A skeptic doubts all. A conspiracy theorist doubts selectively.
wisnoskij is clearly not a skeptic.

"One of the comments levelled at self-service check in is that it has lost the human touch that people had when checking in at a traditional manned counter,"

So we're going to take away the last humans and replace them with mindless robots.

Well done.

Certainly aced that one.

(As an aside, I've just come through London Stansted including an extra hour in the security queues which went all the way back to the gate when you come off the plane, and I spent much of it yelling and attracting the attention of people around me - my primary beef was that the humans had no humanity, nobody had bothered to go down the line, tell us what we were waiting for, how long it was expected to take, what they could do for special cases - young children, disabled passengers, elderly passengers unable to stand in queue, etc. - or would even bother to do anything to help or give answers.

And when we got to the front, all the "electronic passport" aisles were gone and only the manned aisles were left. I know why they were removed - nobody uses them. They are too much a faff, you can't take children through them, if you're travelling with someone with a non-chipped passport, you have to separate and then wait (hope) blindly for each other on the other side, etc. so even when they were opened, less than 1% of the people there ever used them.

Sorry, if you want the human touch, you have to put humans in there AND then listen to the humans queuing alongside them AND then let those humans sort each other's problems out. Reliance on machines? When I got to the long-stay car park to retrieve my car, it wouldn't let my (immaculately preserved) ticket through two different barriers, so I had to press the button and get someone to let me out, costing me another 10 minutes. Thank god that wasn't my passport at the end of a hour-long queue.

My university had a school of mathematical sciences, a school of physical sciences, and a school of computer sciences.

If you think that all three are not only completely separate but also not interchangeable in places, then you haven't been taught enough science (of any kind) for an opinion to have much worth.

As a hint, I'm not a physicist. I flunked the physics module that I was required to do as part of my Mathematics & Computer Science degree. I have no need to defend physics. But saying that a theory based on mathematics cannot be science is to misunderstand the scientific purity of mathematics, and the entire point of the sciences all making up one big "science".

Technically, complex numbers do not exist. There are a purely mathematical construct. There is no square root of -1. It's impossible. It cannot and does not exist in our number space. Good luck doing an awful lot of physics without it, before even getting into quantum physics.

And the entirety of quantum physics, I'd like to point out, is basically maths. The fact is that it was maths that we thought HAD to be wrong, because if the maths was right, all this weird shit had to happen - and that we then went and found almost all of that weird shit was actually true in "real life" (i.e. physics) even where it makes hardly any sense to us.

And who figured out the biggest scientific discoveries in physics for the last 100 years? Theoretical physicists. And the primary tool used to do so? Mathematics. At some points, the maths didn't even EXIST and the theoretical physicists had to create the mathematics tool as they went along. So inventing whole new areas of mathematics, that had applications beyond physics.

Sorry, mate... maths is science. Science relies on maths. And off to the side of a lot of science are things that you would never consider "science" because they don't come under what your Science lessons at school taught. One of the biggest of those is Computer Science. Note that this subject DOES NOT INVOLVE any known, branded piece of software or hardware, beyond using them as a tool to find out new things.

Because even $9 an hour is a shitty, exploitative wage?

I feel sorry for countries that don't see this. Minimum wage in the UK at the moment is $10.70 an hour, and it's risen (and will continue to rise) by about 20-30p (50c) an hour every year.

And this, this is the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM legal wage we expect someone to pay. And it's still shitty. A young kid, with no home or family, works their arse off just as much as I do (if not more) for the same amount of time, gets home, and discovers he can barely pay rent and eat food. That's not a wage. And in that kind of "work environment", we can't expect people to choose work over social security, which harms everyone.

Minimum wage is about stopping employers exploiting desperate workers. It's NOT about generating jobs, or curing poverty. It's stopping exploitation. In the same way that regulating prostitution doesn't generate jobs (just the opposite) or cure poverty (again, just the opposite), it just stops someone exploiting another human being.

To then bring race into it destroys your argument. You can play the race card if you like, but to bring it in when race isn't mentioned at all is just - again - exploitation of humans.

And, as the stats here show, minimum wage does nothing to harm existing jobs. That means the employers KNEW they were exploiting workers, and could have stopped it at any time voluntarily by charging more / paying more wages, but didn't. Instead they waited until they were MADE to, kicked up a token fuss, and then carried on as normal without thousands of businesses going bankrupt because of it.

If you want to hire someone, pay a fair wage. That's the message. All those companies didn't sack all of their workers when the laws came in, so they NEED to hire someone. They just want to exploit those people as much as legally possible.

For someone that wants to play the race card in the way you did, I would think you'd be more concerned about ending unnecessary exploitation of low-earners by high-earners, not allowing them to continue.

To suggest that we, ill adapted to flight as we are, ought to go physically into the sky instead of sending a machine is absurd - like saying that a field is only plowed if dug by hand, or the only correct calculation is done without the aid of a computer, calculator or abacus.

Like, gosh, space for instance?

The ISS isn't exactly sitting there in a cosy blanket with a fire on... it's fighting against things just as cold.

