I can't has cheezburger

DISCLAIMER: this is a customer service rant. I usually get annoyed at reading other people’s because I didn’t go through the stresses that they went through, so I thought I owed you, the reader, this warning up front.

The reality of tech today is that hardware is failure prone. If your brand loyalty is dependent on you never having any issues with your devices, then you’re eventually going to give up on every brand of electronics in existence. Instead, a better metric for one’s beloved tech companies is how well they take care of you when stuff does go wrong. As counterintuitive as it may seem, a device failure gives its manufacturer an opportunity to garner perhaps even more goodwill with its customer than if the device hadn’t failed in the first place. Case in point: the i7 iMac + Cinema Display compatibility adventure with Apple. Let’s run this down:

May 6 (coincidentally my birthday): A new iMac was purchased at work, and it was given to me. I begin using it happily that day and because I am quite partial to excess, I hooked up two monitors to it: my 24″ Acer display and my 24″ Apple Cinema Display. It’s pretty awesome, but in the afternoon I discovered that I was getting some random flickers on my Cinema display and I installed a software update to hopefully address the issue. Then I went home.

May 8: Working on a weekend (such a hard worker I am), I notice that the problem persists. I decide to wait it out a couple days, figuring it’s just a software issue.

May 11: The issue persists and almost seems to be getting worse. I checked forums, assuming it would be a relatively widespread issue by this point. Didn’t really see anything, so I began to suspect that maybe there was a one-off issue with my machine. The fact that the issue tends to happen more by midday, when the sun is over my head, reinforces that. A visit to my local friendly (and luckily, nearby) Genius bar is in order. I take it in, and of course we don’t see it happening, as it doesn’t happen until later.

May 13: After hearing back that they failed to reproduce the issue, I sat down with a Genius and tried reproducing it with my monitor which I brought in, and failed to do so. We agreed to check the computer in after the Genius tried (and failed) to get me a replacement iMac (remember, the thing is only a week old and has spent a significant chunk of its operating life back at the Apple Store). They are very apologetic and appreciate my patience. I check in my display and iMac and trudge back to work with just my laptop, like a sucker.

May 14: I get a call that afternoon from a genius who states that after a bunch of stress testing, they reproduced the issue, and were swapping out my iMac with a new one. I requested that they clone my drive and move my extra RAM over to the new machine and they agreed to have it ready for me within a day.

May 15: I go and pick up the sparkling new iMac and my display. Go to connect them all up in the office, and all is well for then. I go home, happy.

May 16: The display’s at it again! At this point I’m pissed, because I’m worried Apple’s going to try blaming the out-of-warranty display, which is a lousy scapegoat given that this display works great with any pre-Thunderbolt Mac. I furiously schedule another Genius bar appointment. In the evening, I go to genius bar with my iMac and explain the issue. After some deliberations with the Geniuses, they decide it’s likely not the Mac, but rather the Apple Cinema Display. They explained that there is a compatibility issue with some of the Apple Cinema Displays manufactured before Apple’s Thunderbolt transition. Genius explained that I should take my iMac back to the office, come back with my display and they’ll give me a new one that was manufactured since then. I come back 30 minutes later with my Cinema Display, the guy I meet with goes in back to get everything situated, and he comes out with the box for a brand spanking new 27″ Apple Cinema Display. He explained that they don’t make 24″ ones anymore so I get a free upgrade. Since it was a brand new display I asked if I could get AppleCare for it, which I was permitted to do. Yay! I walk back to the office with my new 27″ display and haven’t had a problem since.

That was a great support experience. Not all of my experiences getting things fixed at Apple are like this, but they always treat me right and they are prompt about things. When I didn’t live near an Apple store, they serviced my machine by overnighting a box to me, I would ship the computer back (also overnight), they’d fix it and ship it back (almost always the day they received it) overnight to me. When I had a machine that had repeated issues even after repair, they replaced the machine outright for me with a brand new one (which was much faster).

