So what they are saying is that anyone outside the US can freely hack US servers without a warrant too. Surely they don't expect special treatment?

Dingdingding, we have a winner!

No doubt, China and Russia will react to this announcement with enthusiasm. "Chinese military hacking DOD computers?" No no no, of course not - They just needed to gather some evidence of "blatantly criminal" activity.


More seriously, that one phrase bothers me more than the entire rest of the post... When we allow our government to substitute "blatantly criminal" for "probable cause", we may as well just save time and install government cameras in our living rooms now.

"So why do you need this warrant?" "Come on, man, we know he did it!" "Okay, here you go!"

Why? Facebook has a database of our explicitly stated interests, which many users fill out voluntarily. Facebook sees what we post about. It knows who we interact with. It counts our likes, monitors our comments and even follows us around the Web. Yet, while the degree of personal data collection is extreme, the advertising seems totally random.

"Facebook sees what we post about" - You have your answer right there.

Do you more often post:
"Hey, check out my new iPhone", after which you'll receive a deluge of ads for phones and carriers... Or...
"Gee I sure could use a new mouse - Should I go with a Logitech LS1, a Microsoft Natural 6000, or the el-cheapo HP X4000?".

In my experience, most people do the former, not the latter, while basing ads off products you mention would only work well for the latter.

Of course, all that assumes you even post about yourself. You might mention that your mother needs a new car (resulting in a flood of car ads that do you no good), or your cats, or just random news clips you saw.

Pointing at pipefitters and calling them sexist

Wooosh!

Generally speaking, grades do indicate something. Sometimes good grades mean the student is very bright and picks up things rapidly. Sometimes good grades indicate a strong work ethic. Both of these are qualities that employers would want in future hires.

Most importantly, grades (and the other traditional means of evaluating prospective students) indicate that the student can pay attention and follow directions - and will.

Employers don't give two shakes of a rat's fuzzy butt about whether or not you might hypothetically have excelled in a different universe. You live in this universe, and this universe values people with measurable skill sets who can and will get their job done. Simple as that.

Does the current system discriminate against a handful of niche "alternative learning style" students? Yep, it sure does - And so will every job you ever get! College admissions, therefore, does its best to predict success in your college career as well as your future employment. "Character"? Fuck character. My boss, and his boss, and his boss' boss, want me in a chair writing code; they doen't care if I spend 100% of my income and free time on hookers n' blow.

Now, if you don't like that, don't blame the College Board, simply go to any of the thousands of non-traditional (and non-accredited) institutions of higher learning available. Just don't complain when you discover that you can't get a job after completing your studies there.

I'll be happy once the world learns to build systems that don't break on the apostrophe in my last name.

You would, then, love using any software I write. I absolutely promise it won't break on an apostrophe. It won't break on a semicolon. It won't even break on foreign vowels or unicode...

Because I strips all that crap out, only allowing Latin1 [a-zA-Z]. I do, however, preserve any random-case names you insist on using, because while unbearably pretentious, they at least don't break anything.

And yeah, call me an asshole (though you have to put Australia ahead of me, they've outright banned diacritics in names by law) - But little Bobby Tables won't break my code. To hell with input validation, people constantly come up with new ways to enter complete garbage (and on forms they want to fill out, not talking about fake email addresses here). Just sanitize it all and call it good; and if you end up named Jrmy Obrian, blame your parents, not me.

/ BTW, all those O-apostrophe names in Irish? You've already accepted a corruption of your name, so lose the purist BS. That actually comes from Anglicized Gaelic o- or O-acute, with the diacritic shifted slightly to the right. The former means "from" the latter means "grandson"

Jobs in order of % male.

I find it strange that we talk about discrimination in high tech, when we have literally dozens of fields over 90% male, with and only a handful of niche tech fields even in the top 100. Hell, from that chart, we have sixty-one fields more male-dominated than CNC programmers (at 93.5%), the highest of the male-dominated tech fields. And general purpose coder only pushes 78.5%, with over a hundred non-tech fields higher on the list.

