I personally attended an ultra conservative school of about 70 pupils all grades accounted for, based on the ACE system (see http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com for a decent introduction), and while I thankfully managed to escape that scene many years ago (extremely lucky circumstances outside of my own doing), I'm afraid I clearly recognise the vision the author describes. I desperately hope that they are wrong, but I can imagine it being spot on all too well. :( FWIW I too don't have contact with my parents mostly as a result of this, and the level of mental gymnastics in otherwise intelligent and sincere folks is jarring.
Melbourne to Singapore recently was 7+h with no included food, only dubious snacks Easyjet-style. And in contradiction to another comment here, the email confirming my booking explicitly stated that no outside food and drink was allowed on-board. It's anyone's guess how,well that's enforced, but on first evaluation, if that's not extortion, I don't know what is.
Seven hours with no included food would be OK in my view. I'd start to draw the line around 10 hours. Really, as long as they're up-front about it (both the fact that there's no free food, and what they sell and the prices), I'd be OK regardless.
However, banning outside food and drink is ridiculous. I'd get right on ignoring that, and if they were somehow able to enforce it, I'd stop traveling with them.
This is a pretty redundant comment, but I echo that sentiment! Slightly more modest price tag and configuration and I'd snap one of these up in a heartbeat.
I switched to A Small Orange years ago when EIG started swallowing up the world. ASO is fantastic and now I use them with all my clients and startups too.
Side note: an EIG company has given me free hosting for years because their botched takeover of my previous favorite caused them to stop billing me.
I've also had really poor experiences with Dreamhost.
I had some clients on a Small Orange. They used to be great.
EIG took over a Small Orange in 2010, but thankfully left them autonomous for while. Unfortunately in 2014 Douglas Hannah (ASO founder) left and since then things have gone downhill.
This happened around the same time EIG took over HostGator. HostGator founder Brent Oxley and (no coincidence) friend Douglas Hannah have gone on to start a new venture with their big time profits from selling out to EIG.
2014 and 2015 were riddled with major outages at both A Small Orange and HostGator.
I'm sure you remember the 4-day Small Orange VPS outage of Christmas 2015 ?! That was fun.
I got my last client off them after that and never looked back. Just now I looked at their status page and looks like they never really recovered:
https://status.asmallorange.com/
[0] "Anxiety gives way to pleasure and a passion for creative work for which the only condition is solitude."
[1] "I do feel quite convinced that one's creativity is enhanced primarily by the more-or-less single-minded pursuit and development of one's own resources without reference to the trends, tastes, fashions, etc. of the world outside."
You'd probably really like Magit mode for Emacs then. What you're describing with interactive add becomes trivial since you can stage parts of the diff by selecting them in a region. I can hardly live without Magit these days. Bonus is that it even works on remote hosts via tramp. </emacs plug>
<vim plug>With the vim-gitgutter plugin installed, you can dynamically add/remove/undo hunks without even leaving the editor[0]. I use this instead of `git add -p` nowadays</vim plug>
Google offered a high quality service for free. (Well, "free" as in they're selling eyeballs to advertisers, but, you know. Internet free.) They aggressively promoted it to the entire world. Literally a billion people took them up on it and, after years of reliable service, have made it a central part of their professional and personal lives.
What is Google's responsibility at this point to not grief those billion people? Whether by bad April Fool's pranks, or anything else?
If the takeaway from your comment is that the world would be better if people paid for their email service, I wouldn't disagree. But how we get back to that point is not at all clear.
Firstly, I completely agree with you regarding why this is bad news. However, I don't understand one thing: let's say our hypothetical user has been posting in a private subreddit for carrot fetishists, which Trump will make illegal in 2018. If, today, a NSL was received by Reddit, isn't it potentially already too late for our carrot fetishist, even if they immediately stop visiting the subreddit or delete their account? Now, the carrot lover knows there was a NSL, but there isn't anything they can do except wait and see what happens when the new legislation rolls around in 2018. Emigrate, maybe? Serious question; I don't know how these things work. Asking for a friend.
They can at least stop posting about carrots. If they haven't posted anything personally identifiable that could link their 'carrotlover314' account to their real identity, then they can discard that account. At worst, if it is indeed a case of past lewd carrot-related acts being punishable by death, they'd have a head start to get out of the country before the Carrotstasi get there.
You are right, the only benefit to the carrot lover is that they know, within a reasonable level of certainty, that their carrot loving activities may be called into question in the future.
Which, in my mind, is preferable to the alternative.
Recall the Communist witch-hunt in the cold war. That was done without retroactive policing and parallel construction. Just because they cannot imprison you for actions taken before the action was illegal doesn't mean they can't fuck you over in other ways. It's the thought police all over again.
Perhaps they won't get you for stuff you did today that is legal today.
But if you are still a carrot fetishist in the future, they can use the knowledge that you used to be a carrot fetishist to set up a sting operation. A little parallel reconstruction, they seize your phone and laptop, and next thing you know you're in prison in the future, thanks to the data they hoovered up today and will be in their database forever.