Now, let’s look at my experience with Crucial. I’ve always bought memory only from Crucial, because they make the best RAM and it comes with a lifetime warranty. I figured I’d try my hand at getting one of their SSDs. The first year or so it was great. The SSD was crazy fast. Then, I started getting performance degradation at the beginning of the year. It was really gradual, so I didn’t quite notice it, but once I started to have apps hanging routinely, I decided it was time to try to pin this on something.

I ran Xbench and compared results against the time I ran Xbench when I first got the computer. Looking at the results, it was clear that the hard drive was failing. Performance was sometimes as much as 90% worse than when I originally got the drive. Decided to try to call their tech support, but their hours of operation are ridiculously restrictive (closed at 5 in my time zone). So, I tried emailing their support. Couple business days later, got a typical canned response asking me a bunch of questions that were answered in my initial message. Peeved, I responded and waited another couple business days for a response. They suggested I do a firmware update on the drive. Process was a little bit of a pain in the ass, but simple enough. I ran the firmware update, booted the old machine up, and…

Bam! This sucker’s running fast again! I ran some Xbench benchmarks to verify and they were indeed right back on top again, just like they were when I bought the computer. Great, right?

Well, not so much. I was fixing to copy a VM to the hard drive one day when suddenly performance hit a brick wall. Immediately upon doing this, the drive was right back to its old shenanigans. Not quite as bad as before the firmware update, but still pretty bad and visibly affecting OS X. I begrudgingly emailed them back to let them know that the issue is acting up again, and waited the obligatory 1-2 business days for a response.

Their response was that I needed to call them. Apparently the solution for this problem couldn’t quite be put into words that could be typed out; it had to be verbal. This would piss me off substantially less if it didn’t require that I take time out of the middle of my day to call them (and use my precious anytime minutes).

So, I called them up. Based on the options I was given, I was directed to someone who I thought would handle the return, but apparently because it was an SSD she couldn’t handle that because only the tech support department handles that. So she transfers me to a gentleman in tech support. He was able to read up on my conversation with their crack email support team, and determines that replacing the drive is what needs to be done. Because I didn’t buy the drive direct from Crucial and its price changed since I bought it, I had to pay for an advance replacement and front them $450 to show that I wasn’t just going to defraud Crucial out of a dead drive (which is a totally reasonable policy on a large scale but still annoying for me). He was even nice enough to upgrade me to two day shipping (which became moot since it took them an extra day to ship the drive out anyway).

Two-erm, three days later, a new drive was waiting for me. I was busy with work so I didn’t get a chance to make the switch until Saturday afternoon. After connecting the new SSD to an enclosure, I started trying to clone my drive to it. Oddly, the enclosure didn’t see the disk. Probably no big deal, I thought, it just needs to be formatted. I cracked open my laptop and stuck the SSD in there and booted from an external drive to clone my drive to it. After formatting it and trying to clone, Carbon Copy Cloner said it failed, and then OS X told me I ejected it (it being the internal SSD) without unmounting it first. Being quite suspicious at that point, I tried rebooting to a Snow Leopard disk. Nada. Being more suspicious and slightly pissed, I pulled the SSD out and stuck it into one of my enclosures, hoping to get some life out of it. Nothing at all. This drive was DOA.

No problem, I thought, I’ll just call up their tech support and let them know what’s wrong and surely after having the replacement drive fail, they’d be groveling, trying to make it right. Of course, they were long closed by that time. So I just emailed them and told them what happened.

