Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

Kirrily Robert writes about OS switching and the XY problem and gets it right. Partly.

I’ve been through this process of OS switching a few times too. OS/2 to Windows, Windows to FreeBSD, FreeBSD to Solaris, Solaris to Mac, and more recently Mac to Windows.

Sometimes when a person asks “how can I run Word on Linux?” they mean “how can I read Word documents I’ve already written, those others are going to send me, and also write new documents without feeling an uncontrollable urge to gouge my eyes out with a spoon because the available MS Office clones on Linux are pretty dire?”.

Sometimes a person might ask “can I run iTunes on Linux?” because they actually like iTunes and find the alternatives available on Linux to be one or all of unstable, incomplete, or baroque.

And despite my prior strong bias against Outlook, having accepted my fate as a person who has to talk to an Exchange server for mail and calendaring, gotten over my special unique snowflakeness, and decided to give it a fair shot: I can see how someone might like it and feel that Evolution is a poor second choice.

None of this is to say that Windows can’t be maddeningly stupid. Microsoft have done an excellent job of building a software ecosystem able to do a really good emulation of a non-deterministic system. But sometimes the reason someone wants to run an application which is not native to Linux is because the ones that are just aren’t up to snuff.

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This week’s 4 Corners story on torture was fairly thought-provoking. The one question it didn’t ask of the pro-torture interviewees that feels lacking is this: if it’s necessary and even OK to torture people, why do you need to hide it?

The two obvious answers to that are either (a) they don’t think they’d be able to retain public support for their behaviour if it were widely acknowledged and on the record; or (b) they are themselves ashamed of it and would rather people didn’t know.

If it’s OK to torture then it should be a matter of public record. Who was tortured, how, where, by whom, and what was the outcome? They should be required to operate within a strict set of legal rules, justifying the desire to torture to a judge in order to receive a warrant, and reporting back to that judge at regular intervals and at the conclusion of the process.

If it’s going to happen, better that it happen in the light of day. Maybe that’d prompt a few cockroaches to go running for cover.

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