achughes's comments

Just because it worked out well in the end doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin with

With Metro I think that Microsoft did something really unique, it had a digital design language that spoke to a lot of UI designers. Thats not to say they executed it particularly well, because even if it looks good that doesn't mean it is particularly easy to navigate.

It didn't look like any UI that had come before it mostly because it striped everything out of the design, and it that way it was really interesting. Designers had still be struggling with the move from page design to digital design and flat seemed like a good answer.

Side note: Its interesting that everybody is shouting about it looking like Android when they should really be saying that everything looks like Metro

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur...

and

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

It was hardly a conspiracy theory.

1984 was written about Russia... Your telling me that apparently that doesn't discredit his position. REALLY???

It really discredits any political position he was/is trying to take. Thats the real advantage of having him in Russia.

It would just give the defense even more evidence. The decision was about whether or not Zimmerman shot him in self-defense, NOT whether or not Zimmerman was responsible for creating the situation that resulted in Trayvon Martin being shot.

Again... the key thing that makes it an Orwellian society is self-censorship, not just intimidation.

Sorry, instead of anyone, I should have said "average citizens".

Yes after 9/11 the government has a "your with us or your against us" attitude, promoted by Bush. However, your examples of Gitmo and kill lists are not evidence that this has continued. Those two examples only pertain to the ongoing war effort, not an intimidation campaign aimed at the average citizen, and the Americans that were involved were in the current warzone, not shipped off to Gitmo from the US.

I would address the Boston situation, but I don't think it is relevant. Sure shutting down the city is intimidating, but so is any other active shooter situation like a school shooting. You might feel intimidated by the police presence but ultimately the police are not focused on you.

But more to the point, of course the US is an intimidating place at times, everywhere is, but the key is that the intimidation is not focused on citizen self-censorship, which I think is the key to saying that we live in an Orwellian society.

Whether or not the US is an intimidating place, or debates about the validity of the Boston searches and curfew is a different discussion. They are not forms of intimidation aimed at self-censorship, and thus not valid reasons that we should assume that we live in an Orwellian surveillance state.

If you would like to have a debate about the role, or non-role of self-censorship in an Orwellian society, and you believe that some other form of intimidation is a valid criteria then I am all ears, but the discussion isn't about intimidation in general, only intimidation whose ultimate goal is self-censorship.

While I agree that the government is trying to intimidate people with their treatment of Snowden and Manning, I think the goals of the intimidating are very different. In these cases the people they are trying to intimidate are potential leakers, not average citizens. The goal is not to promote self-censorship, but keep existing government employees from leaking classified information.

Yes, but to be Orwellian the self-censorship must be borne out of government intimidation. In this case the government hasn't intimidated anyone, we were just leaked information.

Unless you want to argue that Snowden intentionally leaked the PRISM slides so that society would be intimidated by the governments reach, thus giving way to society censoring itself without them having to publicly punish people that were guilty of thought crimes. But that's getting into Alex Jones territory.

No. OP is saying that he is not outraged because he wasn't surprised. He may not like the fact that it is happening, but he is not outraged. That was the point of the comment. A little bit of 'I told you so', and a little more of 'stop getting so upset, because if you really cared you would have known.' The only thing that changed with Snowden is that now you know about it.

But lets be honest, we are talking about spying. If we didn't already know, we should have assumed, because the point of spying is to know everything. What did everybody thing spying was? Because it certainly isn't legal. And now that everybody understands what spying entails I am supposed to be outraged? Yawn. Wake me up when the secret police ACTUALLY start taking people away. Because until till then, the NSA is doing its job, and that is spying however legal or illegal it may be.

But when that day comes, if history serves as any precedent, I'll know about it before you do.

Absolutely. Unlike computer science topics art does not transfer well onto the internet. While one could learn a number of techniques for drawing and painting online, none of these make students into better artists, only better drawers or painters. Being technically better than your peers has some merit, but will not get you very far in the artistic community if the meaning of a piece is not conveyed well.

I think the primary mistake that the author makes is boiling art down into a collection of techniques. With this view they can easily argue that each of these techniques can be easily learned and replicated through online education. No reasonable artist would go to RISD and pay that much just to learn better techniques. If they wanted to do that they could just stay home and watch Bob Ross. Instead they to work with and be taught by the very good artists and students. And its these connections that make a RISD education worth 245k.

But to come to some kind of conclusion, art is not just a skill, at a very low level stops being about the artists technique and about its meaning, or communicative properties. Art education thrives on peer review, and the community around it. As a form of communication, you need to do and present art to other people, because without review, you can never understand how well you are communicating.

I'm not trying to say that its impossible, not by any means, but the RT article presents the statement as something that is assumed to be true, whereas the HuffPo article presents it among a large list of conspiracy theories. The RT article is clearly written to act a propaganda, and the article from the post gives a more objective view, where there is a slim possibility that the car was hacked, but it is just as unlikely as any other.

But it also doesn't make it true

You do realize that RT is a directly funded by the Russian Government don't you? There is a great incentive for them to paint the US in a bad light.

NSA probably just wants to look more approachable /s

Actually I thought the article put him in a better light than most of the other pieces about him. It makes him out to be more in tune with the ways the gov could track him. If they wanted to smear him then NYT could just come out with a short piece saying "Snowden made his Lawyers put their Phones in the Fridge", and then just spend the rest of the article speculating about his growing paranoia and questioning the decision.

Instead they explained the logic behind the seemingly unreasonable request. How is that being malicious?

Not to say that this isn't a noble aspiration, but it is a glaringly naive point of view to say that organizations like the NSA and CIA don't need to exist.

He had also made an offer to foreign governments to sell the information, and judging by the fact that he was carrying classified documents with him when he was arrested, I'd say that he planned on acting on those offers. By contrast, AFAIK Snowden has made no such offer and has not talked with the Chinese government.

If they didn't give Robert Hanssen the death penalty, I highly doubt Snowden is going to get it