1-2 business days (and 1 27″ display upgrade from Apple) later (yes, I’ve been dealing with a lot of tech issues as of late), they emailed me back and told me to call tech support. Which, of course, would have to be during the day again. Yippee. When I called, I was treated to a 30 minute wait time. Why tech support companies find their customers’ time so worthless that they have 30 minutes to spare waiting to talk to a support specialist who apparently is so expensive they can’t afford enough of them to keep wait times down, I don’t know, but after about a 30 minute wait I was on the phone again with Joseph, a familiar voice (because he was the guy I was talking to the week before). He seemed skeptical of the fact that Crucial could possibly have sent me a second defective drive (never mind that it was a refurb drive and they probably didn’t test it that thoroughly anyway), and upon learning that I’m using it with a Mac, immediately decided that the cause of the issue must be an OS X update that was reportedly having some issues with TRIM. Because clearly a TRIM issue manifests itself in the form of a hard drive that goes cold suddenly after a few minutes of use. In any case, that’s not my problem; it needs to be worked out between Crucial’s and Apple’s engineers. But, he was a sport about this and said that he’d be happy to replace the drive, and asked if I wanted the privilege of fronting Crucial another $450 to get another (clearly stellar) replacement drive in advance. I politely declined and said I’d rather just send the current drives in and get a replacement one shipped. After this 45 minute (again, using my anytime minutes) call ended, I was on my way. The next morning I sent back the drives Priority Mail with USPS to the proper address.

Two days later (a Friday), the drives reached their destination. Crucial promptly notified me four days later that they got one of the boxes. A day after that they notified me that they got the second box. The email said they’d work “as quickly as possible” to process my RMA. It is now Friday and there is no word that a replacement drive has been shipped to me. When said replacement drive arrives, my confidence in its performance will be tenuous at best.

Granted, Crucial doesn’t have a network of flagship retail stores where they can provide the level of service Apple can. However, Crucial could have done any of the following things to make me hate them less:

• Include a shipping label with replacement drive #1
• Send me a shipping label for either of the replacement drives to send back to them. Expecting me to go out of my way to ship the drives to you is inconvenient. Expecting me to pay for the privilege is bullshit.
• Use overnight shipping. I didn’t buy an SSD at 600% the price of the equivalent platter drive because I don’t mind waiting a few extra days for things. If I’m buying the most expensive and highest performance type of drive on the market, it’s because I’m impatient, and I also expect to be treated like I bought a premium product.
• Send me a new drive as a replacement as opposed to a refurb. I am extremely wary of refurbs anyway, because SSDs have a very finite number of write cycles, and if I’m getting a used SSD back, I have no idea how close this thing is to being worn out.
• Send me a newer generation of their SSD as a replacement as a gesture of their appreciation of my business (upgrading me from 3 day shipping + indefinite wait time to 2 day shipping + indefinite wait time really doesn’t cut it).
• Send me a higher capacity drive as a replacement. That would be a hell of a gesture since their next higher capacity is twice the capacity of my drive, but in my case it would likely have made the difference between me buying my next SSD from Crucial and not. I already was asked a recommendation for an SSD this week and I immediately recommended an OCZ one.
• Let me call them later in the evening. Even being available until 6 PM PST would have been nice.
• Let me handle the return via email.

Perhaps Crucial’s just used to dealing with things like RAM, where you can live for a few weeks without a module in there. Given that they have some experience with NAND flash with their flash drives, I would have expected better from them with their SSDs, and given that a dead SSD means a dead computer altogether (most people don’t have 2 in their machine) it would have been more appropriate for them to have pulled the lead out on helping with this. I’ve been dealing with Crucial for nearly two months now just to get this resolved (which pretty much negates any time I saved from performance when the SSD was working). Worst of all, this isn’t some horror story of things going wrong with customer service policy; everything about this service has been completely to Crucial’s spec. Again, these replacement policies might be okay for RAM, but Crucial better be appreciative of the fact that I have been relatively calm with them on this issue on account of me owning a second hard drive that I was able to put in my laptop as a backup. Otherwise, heads would be rolling.

I’m not upset that Crucial’s drive failed (twice), though that really shakes my confidence in their SSD quality control. I’m upset that they are so quick to advertise what is supposed to be an amazing warranty but when it comes time to make good on that warranty, they’re a huge pain in the ass to deal with. I’ve wasted a good 8-10 hours of my own time actively trying to resolve this issue, and many more hours putting up with the poor performance.