Yes, Slashdot has the byline "news for nerds". Until I start hearing people whine about why we don't see more female pipefitters, however, fuck right off about the "culture" in IT as somehow magically the core of the problem.

More relevantly, if we have a problem, that problem comes from human culture, not tech culture. Women don't do construction and men don't teach (at least not below the HS level), simple as that. However - And this counts as the simple most important point you will read in this entire discussion - They can! If a woman wants to get trained as a master pipefitter, she could have a well-paying job a week after completing her apprenticeship (usually 4-5 years); and even the apprenticeship phase doesn't suck all that bad, they make enough to live on in most of the US.

But we - as a species, not as a niche community of high-tech misogynists - view fitting pipe, welding, roofing, well-drilling, etc as "dirty" jobs that women don't want to do. We view dealing with disgusting snotty little 6YOs, much less trying to cram facts into their head, as something males don't want to do. Does that come from the fact that each side really doesn't want to do "off-gender" jobs, or the fact that society has conditioned us to believe that?

Short answer: it doesn't matter. Do what you want. If, however, you discover that the conditions in your chosen profession don't agree with your personality, don't blame the job, blame what you see in the mirror.

How does this matter?

Well, because the US has a set of requirements for defining the circumstances under which the government can search private property, and the scope of that search if allowed.

The FBI has effectively just admitted that they had no legitimate way of knowing that they had probable cause. This means one of two things - They broke the law to obtain that evidence (the police can't search you to get the evidence they need to get approval to search you); or more likely, they lied about the real origin of their evidence (ie, the NSA told them "go here and do this, and make up a good cover story").

TFA didn't make it harder to identify virtual objects as TFS implies - It made real objects look more like virtual ones.

Aka, "if we make everything look like cartoons, people can't tell which cartoons came from the real world".

On the one hand, anyone who gets it now will get the best medical care physically possible on the planet, though the currently available treatments don't have a high enough success rate to give me the warm-n'-fuzzies.

On the other, we have three (known) pharmaceutical companies busting their butts to bring a cure to market, and I'd expect quite a few more putting huge resources into "fling everything at the wall and see what sticks" R&D. So in six months, we might actually have a high-success rate treatment for it. But, in six months we might have 1.5 billion people in who need it.

Really a tough call... Better to get it now, or wait until it becomes a pandemic in the hopes a better treatment will exist.

Profiles for pets, WTF? Can teddy bears have profiles too? Are the pets allowed to have political opinions?

"My" Facebook page exists solely for my pets. And yes, they have political opinions (they favor absolute monarchy justified by the doctrine of the Divine Right of Cats).

See, I have zero interest in what my 6000 closest "friends" do. I have zero interest in sharing details of the texture of my morning bowel movement with half the planet (or even just with those 6000 "friends"). I have zero interest in seeing targeted ads based on my preferred types of breakfast cereal or cars or sex toys.

Far, far too many people (and even many small businesses), however, have Facebook pages as their primary online presence. Seeing their "public" pages doesn't require "friend"ing them, but it does require having a Facebook login. As a result, I do have use for a functional Facebook login; I just have no interest whatsoever in the entire fad of "social" networking.

Thus, my cats / teddy bear / couch has a Facebook page. If Facebook really decides to crack down on the 80% of users with fake profile info, hey, they own the site and can make that decision. And honestly, I would love that to happen, because I would no longer need a Facebook, because they would no longer any content worth remembering yet another password to access.

He thinks he is pointing out absurdity of gun control laws, but that's because he is (or appears to be, I don't actually know him) emotionally invested into getting rid of all gun control laws.

Agreed, though his motive has no relevance to the fact of his success.


Gun control advocates should be very pleased, because now governments have a much more urgent reason to think about how the law might work with 3D-printed weapons.

I honestly don't mean this insultingly, but that response shows that you have completely missed the point. The law won't work with 3D printers, or even just cheap CNC machines - Not now, not ever.

