However, it is highly relevant that GED holders and/or high school or college graduates with degrees completely unrelated to computer science tend to be better programmers.

Where do you get that from?

I have indeed met a lot of great programmers that did not have CS degrees. But I've met even MORE programmers that were not great or even coming close to it, that did not have CS degrees...

I would say that overall a CS major has a base level of competence above non-CS holders. But I've never seen a study or in decades of practical experience seen anything to back up the claim you are making...

For what it's worth I have both a GED *and* a CS degree.

Although it can be, also note that the Helvetica Nueu that Apple uses in Yosemite is heavily edited to look OK on LCD displays - just like other screen tuned fonts.

They also were trying to get the average size of sentences between the old and new fonts closers so programmers didn't have as much work to adjust for text changing sizes.

I imagine Beats/Apple isn't too happy with Bose's shenanigans regarding telling NFL players they can't wear their Beats headphones until 90 minutes after the end of the game.

Of course the players do it anyway, and Beats apparently pays the fines for them... but still.

Incidentally, the NFL isn't doing very well with regards to their endorsement deals - first Microsoft, and now Bose.

The problem is you have a conflict of endorsements.

The NFL is being paid directly by Microsoft and Bose to promote their stuff - Microsoft and Bose can put "Official NFL Product" on those things.

The problem is, the teams and players don't really see much of that money because it goes straight into the league. Sure, they may get a few bucks in the way of stadium improvements and such, but you can bet most of that money isn't going into their paycheques.

So the players and teams often have their OWN endorsement deals. This money goes directly to the team and the players themselves. Sure some goes back to the NFL in terms of league fees and whatnot, but it's extra income for the team and player.

So what's a player to do? Be forced to wear Bose which nets them ZERO dollars in the end? Or wear their Beats which nets them millions in extra dollars in their pocket?

It's obvious why the players are defying the rule. And in fact, you have to admit, it's getting a LOT of marketing for Beats as well - I mean, they're being fined, in public, for wearing Beats. With photos. In the news. Now what is better marketing - the player wearing it on the field or a news conference, or having it plastered all over the news with closeups of the offense with news they're being fined for wearing Beats headphones (and barely a Bose mention!).

It's actually kind of brilliant marketing - Bose gets made out to be the bad guy, and Beats gets plastered all over the news section, so much so that the $10,000 fine is well worth it - marketing expense.

List of NFL Finable Offenses, with fines.

Heck, one wonders if they're going to get a bunch of stickers to stick over their Bose headphones with the iconic "b". I mean, it doesn't get more interesting than that - they wear Bose headphones, but they're sporting the "b" that clearly indicates Beats.

Do you hear nothing? No, you hear a background roar of muffly rumblings.

Actually, a small (but not insignificant" amount of sound comes from around the ear as well - bone conduction can transfer the lower bass notes to the ear directly (it's why you can't have perfect silence except by being in an anechoic chamber). Of course, your ears when wearing ear defenders does crank up its gain - people in anechoic chambers do report hearing blood rushing through their veins in the ears, their heartbeats, etc. All noise conducted through the body.

It can get pretty freaky.

I shamefully admit clicking on it at least 10 times and cursing at my browser before realising.

The middle button on my mouse has acted up before, so I was clicking it and nothing was happening. I kept thinking it was the mouse so I clicked it harder, softer, and every which way. Then on a lark, I clicked a link elsewhere and a new tab opened sup, to which I noticed the link wasn't bringing up the destination in the status bar and figured that was the reason why it wasn't middle-clicking.

..is to not have a backspace ruin everything you just did just because you didn't have the focus you thought you had (Chrome!)

The big problem is the javascript "rich" editors that mess with browser state saving.

Backspace is a non-issue a lot of the time if you're using standard HTML widgets - every browser I've used from IE, Firefox and I think even Chrome save the state so if you accidentally backspace, you can hit Forward and boom, everything is restored. It's useful if you want to multi-quote Slashdot, for example.

But, rich editors break this functionality. I don't know why. Though, most rich editors work enough that backspace won't leave the page (or they use a javascript alert to keep you from blindly doing it), which is good for accidental purposes, but you lose it all when you return.