If you run a customer support team, understand that your department shouldn’t be treated as an expense that should be minimized. You are damage control, and you should be treated like a team of retention specialists who are dealing with customers that haven’t yet said they have given up on you, but probably plan to, because that’s exactly who you’re dealing with.

There has recently been a shitstorm between Gruber and a bunch of other bloggers about the fact that there now exists a pretty widespread piece of Mac malware that’s making its rounds on the Web (it’s called Mac Defender or something similar). Given past comments I’ve made about how OS X is never going to have the security debacles that Windows has because it’s better designed, I’d like to take a bit more of a calm approach and discuss this issue.

First off, I still have yet to see an OS X virus and I doubt that I ever will (a trojan horse != a virus). This piece of malware still asks for permission to do what it does and it can’t get installed on your Mac without explicit user intervention. And I’m still convinced that people making blanket requirements for all computers (including Macs) to have antivirus software installed is ill-advised. Trying to secure a Mac by installing antivirus software is like trying to protect yourself from a swarm of bees by wearing a helmet. The kinds of legit security attacks that OS X will be prone to are not in the form of viruses as we have known them in the Windows world (that is, executables that are “infected” or contain a virus). Sure, you could make an OS X app that will wreak havoc on your Mac, but it’s going to ask for your password first. Virus-ridden executables are simply not the way security issues affect the Mac. Rather, vulnerabilities in specific apps are where your Mac is most likely to get hammered. And as such, you should be sure to keep your copy of OS X and all of its corresponding software up to date.

But even in the Windows world, viruses are kind of passé nowadays. As more and more of the things we do most are moving to web-based things, the infections themselves are happening there (Facebook is becoming a home for all sorts of stupid virus-y things now). And to Microsoft’s credit, Windows has largely been made quite a bit more secure in the past few years.

Interestingly, though, this recent outbreak of Mac malware bucks that trend with the good old fashioned trojan horse. It adds a nice ironic twist by purporting to be anti-malware software and convincing you that you have Mac malware which it itself is but you otherwise likely don’t have.

What I have been most interested in, though, is Apple’s response to this. Like all other things that come to Apple’s plate, Apple appears to be approaching this issue with the same method it always uses, which is to be silent and wait until it completely understands the problem, then issue a well thought out response.  This is what happened when a bunch of tech journalists decided that the iPhone 4 had flaw so bad it meant Apple would have to recall the iPhone, it’s kind of what happened with the iPhone with regards to having a native SDK, it’s what happened when there were accusations of poor working conditions in Apple’s factories, and it’s what happened as of late when those douche bags at Lodsys started sending nasty letters to iOS developers.  Despite the fact that Apple’s approach to these issues has been quite consistent, the media never fail to go into hysterics when Apple is silent about the topic du jour.  It’s one of tech journalism’s biggest turn-offs for me (my turn-ons include that dapper and brilliant John Siracusa of Ars Technica).

So far Apple’s responded to this in their normal way (which is to say they haven’t yet). But I have been getting reports that Apple’s actually instructed AppleCare employees not to try to get rid of this piece of malware. On the surface that would appear to be exactly the opposite of what Apple should do (I can already see friends coming to me saying “Aaron, you’re not going to believe this virus I got on my Mac that not even Apple could get rid of. {pause} …do you think you could get rid of it for me?” yeah, thanks, Apple).  However, even that’s not bad advice. The best course of action here would be for Apple employees to collect as much information about the malware as possible and figure out the best solution. Granted, it wouldn’t kill Apple to be a little more forward with customers about what it’s doing, but I can hardly fault them for not making a promise that they don’t yet know they’ll be able to keep, and that’s just the sort of promise that would implicitly be made if Apple were to permit AppleCare employees to try removing Mac Defender on their own; if traces of it were left behind or it wasn’t removed properly, that reflects very poorly on Apple.

Bottom line: was there an outbreak/is there one going on?  Yes.  Is it cause for concern for Mac users? Not really.  A lot of headway would have to be made for it to reach the point that 1 in 14 downloads is malware for OS X.

