And even if they were the same, I love how /. is so fixated on one mistake one department made over a decade ago.

How about the repeat three years ago?

And let's not forget about "OtherOS" four years ago.

Or profiteering from Whitney Houston's extremely convenient death two years ago.


No, Sony's PR problem doesn't come from "one mistake one department made over a decade ago", it comes from their entire corporate ethos, which their latest woes merely exemplify. They pretty much have made it a holiday tradition of shoving their foot up our asses on a yearly basis, and then expecting us to just smile and ask when the next gen of Playstation will come out so we can re-buy our entire game library that doesn't work on their empty promises of backward compatibility.

Again, exceptions don't prove the rule.

You have an odd definition of "exceptions", when I specifically included both the bad cops and the rest of their departments. "But you left out that one really really good cop in a coma for the past 30 years!"


And bystander videos do not exactly tell the whole story.

True enough. Why, in that first video I linked, you don't get to see the context - That the guy had just run over a spike mat, lost control of the vehicle, and almost hit a cop. Clearly that missing details justifies half a dozen armed thugs beating the shit out of an unconscious guy lying bleeding on the side of the highway. Damned biased bystanders, always trying to make the police look bad!


We get to see a far more complete portrayal of events.

Except, of course, when the cameras "malfunction" at those very convenient moments when the accused suddenly has an attack of clumsiness and walks into a brick wall... Repeatedly.


That is why police body cams are so much more useful.

And that is why police hate hate hate mandatory camera policies to the point that they piss and moan and vandalized the cameras and threaten to go on illegal strikes over them.

Exceptions don't prove the rule.

You see all those "good" cops standing around "just doing their jobs" in those videos?

The guy choking the drunk college kid out doesn't prove the rule. All those "good" cops doing nothing, however, do.

For every bad cop we hear about, know that an entire fucking department has facilitated his behavior, making them every bit as worthless as the "bad" ones.

Violence against police is why police react so forcefully.

Uh-huh. Why, just look at the violence from this unconscious asshole! Why, that threatening way he got thrown from the car when it rolled over at highway speeds - Heck, even I felt intimidated by him, just watching the video!


People who are compliant tend not to get shot.

Right - They just get tased, pepper-sprayed, and/or choked out for shits n' giggles.


The only good cops know they have a camera trained on them (and can't just smash it and harass the photographer), period.

Hmm, I just can't see it. How do plant stems help parse that particular turd?

It can, however, stand on its own, making the "Hamming-correct" headline read as follows:

"Serious Economic Crisis Looms; Russian China May Help".

So clearly, flatware manufactured in Russia might just save us all from the looming non-specific economic crisis. Time to open a Pottery Barn in Moscow!

Context, much?

"Hotel Group Asks FCC For Permission To Block Some Outside Wi-Fi".

Putting two and two together - If hotels would block WiFi to make a buck, why not cell signals?

Killing your guest's cell phones is not liable to earn you many repeat customers

Why would the FCC grant the hotels permission to block WiFi, but not all RF?

The core "problem" here centers around lost revenue due to people inside the hotel using self-provided free or lower-cost alternatives to the insanely expensive crap internet access the hotels themselves provide. Why stop with internet? Just think how much more money the hotels could make by blocking phone service as well!

Repeat guests? C'mon, really? You shop for hotels the same way the rest of us do - Either your employer tells you "you will stay here", or you use a price search and pick the lowest place that doesn't mention rats in the toilet.

How is this denying service, unless you have some sort of extreme mental handicap that makes you incapable of making a simple decision?

I have a contract that says "I will give you X dollars for Y bandwidth each month". And as many overwhelmingly one-sided ISP-favoring clauses as that contract does include, I can comfortably say that not one of them makes any mention whatsoever of "occasionally we'll intercept your session to ask you useless questions".

As for "incapable" - My ability to answer has no relevance here - If I just don't want to answer their damned question, they can fuck right off, hmm?

It's pretty standard for providers to redirect to one of their pages when they need to bring something to a user's attention, or get user-input.

Bullshit. I have never had my ISP hijack my connection to either communicate with me, or to get my input. They typically just include a flyer with my monthly bill (which I promptly discard, because I have zero interest in any relationship with my ISP beyond "I give you dollars, you serve up the bits I request").


And it's not hijacking.

I request page X. They serve me page Y that demands that I take some action before they'll let me get to page X. Tell me, AC, how do you define hijacking, if that doesn't do it for you? "Saaay, nice airplane you have here! For your own good, though, we just can't let it go on to Dallas until you give us all your jewelry and electronics".


I do have to wonder, though - What will the UK nannies do if essentially the entire country opts out and says "Yeah, thanks, but we want our porn and violence, thankyouverymuch"?

The real reason your open source skills don't help get you a job as much as you might like?

The business world uses the Microsoft foodchain. Simple as that.

Like it or not (personally, I don't, and I say that as someone who started as a Linux guy - But pla gots ta eat, son), if you compete for a job against someone similarly competent overall, but familiar with MSSQL, VS201X, Azure, and all the rest of the relatively recent MS buzzwords - You may as well not even go back to the second round of interviews.

Even worse - And I say this from experience - The few shops that really do use Linux in production environments do so because you'll have an annual IT budget measured in hundreds of dollars with an expectation of five-9's uptime.


/ Cue a dozen responses of "but we use Oracle / Linux / SAP / XServe at my job" that do more to prove my point than refute it.

So, on a standard US keyboard, is this sign a minus or a hyphen?: -

Gonna piss off the typography police here, but...

Yes. They mean the same damned thing, and don't give me any crap about one looking a little longer than the other. A hyphen is a dash is a minus sign is any mid-height horizontal line.

Readability scores? Seriously? I will damned well use whatever character comes out when I press the key between "0" and "=" on my keyboard, and to hell with your broken automated readers that can't deal with the default character produced by 99.9% of keyboards in the English-speaking world.

They want to redefine "discipline" in order to change our culture.

That's nice, Tina, dear. You play your little make-believe games with all the other ivory-tower bleeding hearts, while the adults get real work done.

We've personally dealt with long-time academics who have no real world experience. They'll spew theoretical crap all day long, and those of us who have worked in industry see it for what it is: crap.

In CompSci, I would tend to agree with you; and the humanities do count as complete bullshit, so nothing for them to really get objectively "wrong". :)

But in Quantum Physics? In that domain, the academics overlap 100% with "industry". Sure, you could argue that virtually the entirety of the semiconductor industry depends on quantum physics, but IMO, that field evolved incrementally from the "Cat's whisker" (which may as well have worked by magic for all its users understood about it), not from any sort of first-principles breakthrough as verification of the theory.

Wow, loving all the ACs calling this obvious, who clearly didn't even make it to the abstract! "Such wave-particle duality relations (WPDRs) are often thought to be conceptually inequivalent to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, although this has been debated."

Clearly, all you armchair physicists need to set those ivory-tower morons straight!