You can pretty much see the painting on the wall. Politics has all but ruined Slashdot. I've been here around 16 years, and I've never been more driven to quit entirely. The site and the community over the last year has degenerated from critical/debating to dogmatic/adhominem.

.. hate *restricted speech.

They're welcome to go. So are you! The truth is that the vast silent majority still hate trolls far more than they hate speech. As usual a knee-jerk'd reaction from a person who's mental picture of censorship can only be two bars: 0 (regulated kindergarden) and 99 (free and open of all -- except those pond scum fucking spammers) nay? If you wanted to actually convince people of this somehow horrible policy change, try finding real examples of censored people/material that people will really really want to save.

I'm not paranoid or worried enough to turn off these services, but if you're really determined, you can use something like Tasker / IFTTT and use either geofencing (kind of against what you're trying to accomplish) or something like Wifi / NFC triggers to determine when to turn on/off services automatically for you.

"Trust us with your data, because like when were we known to flagrantly violate your laws."

I'd LOVE to see a lawsuit which that attempts to delete archival records. I can see it possible (unlikely but who knows) that some content may be requested to be removed from the online visible archive.

Legit question, what does archive.org do about posting torrent links, and other such 'illegal' content on the internet?
"The Internet Archive respects the intellectual property rights and other proprietary rights of others. The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others."

So they still honour copyright and who knows what else, so there's no wholly unmolested source of archival information (at least publicly).

You can't call someone left or right if they're authoritarian. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Tito, Caesar, William VIII, etc.. If someone makes a decision on how to run a nation, that's one voice. It isn't a movement (left/right are scales of popular belief in terms of social/economic freedoms). To call a single person (left/right) is almost entirely meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and calling a dictator anything but a dictator doesn't advance one's story.

All dictators require control, and how one exercises that said control varies wildly based on their time in history and the levers necessary to exert control. That's the only real figure necessary for dictators. If a lever of control no longer exists, it falls apart. Romans and most earlier empires exerted control by marching huge armies at opposition. Later, European monarchs exerted control largely through social classes re-enforced by the nation's religion. In my poor home of Canada, they had programs to take aboriginal children from their parents to 'learn' the Canadian way of life. Yay, democracies! The pope is a dictator in his own right, though a dictator who's power to control has fallen significantly.

"Heck, just look how the left in the US is rewriting history"
I'm confused here. Can you give me some google juice on this? Specifically, I'd like to know when/where records were deleted / rewritten.

You forgot to mention two developers, but only roast one. You know know those guy that learns about a new technology that the team has never heard of, convinces the boss through their evangelical zeal, writes the feature, then proceeds to bail / quit because the company is just too passe. Now the team's left with a half-broken feature and a new core dependency boat-anchor left for someone else to eventually remove in a future release.

The sad thing is, I'm far more of this guy than the stale one, but years of dealing with other people's research f-up's have tempered my zeal to much more realistic ends.

Both exist. Well, XML navigation into SQL, but same-ish difference. There are a laundry list of SQL drivers pasted over NOSQL equivalents.

The only problem is there's no universal ODBC / SQL that can just work accross all architectures. SQL has warts and is effective at a specific philosophy of data architecture, but it was a universal standard for decades, making the problem domain relatively simple to embrace. There's no standard that 99% of the dev's out there can use and embrace out of box, which will just help propagate the vast trove of incompatible solutions that exist presently.

Know your requirements first, and figure out solutions secondly.

Considering a solar system is very well partitioned already with almost no outside bleed, you could probably get by with something like Cassandra. If you're in love with 'documents' representing your sytems, you could use MongoDB.

If you want to support features that involve extra-solar system queries, you may want to stick closer to traditional RDBMS. I'd chime in more, but I have to go!

"On February 1, 2008, Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, won a lawsuit against In Game Dollar, trading under the name Peons4Hire. The court ordered an injunction that immediately halted all business operations within said game.[37]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Yes, exactly like Gold farming. Both are violations of the TOS, and one could argue that stealing something of value (even if constrained by their applicable uses) by using external tools is a pretty safe ground for fraud. I may have rot13 security on my content, but someone breaking it without permission is still most likely committing a crime under DMCA. The crime could've been amazingly elaborate, or stupidly simple. The outcome of said crime is the same. Fraud with a computer is wire fraud. So, if in fact the defendant was issued something of value through deception, I could see this having some merit. Gold farmers are just as culpable of this, especially if its facilitated through the use of outside tools.

But since you're black, the drivers won't pick you up anyway (runs from the room screeming)!

Click-bait is click-bait.

Unless there's clear cut discrepancy with clear evidence, I prefer to believe that Google's interpretation of data isn't inherently 'political', or 'racist' or 'insert-other-bad-thing'. Instead, its regurgitating back signals that people are generating creating a cyclically re-enforced trend.

A general model:
  - Google sees 10 pro-ABC articles, and 10 anti-ABC articles.
  - Web searcher searches for ABC.
  - 51% of searchers click on the anti-ABC pages, and the 49% click on pro-ABC pages.
  - Google's algorithm ranks these pages (the anti-ABC pages ahead nominally).
  - Web searcher searches for ABC.
  - 55% of searchers click on the anti-ABC pages, and the 45% click on pro-ABC pages (Since there are fewer pro-ABC pages at the top of the search listings).
  - Rinse and repeat.

The only relevant stat is how frequently a given model does, and if so, what conditions the phone was subjected to when it occurred. A one-off incident is unfortunate but certainly within the realm of possibility (enter any phone here).

Every local credit union in my area are up to their ears in housing mortgage debt, and we're in a local hosing bubble... I couldn't run away from them faster than I have.