Should Mac users look to installing third party security software? Probably not. OS X has rudimentary malware protection built in (though it doesn’t yet appear to detect Mac Defender).  Your biggest security dangers as of right now aren’t in your Mac, but in the cloud.  As of late, your browser probably plays a more important role in a Mac user’s safety than anything.  You should, of course, never believe anything that is inside of an HTML web page that is trying to tell you that your computer is at risk; instead only trusting things that your Mac is actually trying to tell you, like this warning dialog:

And most importantly, let us please not discuss as an option making the Mac App Store the only avenue for getting apps on your machine as a viable option for addressing security issues. Not only would it end up being ultimately ineffective, it’s unlikely to happen in OS X (maybe in OS XI or something like that) and taking that approach would probably harm the Mac platform more than anything.  That isn’t to say that allowing non-App Store installs for iOS would help iOS (though it very well could) but the Mac App Store was developed as a simplification to software distribution for people and a way to bring a great iOS feature back to the Mac, not as a way to usurp users’ freedom.

Spending a year and a half working at a large corporation and making friends with some MSFT people in LA has earned me some respect for the old Borg since my idealistic college years.  In light of making a Microsoft evangelist sad that I was unhappy that they’re buying Skype (which I’ll discuss in another post) I would like to get a few closeted praises of Microsoft off my chest so that the world may not see me as some mindless Apple device buying drone:

They make great technologies

While it might be hard to notice behind the abysmal user experiences they manage to get out the door (wow, these are going to really come off as back handed compliments) Microsoft makes great technologies.  This makes sense, given that they hire only the brainiest of the brainiest. As a result, they’ve developed some clever technologies. Snapdragon comes to mind right off the bat. It was an incredible technology which enabled you to pan and zoom incredibly huge images (like, for instance, satellite imagery of the earth) in real time. They made an app for it once for iPhone but it’s disappeared. Sad.

Speaking of iPhone, their recently released Photosynth app is incredible at stitching photos together (and the app has a decent UI to boot).

A lot of Microsoft’s other technologies smoke the competition, such as their Remote Desktop protocol, ActiveSync, and Exchange. They’ve even tried their hand at reinventing some file formats (much to the chagrin of people who like standard file formats) and did a decent job with that as well.

And, for what it’s worth, Windows runs quite nicely in large, managed corporate environments.

Though Microsoft hasn’t had a great track record with turning their technologies into great products, that isn’t to say the underlying technologies are bad.

You get long term support

Microsoft supports their products to a fault. Whereas Apple adopts a new technology and is all to eager to dump their legacy support for stuff (especially when said legacy support is difficult to maintain), Microsoft is more than happy to spend their lives in misery making their products backwards compatible with whatever old-ass crap their customers want to use with it.  For instance, Microsoft should have deprecated and dropped support for apps written in VB6 a long time ago, but because they still have some sizable customers using this legacy programming language, they’re sticking it out and the libraries VB6 apps need to run are still fully supported in the latest versions of Windows.  You’ll never see Apple doing anything like that.

A few months back, Apple announced that they were discontinuing the Xserve due to poor sales. If, say, HP decided they were hopping out of the server business, that would suck, but it wouldn’t be difficult to just start buying new servers from a different manufacturer (plus HP are likely in big support agreements with companies and would need to subcontract support to another company before just dropping out of the game).  With Apple, customers are SOL because Apple makes the only servers that you can (legally and reliably) run OS X on. Now, OS X is mostly straight UNIX so it’s probably not a big deal, but if a customer was using an Apple server solution that relied heavily on OS X, that customer would be SOL (or they’d have to rig up new server racks that fit Mac Minis or Mac Pros, which was Apple’s “solution” for customers who still wanted OS X servers).

