It has a huge Wife Acceptance Factor, for one. We have iPhone apps that let you select any of the movies I've ripped onto it and play them back directly to our Apple TV (or any of another of settop boxes). Throw music onto it and the songs show up in iTunes for people on our LAN. Save a file to a certain folder on our laptop home directories and it gets synced to the NAS (ala Dropbox), made available on our iPads, then backed up to Amazon Glacier.

In short, it does everything you'd ever want a NAS to do but smoothly and nicely. My DS412+ replaced the FreeBSD system I'd assembled and installed from scratch, because there's other stuff I'd rather be doing and because I couldn't possibly make the experience as pleasant as Synology has.

I'm having a hard time reconciling those statements because it doesn't match my experience at all. First, it's my understanding that all Synologys come "bare" and you have to download and install the OS when you first power them on. My DS412+ that I bought a couple of months ago certainly did. It's initial boot gave me a web page with instructions for downloading and installing the most recent OS version.

Second, Synologys don't automatically reboot themselves, but can easily be configured (as in truly easily, right through the settings UI) configured to email you every time a new OS comes out. Perhaps that should be required, though, before allowing you to enable external services.

Meddling kids. The phrase you're looking for is, "meddling kids."

I'm asking sincerely: is this the output of a Markov chain? Or as the French call it, "Bonjour!"

This is a strange statement to make, seeing as two of the examples you point to, self-driving cars and Google Glass, are expensive innovations that aren't ready for prime time. First you blame them for creative thinking that fails, then you accuse them of not doing any.

What about projects like Google Street View? Sure it debuted in 2007, but that was a year after they acquired YouTube. Google Chrome came out in 2008, and reinvigorated the browser market.

Google has tried a crazy amount of stuff and also made a crazy amount of acquisitions. Some of it sticks, most of it doesn't. Surprise.

How do you propose to "help" them? I believe there is no effective way to "help" such people beyond castration.

And the whole "mental illness" angle seeks to remove personal responsibility from the equation. Why not cave in to your worst impulses? You just suffer from a mental illness, and it's up to society to "help" you.

Yes, you're the only one. Many of us don't call it anything at all.

I'm sure someone's crunched the numbers and this makes sense on paper, but seriously? Porting to Itanium before x86? I know HP wants to prop up its teensy niche CPU server line, but I just can't see how to justify that. Who's going to migrate software from old VMS systems to a new one on very highly vendor-locked hardware? It seems like anything likely to ever be updated before the heat death of the universe would probably have made the jump to Linux-on-x86 years ago.

"Neither Americans nor the rest of the world signed up for a fucking security agency which is no longer under anyone's control except people who feel they can do anything they want."

Uh, the CIA has been pretty much like this since its inception during World War II as the OSS and the CIA immediately after. It was reined in briefly by the Churck and Pike Committees in the 70's but that oversight and those reforms were pretty much rolled back by Reagan. Sure, they got to reach new lows after 9/11 with no hold barred torture, but the CIA has been torturing people through proxies for its entire history, so that wasn't exactly new either.

Not exactly sure why everyone is acting like this is some kind of revelation or anything new, other than its kind of amazing Brennan was foolish enough to admit to it. I predict his career at the CIA will soon come to an end, and he will be replaced with someone with larger brass balls.

The chances you all are gonna change any of this airing your indignation on /. are vanishingly small.

Yep. Their Code of Ethics says:

1.5 Honor property rights including copyrights and patent.

Violation of copyrights, patents, trade secrets and the terms of license agreements is prohibited by law in most circumstances. Even when software is not so protected, such violations are contrary to professional behavior. Copies of software should be made only with proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not be condoned.

I don't pirate software. I pay for the stuff I use when required. However, I damn sure don't respect software patents or nebulous "terms of license agreement" EULA bullshit. I'll honor them as mandated by law to keep me and my employer out of trouble (although every programmer reading this has probably violated 3 stupid patents today in the course of their job). And while the RIAA doesn't "authorize" me to rip CDs I've bought, I'm legally entitled to do so and will at my convenience.

I think my views are pretty mainstream among programmers. If the ACM wants me to join, they need to remove the requirements for me to worship pro-corporate, anti-citizen, rent-seeking behavior. I can't ethically consent to support their unethical Code of Ethics.

I don't think a EULA - even if found enforceable, which isn't a given - is carte blanche to destroy someone's livelihood.

My wife's a doctor and we recently moved to a new state with very protectionistic licensing policies. For example, you're required to have passed the medical boards within the last ten years. Doesn't matter if you're a professor of medicine at Harvard: you had to have passed the boards recently. You know, the ones new doctors take in their senior year of med school when they've been doing nothing but studying for the last for years straight and it's still fresh in their minds. So my wife, who's owned a successful practice for the last (more than 10) years had to pass the given-every-6-months test that determines whether she gets to keep doing the job that she's an expert at.

I'm writing this in sympathy for your situation, and to let you know that it apparently sucks for lots of professions. Your wife's not in it alone, and as someone who went through your role in the situation: I feel your pain. Best of luck to both of you!

I don't know about that. Say the average first year lawyer makes $60,000 (pulled directly from my butt; I have no idea what the actual number is and don't care to look). Suppose that 80% of bar takers pass the exam. That means the expected income for the next six months of a random person taking the bar is 60K * .8 * .5 = 24K. This is the number that a good lawyer could convince a judge (who is a lawyer) that these young, brilliant, aspiring lawyers should be compensated by the testing firm (who is not a lawyer).

That's not shabby pay for a fresh graduate sitting around (ahem, studying!, ahem) until the next testing period rolls around.

I'm almost certain that a company which just screwed over a bunch of protolawyers will allow free re-testing for those involved. It would probably turn very, very ugly for them if they didn't. Test takers will have to pay for travel again, which is probably significant for many of them, but they won't have to pay for test prep and fees again.

While I think that Jackson is an opportunistic jackass, resorting to racial epithets is completely unnecessary and only serves to undercut your message. Be better than this. You owe it to your society and yourself.