To date, only expense and practicality have made the entire concept of "gun control" even remotely feasible. Expense, in that CNCs cost a lot of money, and practicality, in that even though you could technically make these things by hand, it would take hundreds of hours of tedious work. Keep in mind that a cheap modern drill-press makes every tool Samuel Colt had available look like a Fisher-Price "My First Toolbox" by comparison.

For the law to patch this "loophole" requires nothing less than a complete ban on 3D printers, while artificially keeping the price of CNCs and similar technology much too high for the average Joe's garage workshop. Okay, let's say the law actually does that - The joke just goes one level of meta. We already have people building their own 3D printers. Do you next plan to regulate all stepper motors, require registration and proof-of-destruction for every inkjet printer sold, and ban Arduino boards?

Yes, the law absolutely needs to come to terms what it means to live in a world where anyone can manufacture any sufficiently small physical object on a whim. "Shut... Down... EVERYTHING!" ain't it.

But in the mind of libertarian nutball Cody Wilson, lawmakers will just say "Welp, he beat us, time to pack up and go home, I'll see if I can charter an APC for us since it's gonna be like Somalia out there. This is the worst day since the basic theoretical disproof and repeated cracks of DRM made us give up on digital copyright issues."

Not quite - He knows perfectly well that the haplophobes won't just pack it in and go home, just as the anti-DRM crowd know that Sony won't just give up and release everything without adding in-house developed viruses to them.

More importantly, he does what he does to point out absurdity. CA's legislators will pass a band-aid over this particular reality-hack, and Wilson will find a way to mercilessly mock that, as well. The cycle can pretty much continue indefinitely; but most importantly, at each step, they look like fools and he has yet again made his point.

In many languages there's only one word for both doves and pigeons. In Dutch it's both duif, in German it's both Taube, in Japanese it's both hato, etc.

...While in English, we have two equally nonspecific words for the same group of birds.

Taxonomically, doves and pigeons don't refer to distinct species, they both refer to any of hundreds of members of the family Columbidae. At best, you can say that doves "tend" to look smaller and lighter-colored

For the car analogy, we tend to refer to the largest passenger vehicles as SUVs and the smallest cars as subcompacts... Yet neither word actually refers to a specific nonoverlapping set of models, and we actually have cars advertised as subcompact SUVs.

During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor.

No, Microsoft, wrong conclusion. See, your data told you the $deity's own truth, that start menu usage has dropped. Most people pretty much use desktop shortcuts 90% of the time, so your stupid fisher-price jolly candylike tiles may look like crap but don't seriously impact that specific usage pattern. More accurate data collection won't change that.

What your data didn't tell you? That remaining 10% of the time doesn't just mean people "forgot" they had a shortcut and decided to use the start menu for the fun of it. Using the start menu drastically beats having to hunt down actual executables somewhere on the HDD, particularly for administrative-type tasks that might go six folders deep into the Windows directory, and have insanely long command-line arguments as a bonus (ie, a lot of the control panel apps).

Data doesn't equal knowledge. The stats can tell you "how often", but not "why".

How are they supposed to make money if they can't have the price arbitrage?

Net metering already gives them price arbitrage, as I've said over and over. During the day they buy from me at standard offer, and sell at peak usage rates; then at night they buy from the ultra-cheap baseline capacity generators and sell to me at standard offer rates. The KWH may "net" under that scenario, but make no mistake, the dollars do not and the utilities make a fortune off it. They just want even more.


Renewables demand a smart, gear and maintenance intensive grid

National security - The real kind, not the political theatre kind - Demands a smart gear and maintenance intensive grid. That we don't already have one that can easily handle distributed generation speaks volumes about what the utilities have spent the past century doing with all those profits.


but the money for all that investment to the tune of tens if not hundreds of billions apparently is supposed to fall out of the sky.

You missed the part where their biggest fear involves millions of private citizens paying tens of thousands of dollars each to upgrade one tiny section of the grid at a time. That works out to half a trillion dollars. How much more do you want?