I know, write? Who gives a flying flip about an app to track a jolly magical man with an eating disorder.

Now, if someone would make an app to track the Yule Cat, Grýla, and her progeny, then that I would have interest in!

Well, as they say, the tree of liberty needs to occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots. It appears that their tree is in need of some watering.

Besides that, top gear's Stephen Fry:
“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what."

And from Salman Rushdie:
“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read.

If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.”

"Person."

Yeah, he was walking down the middle of the street, blocking traffic. That is a weird and dangerous thing to do, and is obviously a matter of public safety, which is exactly the kind of things cops are supposed to look after.

It's not always cost that limits bus widths. See PCI for example. They tried widening it (64 bit) and clocking it up (66, 133, and very rarely even beyond), but what won out is a much higher clocked serial interface (PCI Express).

Skew in a parallel interface is a bitch, plus the number of traces required on the board to support a wide bus. There's only so many connections you can practically run in to any given chip package without getting unmanageable.

Citizen? They use the word "civilian" like it's something we are and they aren't. They're civilians, too. They're not in the military.

I'm still furious about the flashbanged baby thing.

The entire circus around Michael Brown was media-generated. Perhaps I need my tinfoil hat adjusted, but I think deliberately so. It's like it was purposely pushed to make black people get up in arms, when clearly, most people looking rationally at the case can wish it didn't happen, but can hardly blame the cop. Brown wasn't innocent; he robbed a store. He wasn't just minding his own business until cops hassled him because he was black; he was walking in the middle of the street. I want cops to stop people walking in the middle of the street and ask them wtf they're doing. He was not an "unarmed teenager;" he was a 300lb man who punched the cop. What the hell? When you drive that story in the media, people like my father who don't think police brutality is a problem take notice of the story, say "this is what the liberals are complaining about? They're morons!" it confirms his biases and he goes right back to ignoring the problem.

Where's the outrage and the marches and protests and media helicopters over flashbanged babies? SWAT teams busting down doors at 3am to serve search warrants? "Overwhelming force?" Budgets that rely on "civil forfeiture" which is literally highway robbery? No, the media pushes the non-story of Michael Brown. Muddies the issue. Ignores the real problems.

It's a conspiracy. A C-O-N...spiracy.

ECC does not mitigate it, but it will detect the problem where non-ECC memory will happily keep on operating with the corrupted data.

For the standard car analogy, consider tire pressure monitoring systems. They won't stop you from getting a flat, but they'll let you know you have a slow leak where you might otherwise keep driving until it's bad enough that you notice otherwise. By that time the damage is done and you probably need a new tire.

Not if adjacent rows are being heavily, cyclicly read.

Not that they were necessarily "better" but I think the attitudes of police towards the public have indeed changed over the past forty years. Forty years ago there weren't SWAT teams. The cops did not bash down your door, throw in flash bangs and shoot your dog to serve a simple search warrant. They....knocked on the door.

Did they always lie (well, they have to and there's nothing wrong with that so long as it's not under oath), plant drugs on people, shoot black people? Yeah. But damn if they weren't more polite about it.

The "us vs them" mentality wasn't so readily apparent. Maybe it was there and we just didn't notice because there weren't cell phone cameras, and they were mainly doing it to black people. Still, I don't remember cops 15 years ago driving APCs, in body armor, all black, and referring to citizens as "civilians." Now I hear that routinely. If we're civilians...what exactly are you? And what exactly is our relationship?

Where I work (Google), telephone calls are all but dead and voicemail is completely dead. Pretty much everyone lists their personal mobile number as their phone number in the directory (or a Google Voice number that forwards to their mobile), because getting business calls at home or whatever is a non-issue because no one makes phone calls for business. Communication is via e-mail (for formal communications, messages that don't seek quick response, or group distribution), instant message (for short, timely discussions) or face to face/video conference (Google Hangout). Some groups, especially SREs (Site Reliability Engineers -- sysadmins, more or less), also use IRC, mostly because it stays up when other stuff breaks.

Further, the etiquette is that nearly all non-email communication starts with an instant message. This is true even if the other party is sitting right next to you, unless you can tell by looking that they aren't deeply focused on something. There are only two times a phone is used, one rare, the other extraordinarily rare, and in neither case would voicemail even be useful.

The rare case is for a (generally informal) meeting when one party for some reason doesn't have access to Hangouts. The extraordinarily rare case is when something is on fire and someone's attention is needed at 2 AM Sunday morning. The latter has never happened to me, though I have called a couple of colleagues. Even then, a phone call is an unusual step; normally you wake people up via the pager system (whose messages are delivered via various means, sometimes including automated phone calls) and proceed to communicate via IM or VC.

It's not just Google, either. Prior to Google I worked at IBM which where communication similarly revolved primarily around IM and e-mail, though meetings were primarily via teleconference, not video conference.

From what I can see, voice is generally declining, and voicemail is leading the charge.

Ya know, to be honest, that wouldn't be that bad. So long as the cause was somehow noble, and they had to use their brains to find a sneaky, non-violent solution to a problem instead of just blowing shit up...

I'd prefer exploration and maybe a suspenseful first contact, trying to understand a truly alien species before conflict erupts. But anything where they don't just immediately jump to photon torpedoes and punching would be a step up.

No, the Matrix was a work of art. The last thing I want is for them to ruin it with a sequel. Thank God they never made any.