And not voting for either is what, exactly?

Voting for the "lesser of two evils" is not the right way to look at the problem. The right way is to realize that politics is rather like a giant game of tug-of-war. A vote is a statement about which direction the country should move. Actual policy with remain in the center (with some corruption thrown in, sadly), but a vote in one direction will pull the center in that direction. It's not the lesser of two evils: it's a little pull in the direction you think the country should move.

Microsoft doesn't want Windows machines to cause the amount of malware and exploits on the web to explode far beyond current levels. They'll continue to get security updates for sure. But it does mean that if they call in to MS support, the agent won't help them without a valid key, and there may be some non-security Windows updates which will be restricted.

What Microsoft is warning people about is that hackers may have trojans, keyloggers, etc. built-in to the OS from the start. I don't know why this would be a danger with a "non-genuine" Windows 10 downloaded from MS, but that's been the danger with previous non-genuine versions of Windows.

Yes, we should have mandatory voting. But for that to be reasonable, voting has to be easy for everybody. That means strict requirements for polling place access (meaning reasonable maximum wait times and transit times), make voting day a mandatory national holiday (i.e., no business could force a person to work on voting day), and absentee voting should be available everywhere.

I think EMG intended this to mean that the person being harassed could delete their own account if they get tired of the trolls. Because apparently people who are on the receiving end of relentless campaigns of harassment including rape and death threats should be punished for being on the receiving end of such relentless campaigns.

This doesn't make these people "self-made". Inheritance just isn't the usual way rich parents help their children become rich. The fact remains that it is extraordinarily rare for middle class and lower to become rich.

Usually people become wealthy by having wealthy parents.

Also, it's not really foolishness. If you make the assumption that the market is efficient, it is actually rational to use price as a signal of quality. So there's a bit of a catch-22 here: if the market is efficient, then price is a signal of quality. But if people see price as a signal of quality, then the market will no longer be efficient.

This isn't a matter of how free or not the market is. It's a matter of information.

If it weren't for a lack of information among market participants of this very sort, there would be no such thing as $10,000 ethernet cables.

Nations that have these laws usually also ensure that next to nobody has to live in such poverty that they can't afford a fine. The US is pretty exceptional in its callousness towards the poor.

Nah. The lawyer charging more will often get the deal because the wealthy person can afford it, and because they'll see the higher pricetag as a signal of how good the lawyer is.

The simplistic idea of competition you have invoked here depends upon all parties having all relevant information. This almost never happens in the real world.

There might be some issues with corporate-funded science (e.g. medical trials), but yeah, science is doing just fine overall. The ones who get things wrong all the time are journalists (there are a few good ones, but there are a plethora of horrible science journalists).

It's nice to have sometimes. For some things it's a lot easier than using the mouse pad (in particular it's faster to click on a specific thing). Usually I don't use it because I forget about it (as I spend most of my time with a desktop). But it definitely is a cool thing to have.

Nope. You have a fair amount of control as to how much data Google stores, and can tell Google to delete all of your data if you like. See here. I do think Google could stand to do a bit of work improving the interface, and making it more clear that they allow this sort of thing. But they do have pretty good privacy controls.

Even on a Chromebook, you can avoid Google collecting essentially anything connected to you if you simply browse in an incognito window and don't log into Google within that window.

If you have a weeks-running job and it isn't fault-tolerant, you're doing it wrong, period. As long as it's fault-tolerant, it isn't a big deal where it's run.

That said, if you have a job that takes days to run on a single computer, it'd be a good idea to either invest in a compute cluster or get some time on one.

At least women in STEM and global warming are important issues....

I started development in C++, but have since done quite a bit of development in Java, JavaScript, Go, and Python. I've really come to miss Clang's expressive compile errors, though there are other things about these languages that can be nice. Java is okay. JavaScript is abominable. Go is nearly as good as Java. Python is pretty terrible. As far as compile errors are concerned, anyway.

The other languages have other things that are good and bad, but C++, especially C++11 is great for just getting things to compile. One other cool thing about modern C++ is that it's easier than ever to force more and more errors to occur during compile time, instead of waiting for a runtime error to blow things up in production.

To make the most of C++ really requires good programming practices, though. For that I highly recommend Scott Meyers' "Effective C++" books.