Exactly. He's an idiot.

By that reasoning, all words are arbitrary in meaning. Yes, in a sense they "are", but it's a trivial, meaningless sense.

Words carry agreed upon, shared meanings and connotations, which is what makes them useful. Whether he knows it or not, he wanted to use profanity as a kid because it was profanity. If it magically wasn't anymore, it would lose its allure.

At 21, Haselton testified before the US Child Online Protection Commission (COPA Commission), a congressionally appointed panel mandated by the Child Online Protection Act, where he presented evidence that the error rate in most commercial blocking programs was much higher than commonly believed.[3]

If this Slashdot article that we are posting on is an example of his qualifications as an expert witness, then I assume he's been posting from prison since then ...

Why are you digging a 8 feet deep trench for fiber?!? Laws in different states seem to vary, but between 2-4 feet is plenty. If you use a ditch witch style machine, the trench is only a couple of inches across on the surface. If you wanted to do it really well, you could cut a strip of sod out, but it to the side, and put it back when you were done.

If by "needs of the industry", you mean "get to pay programmers less", then sure, that's what they want.

The generic MS drivers know how to see if the drive supports TRIM and send the commands if it does. That's the point of TRIM: It is an ATA standard command, so special software isn't needed.

In fact, in Windows all you use is the generic drivers. I mean you may install drivers for your SATA controller, but not for your drive. My laptop has a Samsung 840 Pro in it, with Samsung's Magician installed. However the drivers in use are disk.sys, partmgr.sys (both Microsoft files) and iastorf.sys (Intel's file). No Samsung provided drivers. Magician can directly send commands to optimize the drive if needed if the OS can't, but the OS sends TRIM commands no problem.

So the Japanese government owns the car engines and the people just pay rent to possess them?

Or perhaps more likely "pro Russian shill" next time, spend a little more time doing research before you put together your bullshit theory. See you seem to have missed one little detail: This came from Russian TV. This isn't something that surfaced in the US, purporting to be originally from Russia, it was on Russian national television.

So, maybe think your bullshit conspiracy through next time,a nd make sure you know the sequence of events.

I hate this attitude that if you don't have the top spot, you are crap. It is so silly the attitude that the US somehow lost something by not having the first spot on the top 500 list.

I mean for one thing, the Chinese computer is more specialized than the big US supercomputers. It gets its performance using Intel Xeon Phi GPGPU type processors. Nothing wrong with hat but they are vector processors hanging off the PCIe bus. They work a lot like graphics cards. There are problems that they are very fast at, linpack (which is what's used to test) being one, but others they are not as fast at. Many of the US supercomputers (like BlueGene/Q) use just standard CPUs, meaning their performance holds steady over more kinds of tasks.

Then there's the fact that while the US might not have the #1 spot they have the #2, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 10 spots. In other words, half of the top 10 computers. That is more impressive than having one really big system. Ya it's nice to have a huge system and some simulations need really big systems to do, but there's something to be said for lots of different research groups having access to high power computers.

Also there's the fact that linkpack isn't necessarily the best benchmark.

I'm happy that the US is looking to invest more in HPC because money spent on research is always well spent in my opinion. However let's stop pretending like it is some major failure that the US doesn't have the #1 computer. Big deal.

I've seen the same kind of thing. I know a lady who's from Serbia. Very smart woman, and she's lived in the US for a couple decades, immigrated and become a citizen. However, when it comes to world news, she believes the Serbian media over all others. It's pretty bad too, it makes Fox News look credible (well almost) with the level of propaganda and shit. However, to her, that's the truth.

It seems a somewhat common thing that whatever you start getting your news from first is what sticks with you as the "true" news if there's disagreement later.

Geeks have real issues with the concepts of knowledge and intent mattering in the law. They think something is either ok, or not ok, and if it is ok it is ok in all situations. Of course that's not how the law work. Intent in particular matters a hell of a lot. Something can be illegal or legal just based off of intent, or can be a different level of crime. Likewise if you know you are helping someone commit a crime, that can get you in trouble whereas doing the same thing unknowingly can be fine.

It is complex, because it varies, there are crimes that don't require intent, or crimes where even doing it unknowingly will get you in trouble, but there are others that are not. It is complex with various shades of gray, which I guess is why geeks can't understand it. Many seem to be very binary thinkers and want absolutes in rules, which the law frequently doesn't have.

I think it's fine to buy them soon after release if you want them and can afford them (remember, to some people $60 for entertainment isn't a huge deal) so long as it has been properly reviewed and your research indicates it is a good game. There are plenty of games that launch strong, just as there are plenty that don't.

But never buy it before you can research if it is good, and if you are likely to enjoy it.

And I am one of many people who harp on the "Never preorder games!!" thing. So why do people do it? Two reasons:

One is they just get caught up in the hype. They are all excited and wanna have it as soon as possible. Silly, but human nature and it does happen time to time.

The other is that companies try to bribe you. They offer bonuses that you only get if your preorder, or that you have to pay for later. So there may be some day one DLC, but you can have it "free" if you preorder.

It is still, of course, and extremely bad idea to preorder and people should be talked out of it at every opportunity. Wait until it is out and reviewed, then decide if you want it.

Its astonishing to me that anyone agreed to operate under such an NDA anyway. 17 hours is sufficiently long that you could aquire the game, play it for 2 hours to get a feel for it, 1 hour to record a video, edit for another 2 hours, and then post it with 10 hours left on the embargo.

Any game company having their embargo end long after the game is available is just begging for trouble. Or they know there is a very serious problem and they can't or won't delay the release.

There are only so many ways someone is likely to design some functions, particularly if the class demands particular formatting. So if having one function that is very similar or the same triggers it, then it is rather bullshit.

I could see this too. Where I work professors are extremely lazy and grade via script. They don't read the programs students hand in because that would be "too much work", never mind that in the arts and humanities professors have to read papers all the time. Then they usually use some kind of automated cheat checker program. Well, said checkers aren't something that just makes sure files are bit identical. They allow for various fudge factor. That means they can match even on things that aren't actually copies of eachother.