Also, the amount of insulation you can carry is ENORMOUS (because most insulation is nothing more than pockets of gas trapped in a thin substrate, so think "expanding foam" instead of "brick"). Insulation means you don't care what it is outside - once the inside has been warmed once, you are only fighting the speed which heat leaks through the insulation. Anything decent and modern and we're talking minimal loss.

Otherwise, quite literally, you would die camping in the Antarctic with only clothes and a little tent to keep you warm.

Heat's not the problem, if you've already got the power, the infrastructure, the ability to move the materials, to shore up the place, build a structure, move into it, and live independently inside it.

I'll cut you a deal, AC: Microsoft gets a new allotment of H-1B visa sponsorships if they promise to only use them to bring workers who have jobs with Microsoft subsidiaries (as of some fixed day in the past) to the US, and consent to meaningful oversight to ensure they keep that promise. If they don't want to make that promise, I will infer they mostly want to fire people with decent-paying jobs (which I hear is the usual case in Finland, especially for tech workers) in favor of low-paid, almost captive labor.

Customers.

You're paying for a service, and nowhere does it say that they will discriminate against a particular service, such as Netflix.

It's obstructive business, against your customer's best interests, for no particular reason. It will also violate any given "net neutrality" laws that are / may come into effect.

Those laws are the answers. The reason for their existence is this sort of unnecessary posturing. And governments make companies do a lot of things against a company's best interests - all the time. It would be in the company's best interest to not pay tax, screw over its customers, not ship goods that have been paid for, be monopolistic, collude with others to enforce market prices, etc. The laws are brought in to stop that shit in the PEOPLE'S best interest, not the company's.

Not saying it's anywhere near perfect, but your post seems to want to back a corporation screwing over its customers and then (falsely) blaming its competitors and random third-party companies for that.

Yeah, it kinda does.

Oh that's rich. Like, instead of having a legal system, let's just tell all the gangs how we want them to behave, and let them enforce our desire on their own.

This is, of course, simply a lie. The US stopped executing minors years ago. They've also gone a step beyond, and abolished life-sentences for minors.

The reason the US hasn't bothered to ratify it is because:

a) The ratification process is kind of a pain in the ass; and
b) It wouldn't change anything, so there's no point. It's a purely symbolic gesture.

But by all means, keep pretending that Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama both refused to ratify it because they want to keep executing children. I'm sure all the Democrats will love that explanation :)

Good point. I keep forgetting that getting lost is a capital offence.

The founders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had, at the time, just finished carpet-bombing large parts of Europe and Asia, and imprisoning their own citizens for the crime of having the wrong ethnic background.

It's not that the countries "aren't keen" on the declaration - it's that the modern interpretation isn't exactly what the drafters had in mind. Kinda how the founders of the US were able to speak about inalienable rights while simultaneously being OK with slavery.

All I see is another difference: the UN criticizes the US while completely ignoring far, far worse abuse in Iran and Soviet era Russia.

Oh no. You're telling me that the US hasn't ratified a worthless piece of paper which contains no actual enforcement mechanisms and would make zero difference to any US policies? That's horrible. Next you'll be telling me that nations which have ratified it don't actually do a damn thing to abide by it! Say it aint so!

I work for the government, which unfortunately means no linux on the workstations :(

I use BTRFS at home for my primary computer. On my home server I use a combination of BTRFS and ZFS, primarily because BTRFS doesn't have stable support for RAID5/6 yet (and because I've been using ZFS for 5 years now and it would be difficult to switch without first buying 10 new hard drives).

I also have a few BTRFS USB-sticks which I use for freelance work (and occasionally troubleshooting at work, when nobody is looking). They're 16 or 32 gb each, with multiple OS's installed on them (eg. a couple basic Ubuntu-based distros, plus Kali, Caine, etc.). Thanks to dedup I can fit 5-6 different large distros on a 16 gig stick and still have 6-ish gigs left over.

All that said, I've yet to run into any problems with the current versions of BTRFS. All of the various setups I just described have been running without a hitch.

Was your race-condition due to running out of disk space? I remember a problem like that from a while back ... you couldn't delete any files to free up more space because the deletion needed to write to disk and couldn't. As far as I know that was fixed ages ago. I actually tried to replicate it recently, but couldn't.

Yeah, took me a while to get around to trying it also. I'm very glad I did. Deduplication and snapshots are awesome features to have.

Actually you can do an in-place conversion from ext4 to btrfs as long as the volume is unmonted (ie. boot off a CD or USB). It's pretty much instantaneous, and even provides you with a means to roll-back to ext4 if you're unhappy. You may have to update some boot files after though ... can't remember if I had to or not.

Of course any filesystem conversion is inherently risky, but I've yet to see an ext4 to btrfs conversion go wrong. Still, it would obviously be safer to start fresh or at least have a current backup.

Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries seem to fit the bill. Italy probably works too; there's a lot of Catholicism there of course, but you never hear about them being violent these days. They seem to have gotten over that centuries ago. Also, the Eastern European countries generally aren't very religious either, with a few exceptions.