Although the password keeper point struck me as interesting, I take issue with the "experts" stance on updates.

People don't shun (non-OS) updates because they "might" install malware - They shun them because they do install unwanted tag-alongs (if not outright malware). Flash tries to install its partner-of-the-week every time you update it. Chrome just added push notifications. Java... Let's not even go there. And let's not overlook the fact that most users can't tell a legit update prompt from a drive-by installer.

Security experts have a bias here because they:
1) can usually tell the legit updates from the bogus ones (and know enough to get the bloat-free version of the update); and
2) can themselves remove or repair the occasional spyware that slips through, without needing to pay BestBuy $150 for five minutes' work on a machine only worth $300 in the first place.

Yes and no - That would count as a valid reason, if not for the fact that Wu has five minutes of fame solely because of GG. No one gives the least damn about the co-founder of some two-bit game studio.

When your pony has only one trick, no one comes to the show to hear its opinions on the merits of alfalfa vs clover. Heck, until the trolls showed up and explained why we should care about this Q&A, I dismissed it as a blatant Dicevertisement.

Did you actually have a point, or just wanted to play a flaming douchenozzle on Slashdot?

Yeah you're right, an acknowledged bug directly reproducible by using one of Google's core revenue-generating products (YouTube, you may not have heard of it, it's kind of new) is mostly irrelevant and won't cause issues for anyone else. Sorry to make such a fuss.

We don't actually know that she got sent the hard questions.

Perhaps Slashdot could use a new Director of Talent? I hear a pretty good one just went on the market after her former employer slashed and burned any remaining semblance of their credibility...

Sure! Why, I can think of plenty of non-evil reasons for push notifications. Why, we have email (that I don't get through a PC browser), IMs (that I don't get through a browser)... Um... Stock alerts (that I don't get through a browser)... Hmm...

Oh, and ads, lots and lots of ads - Ads just fucking everywhere, loves me some ads. Mmm-hmm. Don't you love ads, you commie bastard? How do you expect the economy to grow (wink wink nudge nudge) if you don't need to acknowledge an ad for Viagra every five minutes?

Ahem. Yeah. At this rate, I'll need to start rolling my own Chrome builds just to keep the crap to a minimum.

Of all the good questions actually upvoted in the original thread, why the hell did you decide to respond to not only the most soulless of the bunch, but ones that also require the disclaimer "I can't talk about this, but here's my opinion about a tangentially related issue"?

You say that you don't want to play the victim or the token IT female or the feminist propagandist... And then proceed to focus on literally nothing else, even at the expense of answering the damned questions asked. Seriously, why bother?

Sometime in the last five releases it feels like the number of memory leaks in Chrome have just skyrocketed. Maybe I'm not the normal use case, but I typically leave Chrome and various tabs open for days or weeks at a time, and eventually causes Windows to panic and close Chrome to recover that memory. My wild-ass-guess is that it's related to HTML5 video but maybe it's something else. I freakin' love chrome, but the memory leaks are seriously making me consider something a little more stable.
 
Chrome is the only application I use that ever, ever has memory leaks now in 2015.

There are countries (including the US) that do consider certain acts committed outside of their borders, not by their citizens, that only indirectly affect their country or citizens, as full crimes, to be persecuted and the guilty to be extradited, regardless of laws of the countries where these "crimes" were committed.

So, if given country has a law against aiding unauthorized entities from spying on their citizens, and the firm sells the software to these entities, it is committing a crime. And while extradition or direct consequences are unlikely, they are not impossible, especially if employees of the firm ever visit the country in question.

This has been coming for decades, and yet governments have been far too busy lining the pockets of members of the party in power to do anything about it. Donald Kingsbury predicted home-built cruise missiles in the '80's (in "The Moon Goddess and the Son").

It's been obvious since the early 90's that computing costs and hardware costs were falling so rapidly that anyone could do this on a budget of a few thousand dollars. That's now a few hundred dollars. And fully autonomous operation is not far in the future: it's just not that hard.

So the reason no one has done anything about this is that hardly anyone has been paying attention, and those of us who have believe that drone technology is worth the price of the risk posed by machines like this. There was simply no way to not get to this point without cutting off development of half-a-dozen technologies that are too important for too many things to ignore, not even counting the economic benefits of drones themselves.

Writing code is human action. As someone pointed about above, it would literally appear that a weapon fired by a loop would count as an automatic, but a weapon fired by a sequence of individual calls to the "pullTrigger" method would not be, because the act of writing each one of those "pullTrigger" calls would be an individual human action that resulted in the gun firing.

I'm not suggesting this would stand up in court--for all I know it might, but that's not knowable until it does--but serves as a nice illustration of how our categories start to break down in the face of new technology.

First, I agree with you as regards willful ignorance - I have no patience for that, myself. That said...

From the context given, it seems pretty clear that he didn't mean that literally, so much as describing the complexity of the respective systems.

Variac output induces a current in coil 1 proportional to the current times the number of turns, which powers coil 2, which repels against a fixed magnet to move a needle... vs "I clip this on, something similar happens at the first stage, then it goes through various filters, goes through the lowest bidder's 4-bit ADC using an aging 9V battery as Vref, gets adjusted by calibration code of unknown accuracy (and hopefully the last person to use it didn't randomly recalibrate it using a lemon and a dog's nose), and finally a number magically appears on the LCD".

Yes, the old timer understands what the digital meters does - Enough to understand that it has about a million times more points of failure than two loops of wire and a magnet.

No, you stupid shithead. The search terms are the same. The login names are different.

Reading comprehension fail, much?

FTA: I wondered what a Google Image search would bring up if I typed in "black" names and "white" names.

The author explicitly searched for names strongly associated with a particular race.

But that said, let's play Devil's advocate, and pretend you didn't decide to jump in and start flinging feces without even reading the GP's linked article. If you've logged in, your own login name is a search term. You just don't actually enter it manually. Again - Brad Pitt no doubt gets ads for different products than I do, despite our shared race and gender.

I realize you meant that as a joke, but seriously - A select-fire weapon has a hell of a lot more to do with the firing mechanism than how fast you can pull the trigger. A double-action semi will never function as a full auto no matter how you pull the trigger.

Case in point, entirely legal bump-fire triggers on '15s - Yes, they can spit rounds out at a rate approaching a full auto (albeit with all the accuracy of a monkey flinging feces) - But you'd need a frickin' miracle to make it through a standard 30 round magazine without a FTF due to overheating.

Every American, regardless of their stance on gun control, should find the government's stance on this one nothing short of reprehensible. We have laws for the purpose of keeping the domesticate primates from robbing, raping and murdering each other. Someone's RC aircraft (legal) pet project that just happens to include a spoooky word (gun, also legal) but hurts no one shouldn't even get the attention of the authorities, much less have them wasting resource trying to find charges they can make stick.

It's already been shown that Google gives different results to searches that include "black" names vs "white" ones

Wow - You mean putting different words in my Google search... Gives different results (or in the case you linked, different ads, arguably just another type of result)??? Those racist bastards!

Seriously, what the fuck? No kidding, it gives different results! If I search for my name, it gives different results than if I search for Brad Pitt, despite having the same race and gender. Duh.

The world still has real racism. Quit trying so hard to find it in places it can't exist (algorithmic search results), unless you seriously mean to accuse Google of biasing their algorithm to discriminate against people named Shaniqua.