Insensitive? - IBM saw the dotcom bust coming, they knew layoffs would follow so they forced all the workers to watch a video called "who moved my cheese".

Ex 1980's taxi driver here, public holidays are dead times, surge times used to be called Friday and Saturday night, but the price didn't change.

Add to that the percentage of the population that actuall is a spy is incredibly small and the percentage of the population that gets squeamish under interrogation is really high and you have a total classification disaster on your hands. I mean, of the thousands of NSA or CIA or FBI employees, how many of them are spies? Sure, some of them probably are. But I'm guessing it's single digits in each agency.

I love watching a dog lose its shit whenever it sees something new. Dogs have a highly tuned, "That ain't right," sense and they love to share it with all of us.

"That's the tallest guy I've ever seen. That ain't right."

"That person has wheels instead of using his legs. That ain't right."

"A big person carrying a little tiny person in a bag? That ain't right."

What you are offering up is no different than the *I was just following orders* routine.

No, he's not saying that the hitman is innocent. He's saying that the hitman and his employer are both guilty.

You regard being called 'human' denigrating?

The sides of the trench are tectonic plates, both plates are diving into the crust, in 2000yrs the drums will be absorbed into the crust.

There's enough space junk whizzing around Earth now, why pollute the space around other planets if it can be avoided? There's also the possibility of doing "last minute" science as the probe descends that cannot be done from orbit, eg: atmospheric sampling.

How to piss off an Aussie

AFAIK the only thing that is censored in an R18 rated game/movie is explicit sexual violence (rape porn), CP, explicit beastiality, etc. For a long while there was no R18 rating for games, they were assumed to be for children so the highest rating was MA16. Game studios would deliberately get a "banned" for publicity reasons, but unrated games have always been legally available on the net.

We don't have a 'viable [domestic] market' for big budget movies/games because of our tiny population, nothing to do with our movie rating system which is far more permissive than most of our neighbours in SE Asia. Hollywood movies are typically shot on location in AU/NZ because it's cheaper than making them in the Hollywood.

NVidia have freely available, user hardened, linux drivers for all of their hardware, and a large scientific/gaming community that uses them. Same deal for NVidia's windows drivers.

...because...
- They will flush 50% or more of their own revenue down the toilet.
- It sounds too much like extortion/ant-trust, and is probably illegal.
- NVidia already comply with their stated goal.

IMO Steam is a glorified shopping cart that invades your PC and "manages" your purchases, they don't "own" anything, they are middlemen. I prefer to go directly to the vendor, if it's exclusive to steam I won't buy it because I refuse to install their malware gateway on my PCs. IMO the freemium model used by game studios such as wargaming.net is much more consumer friendly, just register, d/l, scan, hit install, and you done. From a business POV, wargaming.net has proved beyond doubt that a talented game studio combined with a player friendly freemium model can make you very rich, very quickly.

It's important that players who subscribe to a freemium game only gain a meta-game advantage, for example in WoT nothing you can buy in-game for real cash will give you a significant advantage on the battlefield. However a "wallet warrior" (me) will climb the tech/skill ladder ~1.5X faster than a "welfare warrior", a "wallet warrior" is able to extend the size of their garage/barracks, recycle expensive tank add-ons, paint their tank, etc.

Freemium models that significantly handicap a "welfare warriors" ability to compete with "wallet warriors" simply won't get enough players to attract a profitable community of paying customers, and the game will die. Note that the freemium model also applies to some traditional games (on a computer), such as internet bridge clubs who make money hosting tournaments, hosting bridge holidays on a cruise ship, selling/advertising advanced lessons, etc.

NVidia - I have found them to be a developer friendly company (CUDA, etc). NVidia have a large linux user community for scientific applications, their linux driver works, Yes, it would be nice if they could find a way to open source everything and there's no harm politely asking/reminding them, but hurling abuse at them for choosing not to is the act of a spoilt child. I for one, don't want OSS devs to be associated with spoilt children.

Disclaimer: Buying video games since I dropped my pocket money into a pong machine at mum & dad's local pub, circa 1970.

Have you met anybody involved in a multi-level marketing scam? The comparison is actually not that far off.

Exactly. Good encryption makes cloud backup a perfectly safe option. Encrypt your stuff something good and secure like GnuPG, stick it in one or more cloud providers, and then just worry about backing up your keys. Keys are small enough that you can even keep your backups as hard copies, and you only have to do the physical backup once instead of every week or whatever. It's a pain in the ass to type hard copies in correctly, but printed paper survives a lot better in a fire safe than digital media. Keep one easy to use digital copy and one heat-resistant paper copy in your fire safe and do the same in a safe deposit box somewhere.

I've been emailing myself important encrypted documents for years and letting gmail index them for easy retrieval. I can't imagine going back to dealing with having to regularly get physical media backups somewhere off-site and safe. It's just bits. Use computers to move them.

Don't talk nonsense and dress it up as "scientific". "Scientific consensus" is just the modern phrase for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science". People who complain about the meaning of either term are not scientists, they are usually partisan political hacks who have never heard of Karl Popper and think AGW is a some kind of gigantic conspiracy to take away their SUV.