Meanwhile, at Microsoft, they are sympathetically ignoring pleas to drop support for IE6.  Their rationale is that because Windows XP shipped with IE6 and since they extended Windows XP support to 2013 or so, they must continue supporting IE6.  Given what an incredible waste of resources it is to continue to support IE6 for another two years just to appease some lazy corporate customers who aren’t bothering to update their legacy web apps to work with later versions of IE, I personally would have just called takebacksies on the part where Microsoft will keep supporting IE6 and take the 6 out and just say they are supporting IE, and then say that IE7, 8 and 9 are the replacements and customers are just going to have to suck it up and upgrade.  But I suppose that’s the difference between me and MSFT.

They’re making big wins

Though I feel that many of MSFT’s decision making is overly influenced by internal politics (as evidenced by them not taking Office for Mac and iOS at all seriously), they aren’t the Microsoft of 15 years ago (saying that makes me feel old).  They are capable of putting some good products to market.  Their gaming division has gone from nonexistent to becoming one of the top three gaming consoles on the market today in less than ten years.  They went from deceiving customers into saying they liked Vista to actually hunkering down and fixing a lot of the user experience issues with it in Windows 7.  And they recognized around ’05/06 that the internet was leaving IE behind by embracing standards and they finally started taking standards compliance seriously in their browsers to the point where IE9 betas are more standards compliant than any other leading browser (and boy are they cocky about it!).  You could argue that these innovations are too late to the game, or that they’re mimicking competitors, or that they’re not doing enough (all of which I’d agree with), but the truth here is that they are well aware that they can no longer lead the market just by the sheer momentum of their market share and the inertia of changing platforms.  They’re clearly trying to win in a more honest way, by making their product offerings genuinely better (as opposed to, say, crippling your public APIs so that Microsoft-made applications had a leg up over the competition).

Peace out. Namaste.

It’s the time of year when gas prices are making headlines again. Now they are starting to reach new record highs in America, and these prices are even starting to come close to what Europeans have been paying for gas for years. Those who want to blame Obama for all of America’s problems will be quick to blame him for these prices (and apparently Obama has raised gas prices in Ontario too, so his jurisdiction as raiser of gas prices is far reaching). Nearly everybody sees high gas prices as a problem, and I might make a few enemies saying this, but I don’t see it as a problem. Gas prices need to stay this high and they need to even go up more.

We are literally taking a resource which is finite, and we’re fucking burning it as fuel. I just tried to think of a clever analogy that would demonstrate how stupid this is, but I couldn’t think of anything stupider than using crude oil, a fascinating chemical with a myriad of uses which can be used as a component for a lot of amazing substances (like plastic), and just burning it like firewood.

It gets even more ridiculous. We are burning it and we have made it a cheap commodity! I’ve purchased gallons of milk which cost more than gasoline. And milk is a renewable resource. We complain that OPEC needs to “produce” more oil. There is no such thing as oil production! W are just taking it from the earth, and we WILL run out. The simple fact that oil is a finite resource should completely shoot down any claims that we need to approach the gas prices issue as a normal economic issue. It’s finite. That changes everything. At least it does when you’re using it as fuel for your car.

We will innovate ourselves out of our need for oil at some point. Wether that point is soon or some time after all the oil runs out depends on whether we take this issue seriously. The need to reduce our dependence on oil had our attention in 2008, but Americans quickly forgot about the issue once gas prices went back down.

Car companies are getting smarter. Hybrids are very common now, and plug in hybrids are starting to make their way into the mainstream. But we need to do more than change how we fuel our cars. Americans need to start demanding decent mass transit. They need to bite the bullet and acknowledge that although right now there are huge budget shortfalls, ignoring our dire need for better infrastructure is what will keep the US perpetually in the sorry economic state we are in.

So bring on the higher gas prices. People need to feel a squeeze that is tighter than “aww, it is painful to look at that number on the pump but i’ll keep driving to work every day anyway instead of taking the bus.” The prices will need to make people start doing without, or cutting down on driving. I would rather that we didn’t have to experience that, no doubt, but if we are the country that keeps forgetting about every gas crisis then we are going to have to feel more pain. We are the country that popularized the SUV just 20 years after the energy crisis, for fuck’s sake.

