I think you mean pedantry :)

then you don't know your history

this is not a dating site. if you're interested in such things you should be happy to know that gay rights are increasingly accepted. good luck to you and your romantic interests

there have been exotic glimmers of true fairness and equality, always. but they were on the edges of civilization, were fragile and fleeting, and not enshrined rights hard fought for at the centers of power. now they are

progress is not a straight path, it's two steps forwards and one step back. it will always be a fragile growth prone to breakage and backsliding. and then pick up again and resume

and if some horrible world changing event occurs: an asteroid, a plague, then i am sure we will backslide back into barbarism and lose our progress

but as long as civilization is stable, then we are on a new path of rights we have never, ever had in this world anywhere remotely on this scale before. your exotic historic oddities don't remotely compare

yup

the arc of history is clear: progress is real. it wasn't long ago the idea of gay marriage rights or marijuana legalization seemed distant and impossible

bigots, sexists, racists: they may whine and bitch, or go full douchebag and do immoral things, but their fate is clear and certain: the dustbin of history. they are losing, and they will lose in the end

don't get me wrong, sexists, racists and such losers will always exist. it's just that they will no longer dominate the social, legal, and political status quo like they used to. the fact that they no longer do is, like the arrow of time, proof of the march of history and progress

you will always encounter sexists and racists. a moronic comment on slashdot. a throwaway comment by a loser coworker. a catcall or a tweet from who knows where that momentarily catches your eye

ignore them. they hold no power

such shitbags will always linger like a fungus in a dank basement, the socially malformed pathetics of any society. serious civilization has moved on without them, and will continue to make them more and more irrelevant

like cannibalism and slavery, things that also do still exist, and always will exist, in the dark cracks. but are now an exotic shocking fringe, and no longer dominate our societies

The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.

What do you mean by inadequately configurable? There's usually an option to disable while typing somewhere.

It's there. It's on. Didn't help. Don't know if it's that Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't support it properly on these two machines or if it doesn't do the job I want done.

What I'm looking for is NOT there: A threshold level for touch sensitivity. If you're going to put a BIG touchpad on a laptop's palm rest, you need to either put it where the palms won't brush it, or you need to make it possible to turn down the sensitivity so that a feather-light brushing of the pad doesn't register as a mouse motion or button click.

Two different manufacturers (Lenovo and Toshiba) have used exactly the same layout, and exactly the same hair trigger, non-adjustable, touchpad sensitivity. (Also exactly the same sort of wafer-thin flat tile keys, which is how we got into this digression.)

while i agree with you that this story sounds like bs, i despise this "always dealing with rational actors" argument

people do insane things. all the time. if your argument depends upon how someone you don't know is perfectly sane and rational, your argument sucks

The problem I have with current keyboards is not just the short travel and lack of clickyness, but the tiny height of the keys.

Instead of the tall keys with space between them for fingernail clearance, there are these thin squares maybe an eighth of an inch above a solid surface. If I don't keep all my fingernails cut short, when they go past the side of the key they hit the panel and the key doesn't "strike". Letters get dropped. (So I get to pick between typing well and playing the guitar. I pity those who must keyboard for a living but want long nails to maintain their social life.) The short travel means there's little margin for finger variation, so some letters, where my fingers don't depress the keys as far, normally, don't strike, while others, where I support the weight of my hands, do strike when they shouldn't, or strike multiply.

After over a year I haven't been able to adjust. You may have noticed that my spelling has gone to hell as a result: I have to do a lot more correction and sometimes miss fixing things up.

(The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.)

On the other hand, when the nails do hit the key, they quickly wear through the top level of black plastic, exposing the backlit transparent light below it. I replaced a laptop about a year ago and after about six months about a half-dozen heavily-used keys had their pretty letters obscured by the giant glow of the scoured away region.

I had been running on older thinkpads and toshibas, with classic keyboard-shaped keys, or at least the little fingertip cup and substantial fingernail clearance. Switching (in a two-dead-laptops-in-two-weeks emergency) to a lenovo z710, then to a company-supplied toshiba s75, both with the stupid "I'm so thin", square, low-travel, no-finger-cup keys has been a disaster.

Okay, so we have a benchmark where the bog-standard human being scores 94.9%.

Then in February (that's three months ago), Microsoft reports hitting 95.06%; the first score to edge the humans.

Then in March, Google notches 95.18%.

Now it's May, and Baidu puts up a 95.42%.

