands on it.

<comment><USER5> That you think a few pounds of low speed balsa wood and a high explosive guided missile are equally dangerous to an aircraft exemplifies the problem.

<comment><USER4> How about I throw a few pounds of low-speed balsa wood into your car windshield at 75 mph/120kmph and see what happens?

Now imagine what happens if you can get a car up to airline speeds.

Your ignorance of the dangers of high speed collisions exemplifies exactly _why this is alarming._

Also, I recommend familiarizing yourself with Airline and Foreign Object Damage before continuing further.

<comment><USER5> It's fine that you are worried about high speed collisions. Bird strikes are a serious problem, especially for small craft, and there's no reason to allow the public to increase the frequency of them.

However, you compared them directly to guided, high explosive ordinance that are intentionally, reliably fatal for any sized aircraft. This is not a valid comparison, and is the core problem with the term "drone".

I have had a few pounds of wood hit my windshield at high speed, and while it really scared me it had no long term impact on me or my car. I would not fair so well against a Hellfire missile.

Edit: Impact of 2lb at 75mph ~= 1 Kj. Detonation of a Hellfire missile (9kg of TNT equiv) is 37.66 Mj. That's a four orders of magnitude difference, not taking into account the suitability for inflicting damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I expected better from the BBC. Although they referred to it as a model helicopter in the article itself, the use of the D-word in the title makes it sound much more serious then it actually was.

<comment><USER4> > the use of the D-word in the title makes it sound much more serious then it > actually was.

I disagree. There are a number of reasons why this should alarm folks. Radio controlled aircraft flying near an airline is extremely dangerous, whether it contains weapon systems or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are the control links of hobby RC aircraft encrypted? I would assume not.

I wonder then if it would be possible for airports or planes (or both) to emit control signals what would guide RC aircraft away. From the operator's perspective, the aircraft would simply refuse to follow commands to go in a certain direction.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure they could know ahead of time what signals would operate which motor.

Plus it'll vary per setup. 40% thrust might bring some rc models down quickly & dangerously, and might actually increase height on others.

Without being able to view the models, I don't think this is a very viable solution.

<comment><USER7> I was thinking that a smart system could vary the input signals and measure whether the aircraft gets closer or farther--teaching itself pretty quickly which signal does what.

But now that I think about it, even if the signal is not encrypted, it's certainly operating in a narrow slice of bandwidth, and might be digitally encoded. A naive search would probably take way too long just to find the input signal at all. It would only work if manufacturers were forced to share information that would allow an "authorized" system to quickly find and alter the control inputs. Seems messy and risky.

And of course this does nothing for self-controlled drones.

<comment> ryan-c There are a very limited number of frequencies used for RC aircraft and I've never heard of the signal being encrypted (authenticated would be more important than encrypted anyway). I also think the control protocols are fairly standardized. The main exception would probably be the ones that are controlled over WiFi (which, as far as I've seen, are not normally encrypted either).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can App Ideas be Validated With Only Design? - <AUTHOR> http://www.designforfounders.com/app-idea/

<comment><USER2> Apple has a nice WWDC 2014 video on this topic as well. It's called "Prototyping: fake it till you make it".

You can find it on the following page: [https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/)</comment>


Re: Yesterdays post on cli tools being near 100x faster than dedicated systems - <AUTHOR>

I built sentences from /usr/share/dict with a small one line script I made.
I have as `final_data` as a source file with a bunch of strange sentences in it.
$cat final_data | wc -l 	 1501920
So, a little more than 1.5v million "records" in the file.
And let's time the operation: 	$time cat final_data | wc -l 	 1501920
real	0m0.063s 	user	0m0.052s 	sys	0m0.043s
Thats some speedy stuff.  Keep in mind, I am running this on a Mac OS X Yosemite MacBookPro (15-inch, Mid 2010), 8 GB (Self upgraded from 4GB) 1067 MHz DDR3, 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5, so by no means at all a speed demon.  There probably literally are now faster phones on the market.
I imagine, were I to drop two SSD's in here the second in the CD tray slot and worked the source and destination data from each drive so they are never combating for read and write access, this would be sped up a ton.  Or I had a SSD array.
Next up, lets drop off the cat and work right away with the `wc` application.  if sure get blazingly faster:
$time wc -l final_data
	 1501920 final_data
real	0m0.059s 	user	0m0.044s 	sys	0m0.015s
faster in every regard.  Just for fun, lets pump a grep call in there and see how much it speeds up, slows down, who knows:
* Remember to clear your terminal scroll back when looking at large data like this, or set the threshold to a lower value. Until I did, Mac IS X does not like multi-megabyte text files.
Wow, that was significantly faster than I thought:
$time grep '\.' final_data | wc -l	 	  1501920
real	0m0.705s 	user	0m0.712s 	sys	0m0.035s
And, lets do it how some things sometimes happen, but they are just one off's:
$time cat final_data | grep '\.' final_data | wc -l
	  1501920
real	0m0.766s 	user	0m0.771s 	sys	0m0.041s <comment><AUTHOR> or crap, basic returns are not part of markdown, and my editor sucks I guess.

<comment><USER2> Yep. It would probably be easier if you write it in a quick readme.md on github and post the link to that, as it's hard to read with greyed text.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> markdown not supported?</comment>