hahaha, I did presentations at a conference this past weekend and shared the mini-DisplayPort to VGA adapter I have in my bag with lots of folks with all different hardware.

I'm using a high-spec Taiwanese laptop with Fedora and used this "failed" spec quite effectively.

The 8K display I have on my wishlist is definitely going to use _only_ DisplayPort.

But I am not allowed to take my own life.

You're a tax-generating asset that has received some amount of investment.

Imagine if you raised a calf and then at two years it decided to jump off a cliff when you needed a three-year-old steer to slaughter for market. You'd be miffed at that animal.

In a world where you're being farmed for a share of your productivity to be transferred to the farmer-class, you're speaking here as a very bad unit of livestock.

people claiming you are impeding on their constitutional right to overthrow the government.

I really, really, wish I was exaggerating or kidding on this one.

I really wish you weren't wishing that. It shows you haven't read your history.

they were useful for breaking news in the actual tech industry

This. If you cared more about big transit than trends in cellphone style, Gigaom was worth having in your Google News feed. I'm not sure what the alternative is right now. Back in the day ComputerWorld (in print) used to carry this kind of stuff.

Hopefully the writers (what, the content doesn't auto-generate?) will find a home at other outlets.

If they weren't any good they would flop in the marketplace and not worth suing over, so I see this as a signal from Microsoft that Kyocera is making some good phones. Anybody here have specific models to recommend (preferably with CM11 on it)? Samsung has gone all nuts with no storage or battery options, so since I'm looking for a new vendor, might as well be one that's fighting a bully.

9 deaths in 9 years? Is that supposed to be shocking?

Most fraternities and sororities have no deaths in nine years. Rather than drinking too much beer, the SAE kids that I knew were nouveau-riche who preferred to party by snorting blow off Peruvian hookers.

Last I looked at the student newspaper, they were continuing in the same mould.

the precise, correct number of photos to take during a vacation is precisely the number you took on that awesome vacation you took decades ago

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin

Beware the ego - it's a powerful confuser.

Alright everybody - if you think Firefox is better at everything, step over to this side of the line. If you think that Chrome is better at everything, step over to *this* side of the line. Yes sir? Yes, you. Opera? Listen - you just get the hell out of here, and leave your meal ticket on the table. Everybody else: being shouting!

If you play music, my code will go to crap, since I'm trying to do two things with the same set of neurons.

Some of the most amazing brain work is done by /dampening/ the neurons, not hyper-exciting them. For me, music distracts enough of them that the rest can stay focused on the code. aka "in the zone".

For some reason, instrumental is fine for me and talk radio is fine for me, but lyrical music does not work at all. Maybe I'm programming more in the 'song' region.

'Geek' is more the 'script kiddie' version of a nerd. Nerds know what a wire-wrap gun is, even if they're more into grinding lenses for homemade telescopes.

This is fairly well-trodden territory. Nerds are hard-core specialists, fascinated with particular topics. Math nerds, bio nerds, telescope lens nerds (sure, why not?), etc. It's possible to be a multiple-nerd, but Geeks are more obligatorily generalists and tend to be makers.

Prohibit them from carrying out a single transaction until they comply with Federal requirements.

You'd be less incensed if you read the summary. And you'd have fewer upmods if the moderators did too. Sheesh.

We support the government when it acts in the interest of the public, and oppose it when it acts against the interest of the public

Obligatory car analogy: Toyotas mostly get people around just fine. They had a problem with uncontrolled acceleration. It happened a few times with bad consequences. They were shady and tried to hide it but finally came clean. So people still drive Toyotas and the acceleration problems are fixed.

Now ... imagine that there were at least three stories a day about people being killed by malfunctioning Toyotas and then we found out that Toyota was using its onboard electronics to record everything everybody who rides in them is saying, to be used against them in the future, and remotely detonating a few of them every few days. Most people still get from point A to point B, but still a bunch of people are getting killed because they own a Toyota.

We'd stop driving Toyotas and their resale value would fall to almost zero. It's good that we have Honda and Nissan and Tesla (et. al) to choose from, because we could quickly and relatively easily make that choice.

Now, what do you do when Toyota is the only car manufacturer and they're constantly running people into brick walls at high speed, and the frequency is increasing rapidly? Why should they even bother fixing the problems?

The first stage is suborbital, so that's not really an option.

Yes, you're right of course. I must've been thinking Dragon v2 rather than the first stage burnback. durr.

Still, fuel is currently only a couple percent of the total cost of a launch, so even if you had to double the amount used you'd still see negligible effect on the total launch cost.

Interesting - kerosene may well be cheaper than shipping a rocket across an ocean.

it's a fairly cost-efficient way to buy more time and make business.

It sure is, and the people making such decisions face no consequences for violating the license. Yeah, maybe the corporation will get slapped with a tiny fine that reflects some small percentage of the money saved by incorporating the GPL'ed library, but how is that really any disincentive? It's more of an inconvenience, or simply a cost that gets processed through the EMC legal department, and then only maybe.

The money being spent on the prosecution won't actually change much behavior - there might be better causes to donate your money too (especially if you don't believe in imaginary property) than funding this expedition to behead a hydra.

In the US, if the cops can convince a judge that they know the evidence is on your device (say, they saw you recording when a murder happened), then they can compel you to testify your knowledge of the crime.

If they want to go looking on your device for information to incriminate you, then that's compelling testimony against yourself, so it's forbidden.

The first case is, of course, subject to lying cops saying, "we saw kiddie porn on his screen when we broke in", which will happen (the way they plant drugs, shoot people and animals and lie about it, etc.). Then it's up to a non-corrupt judge to throw out such evidence based on the cops' lies. But if you're up to something illegal you have to weigh the contempt charge against the danger to yourself of disclosure, and if your password sucks or the judge and cops are corrupt, both.

Frustratingly, the USG claims that the rules for itself don't apply at the border - ostensibly it's operating outside the Law in those scenarios. What could SCOTUS really say about this? - they only judge the Law, not lawlessness.