We need to reach the point where not a soul is complaining about the heavy costs of implementing high speed rail because the cost of a train ticket would be a great deal less than the cost of gas to drive 100 miles.

We’ll get there. The only question is when.

I decided this needed a post because keeping my viewpoint condensed to tweet form resulted in me implicitly calling @digeratii a piece of shit.

It all started with this:

Apparently, Digeratii, though seemingly against murder, is upset that people are raining on his parade by reminding him that it’s overall in bad taste to celebrate the death of a person. I’m not saying we shouldn’t feel some relief at having attacked a very real threat to US security and neutralizing that specific threat, and I’m not in any way coming to Bin Laden’s defense.  Whatever his reasoning was in running a terrorist group, I’m quite certain that it was wrong.

And no matter how wrong his actions were, it just isn’t right to celebrate his death. It wouldn’t be right for someone to celebrate your death, even if you did awful things.

Killing him was probably the right thing to do, and the people who carried out the operation that resulted in his death should be proud of the job they have accomplished. However, that doesn’t make it right for these people to be happy that they killed someone. They were doing what needed to be done.

These are the kinds of lessons that your parents taught you. Sometimes you need to kill (animals, perhaps a human attacker) and you recognize that you need to do that for survival and that is morally sound, but it is most certainly not morally sound to take pleasure in another’s death.  When you are taking pleasure in a person’s death your perception of the value of life has lessened. And even though many in the country are cheering you on in agreement, it doesn’t make it morally sound.

If I may start to Godwin this post, let’s look to the Stanford Prison experiment.  If you aren’t familiar, this was an experiment in which college students played a randomly selected role in a role playing situation of a prison. Some were prison guards, and others were prisoners. These were perfectly normal college students, mind you. The experiment had to be cancelled prematurely because of the psychological and physical harm being caused to the participants. The “guards” had taken their role far too seriously, and they were hazing the “prisoners” to the point that the prisoners were genuinely convinced that they deserved what was happening to them. And it all started with the “guards” being under the understanding that it was okay for them to wield power over the prisoners, not at all unlike how people in the Twittersphere are trying to convince each other that it’s okay to be celebrating Bin Laden’s death.

In the Stanford Prison experiment, nobody was killed, so perhaps you may not find the connection adequate.  But in WWII people were killed. Let’s look to the Nazis. As much as we’d all like to be convinced that these were inhuman killing machines bred to try to destroy an entire people, reality is much more grim. They were a bunch of young, respectable men who were convinced by their leaders and society that the Jewish population needed to be exterminated. It would be a huge burden off of my shoulders to believe that these weren’t just regular young men. But that’s exactly who these people were. It took very little to convince these soldiers that running concentration camps and rounding up Jews was the right thing to do.

It’s so easy to jump into the hivemind and cheer about what happened. It almost seems logically sound. After all, this man led a group of terrorists that murdered many Americans, and he has no been killed, ergo that is good, right? It makes us safer that he was killed, perhaps, but cause for celebration?

If people are unable to even speak out against someone being happy about a death of a (admittedly dangerous) man, are these people going to know when to speak out?

If you’re willing to cheer about someone’s death, how can you argue that you’re a better person than the Al-qaeda operative who cheered on 9/11? Do you think it’s enough to rationalize it with “he was a murderer, therefore it’s okay?” Al-qaeda were likewise convinced that Americans were bad people (hint: that’s why they wanted to be terrorists).

If you see someone kill someone and get giddy about it, then you kill that person to protect others yet you’re giddy about it too, how can you argue that you’re the better man? Because ultimately it is this pleasure in killing someone that makes the difference between the murderer and an innocent person who was acting in defense.

Feel free to weigh in in comments below. @Digeratii, I invite you in particular to provide a detailed response here. I promise that given adequate typing room, I won’t need to get too fierce!