It's a search engine though, so I think this case they are much more similar to an ISP than a media company. They're not creating the content, so I don't understand why they deserve 'free speech'. They should just display the search results, similar to how under the principles of net neutrality the ISPs should just deliver the bits. If there's no compelling business interest for them to be filtering out results other than ideology, then there should be legislation to prevent that filtering. And for the record, I give absolutely not one damn about the "rights" of corporations - they're just as corrupt and slimy as the government, and have vastly more power in practical terms.

I'm seeing you get a lot of flack for this, but for the record I totally agree. For a site that generally supports net neutrality and would like to see ISPs regulated as common carriers, I'm surprised by the assumptions other posters are making about the competitiveness of the search engine marketplace. "Use a different search provider" is getting to be as useful a suggestion as "use a different ISP" when your only options are Verizon and Comcast. I would support legislation that regulated search engines in a similar way. Search engines generally aren't there to create content anyways, only display it, so I actually think they are much more similar to an ISP or telecom in that sense instead of a media company or other entity worthy of 'free speech'. Only a lolbertarian thinks that there's a practical difference whether it's the government taking away your rights or a giant corporation anyways. If this was Google censoring results, would these people feel differently?

The "right to own slaves" necessarily infringes on others' right to be free. The right for two consenting adults to marry infringes on noone else's rights. What you're saying can be boiled down to "why won't you be tolerant of my intolerance?"

You have anarchy wrong. Anarchists are not against government regulation. They are against power. If a small amount of government regulation results in a large reduction in corporate power, some anarchists (such as this one) would support that.

/usr is a directory for storing user-level programs and files (bin, lib etc), as opposed to root or kernel level programs and files. The reason it's its own top-level directory is for historical (or contemporary in embedded environments??) purposes. You could boot up linux using only the small number of core programs in the /bin, /sbin etc directories, then mount /usr to get your user-level stuff. You could also store /usr on its own drive or partition that way for space/performance. Nowadays it's kind of redundant to have BOTH e.g. /usr/bin and /bin. (someone correct me if I'm wrong) /user is the old name for the directory of users' home directories. If your username is myUserName, then ~ would point to /user/myUserName. Nowadays it's called /home (again I could be wrong about /user not being used anymore. Been a linux user for 10 years, but haven't strayed far from debian)

Link to Abe Lincoln was a Democrat question? Also, the percentage of boxes that are shaded when there are no shaded boxes is 0.

It might surprise you that I'm not a fan of the term 'misogyny' or the coopting of the word 'hate' to mean 'bigotry and stuff' (although I support 'hate crime' laws, just wish they were called something else). As for 'patriarchy', sorry bro but men still hold the cards politically, socially, and economically. It's not really relevant who's 'fault' that is - the word just describes the power imbalance, and in this case we're talking specifically about when that power balance is NOT men's fault. But yeah, in general i agree that 'buzzwords from the feminist dictionary' are lame. As for 'all heterosexual sex is rape/ all men are rapists', that's a very outdated viewpoint in feminism that was fringe even when it was the most popular in the 80s. The 3rd wave feminism/intersectionality that's mainstream in feminism now really addresses how ridiculous the black/white feminism from that bygone era was, and looks at things like male-on-male rape, the role racism plays in sexual assault cases, and having respect for women who choose to take on traditionally female roles (or don't).

No, you're wrong. He said that a certain ('the oldest') professor was especially harsh on girls because she wanted to 'drive out' the supposed women "cruising through on their backs". He didn't say that these women actually exist. Then he said 'careful about letting female engineers interview other potential candidates unless they are known to be genuinely fair-minded', implying that this was not a fair-minded assessment, followed by describing what the professor was doing as 'discriminating'. And i mean honestly - have you ever seen someone 'cruising through on their back' in this industry? like ever? I've seen high-performing women get illegally fired by male bosses for getting pregnant, but never someone actually sleeping their way into any kind of professional position in tech.

Your rights are only important when they're also my rights.

As a male feminist ("kumbaya!"), I agree with you about women often being the roadblock to other women's success (example: http://science.slashdot.org/st...), but I think it only reinforces my viewpoint about the pervasiveness of the patriarchy. Our society makes women feel that they have to compete with each other as opposed to competing with men. I think this is due to the real or perceived notion that there are only so many 'slots' available to women especially in technical fields, and the real or perceived idea that non-technical qualities (attractiveness, submissiveness) are unfairly considered when judging women moreso than men. That's something that must fundamentally change before we start seeing economic equality, and its something men and women must work equally hard to fix.

Thanks, this makes a lot of sense wrt to congressional pork. It may take $1m to bribe an politician, but $1b if you have to bribe their constituency as well.

Genuinely curious why you think this? It's been my understanding that there are strong ties between the government and the defense contractors, and the defense industry there is fairly shrouded in secrecy, making corruption easy to pull off. Do you think the Chinese government is more capable of taking an 'agile' approach to a space program than the US?

We will never be in a DBA bubble as long as data is king. For most companies, their database is an order of magnitude more valuable than their code base.

I think it's actually a little of each. Look at the apache POI project for supporting microsoft document formats in enterprise java apps. from wikipedia:

The name was originally an acronym for "Poor Obfuscation Implementation", referring humorously to the fact that the file formats seemed to be deliberately obfuscated, but poorly, since they were successfully reverse-engineered.

The other acronyms in the project, such as HSSF (horrible spreadsheet format) are equally revealing.

which is approximately 45 Solyndra scandals