Quite annoying, really. Especially since the browsers even return text field contents if you close and re-open the tab (using Ctrl-Shift-T to reopen last closed tab, or reopening a tab from the history). Except well, rich editors. They always blank themselves...

My name-brand phone that I've had for ages -- and had Apple users asking me what it was, then telling me they were going to switch to Android -- has the exact same resolution as the iPhone 6 Plus.

And it's performance in every way is significantly less. When they had the smaller res, they lacked the CPU/GPU the modern Apple hardware has now. The modern Android hardware has the better GPU/CPU but the screen res is killing performance. Apple let them dance right over the sweet spot.

My phone looks better, it fits a pocket better, it weighs less, it's waterproof,

So it's smaller? Behind them times already I guess. Otherwise the six is pocketable for anyone.

Waterproof is something I use a case for if I need. I use the phone in the rain briefly without issue as I always have.

Your phone basically sounds like a fish-mash of things not important to anyone anymore (FM radio....)

Literally the only feature from the iPhone 6 Plus that I can find which my phone lacks is the fingerprint sensor,

Which actually works and opens a whole world you'll be left behind with as you listen to... FM radio.

no disabled NFC here

Fully operational and utterly useless.

Oh, and my smart watch is here now, not some vague date in the future

I wouldn't want what you have now either, but at least it probably also supports FM radio!

Apple are late to the party once again,

They are never late, they arrive when they feel they have something worth selling. I as a buyer appreciate not having to tolerate half-baked crap any longer, that was fine when I'm young but like Danny Glover I'm too old for that shit. Including FM radio.

What's wrong with using the iPad as a second screen, as some third party software lets you do?

Then you get touch and a traditional laptop.

All of the compelling uses I read about for something like the Surface have boiled down to pretty niche uses that are really not sustainable. It's nice that you like your Surface now, because it's not going to be around for many more years. Hopefully it will last you a while.

The market starting using more and more large but mediocre phones, just as demand is really starting to grow Apple introduces a model that doesn't sacrifice performance or battery life to have a larger device.

By waiting Apple also gave device makers a lot of rope to hang themselves with in going to screens with absurd DPI. Now the poor bastards (Note4, etc) are hamstrung changing and powering so many wasted pixels, and the companies cannot back off the resolution they have chained around their own necks.

Apple as usual simply makes a good idea work better than anyone else.

That's not what you said earlier.

I'm not BasilBrush, so there's no "what I said earlier" to speak of. What *I* am saying, however, is that speaking of walking up to someone and yelling "motherfucker" is missing BasilBrush's point, because the word's function in that particular context is that of a whole sentence. Saying what amounts to "you regularly have sex with your own mother!" is what might get you clobbered, not the word itself. Walk up to a person and yell "motherfucker!" while pointing at someone else and the person who was in one case so offended as to break your nose might actually laugh about it with you instead.

:) i'd love to but sadly it's one of the [few] contracts where i was in a proprietary environment. if i meet a software libre project some time in the future that needs that kind of stuff i'll certainly attempt to recreate it but it would need to be at least a year before i consider that.

They can roast the pigeons after throttling them and feed people who are homeless because of the disaster!

Yes, already planned for, that's called the Exponential Bakeoff algorithm.

Even setting the balance of government powers vs individual rights aside, the problem is that there's no such encryption. If it has a backdoor, it's vulnerable. For example, if it has an extra "NSA key" that can be used to decrypt it, then that key will be leaked eventually (Snowden is a living proof of that0, and at that point all existing data is vulnerable.

What he is asking is to compromise security below any acceptable standard for the sake of his convenience. The only correct answer here is, "fuck off". There's no balance to discuss.

Can you quote that right? Because all I see in the 4th Amendment is that they're not allowed to arrest or search unless it is reasonable; it doesn't say anything about being granted a right to search things successfully.

So far as I can see, 4A is not relevant to this discussion at all. It does not grant people the right to be completely secure from any search (as it specifically excludes reasonable ones), nor does it grant the government the right to force people to make said search easier.

For my own collection of systems, there's only one use that counts: that's me -- and this is a big deal for me. For my needs, both on my servers and workstations, systemd presents a lot of downsides and no upsides. Therefore, I reject it. I would prefer the relatively short-term pain of migrating my systems over the long-term pain of dealing with systemd -- but I rather that I could just continue to use Debian without having to use systemd at all.