Meh. Swinging dicks with big iron are twiddling with their algorithms to squeeze out incremental, marginal improvements on an arbitrary task.

I presume that next month it will be IBM boasting about "leading the race" and being "much greater than their competitors". The month after that it will be Microsoft's turn again. Google will be back on top in August or so...unless, of course, some other benchmark starts getting some press.

Of course, none of those things are among the criteria for what causes something to be classified as a religion, ...

That depends on what set of criteria one is using to classify something as religion, doesn't it? B-)

A solar offgrid (or grid-tied with standalone capabilities) would provide power locally until too much stuff failed.

Lead acid batteries last for several years, recent lithium probably for a couple decades. Nickel-Iron batteries are more lossy, but last for centuries, if provided with water to replace evaporation, potentially decades if they have catalytic fill caps to recombine lost hydrox or, say, a reservoir-based automatic watering system. (If their chemistry has a long-term unavoidable failure mode I'm not aware of it.)

Even with the batteries dead (NiFe or otherwise) the system will have power when the sun is out until at least one panel in every series substring is too degraded, shaded, or smashed to provide adequate power.

Semiconductor controllers might go for a decade to centuries, depending mainly on whether the conductive interconnects of the semiconductors are sized to avoid electromigration at the current levels used and what they're using for large capacitors.

Wind generaors have several moving parts to screw up - how many depends on the design. For a simple homebrew one you have the main bearings, yaw bearing, and tail furling-system bearing. Any one of them failing will take it out. (Even the furling bearing: Once that screws up it doesn't furl right and tears apart in the next storm.) There's also the get-the-power-past-the-yawing mechanism (typically a long cable being twisted and manually "unwound" every few years, or a brush mechanism.) Call it a decade without maintenance at the outside.

So some of 'em may run until a nearby lightning strike fries something.

I wonder what the numbers would be if "Progressivism" were also counted as a religion, rather than JUST a philosophy or political affilication? B-)

Think about it: It claims to prescribe what behavior is good or bad, generally expects its adherents to take its pronouncements on faith, and has a lot to say against various religions - just like ("other") competing religions do to their opponents.

I could go on with the similarities. But since they include suppression of competing ideas by pretty much any available mechanism (including arbitrary down-moderation, personal attacks, and flame wars), I'd prefer to keep the discussion light.

They're not alone in this, either. (c.f. any of several political philosophies, right, left, libertarian, authoritarian, moderate, ...) But they're my current candidate for the largest not-advertised-as-religion-religion at the moment. B-)

My ISP uses an AQM and I can maintain about 10ms of additional latency even when my connection is flooded beyond 100%. ... When I manage my own AQMs on my network, I can maintain 0ms of additional latency, no QoS needed.

Latency is a problem, and as you mention, AQM can deal with it without packet-type distinctions. But it's not the BIG problem when TCP and streams are trying to divide a channel's bandwidth.

That problem is packet loss. TCP imposes it on streams. TCP is HAPPY to accept a little packet loss. Streams get into trouble quickly - and all the workarounds short of QoS packet-class distinctions on the pathway just push the problem around into other aspects (such as delay).

With QoS you can put the drops selectively into, first the TCP flows (which then throttle back), then already-delayed stream packets (which streams no longer need - when TCP could use the equivalent just fine.) In fact you could even give streams strict priority over TCP - provided they're within their bandwidth limit - and avoid dropouts and most of the jitter completely. Streams get the cream and TCP gets the whey, other stuff gets something in between.

One should be very wary of the distinction between "run without refueling" and "run without regular maintenance". Even assuming that the reactor's fuel would last, the ancillary equipment associated with the reactor's operation (coolant pumps and such) and electricity generation (steam turbines) certainly wouldn't be expected to operate unattended and unmaintained for months, let alone years.

That said, the fifty-year planned lifespan of the Nimitz-class includes, if I'm not mistaken, a mid-life refuelling and complex overhaul (RCOH). To be fair, the reactor's fuel would likely last longer than the planned 20-25 years if the carrier weren't actively steaming--but I wouldn't trust the other parts to last anywhere near so long.

in normal human conversation, errors are expected and normal

if someone is corrected and they flip out because of it, they are not socially well adjusted

if someone catches someone in an error and they flip out because of it, even after a normal, gracious apology, they are not socially well adjusted

congratulations, your behavior in this thread defines a deficiency in your basic social development

welcome to slashdot i guess