Number 3 (no Adobe Flash) is a reason to love Apple products though. They got that bit of the list wrong. It's forced website owners away from proprietary Flash towards truly multi platform html5.

So sure, it's easier to hang up on them but you are actually doing them a favor and helping them out by doing so.

No, failure to take hostile action isn't a favor; it's neutrality. Installing their malware would be a favor. I can appreciate those with the time and energy to take fight to this enemy (good on you!), but I have other battles to fight with my (however high) limited anger.

The problem with this enemy, which makes it so hard to care, is how irrelevant they are. So they call people about bullshit, wasting their time. That can be annoying, but there are so many more annoying things.

I suppose some people would say this enemy is worse that that, because the call is just a way of performing a SE attack, but I disagree. I just can't help but get blame-the-victim-y with SE attacks like that. I think many of our society's real problems are caused by SE, much of it legal (e.g. "vote for me, because I'm a member of the correct party," or "believe our religion's dogma, because your parents did") and that we'd all be a lot better off with more "scam antibodies" in ourselves. So part of me hopes these scammers flourish, thereby teaching people to stop being so fucking gullible. Maybe you can't fix stupid, but we can try, and an environment full of con artists is good for that. These assholes are evil, but they're good for us.

No, I'm not fully committed to that outlook (sure, I wanna hurt the bad guys too) but I'm conflicted enough that it evens out. And while we're at it, don't knock lazy! So a position of neutrality, it is.

I have never gotten one of these calls. But I have gotten a few calls like this:

[Phone vibrates. I see the non-local calling number. Reject and block.]

That's the new, lazy version. Until a few weeks ago, I had many of these:

[Phone vibrates. I look at the non-local calling number and wonder who that could be. Google the number and apparently every non-local number that ever calls me, is associated with robocalling. Reject. They call again a few days later. Reject and block. Then a few days later I look at my Visual Voicemail which my shitty Galaxy S4 software never tells me has new entries until I refresh it, and some actual human speech may happen.]
ME: "Fuck."
[And I see they left a few messages containing nothing but silence. Delete.]

But that second scenario doesn't happen anymore. Robocallers have successfully trained me.

Which shows that the word is undefined. But I would expect, whatever the actual details, "hardcore" means unsuitable for broadcast TV. I would agree that GoT might be defined as porn, but is being broadcastable automatically makes it not hardcore. My definitions would not include anything transparently consensual as hardcore, but explicit portrayal of sex is porn. But the "hard" in "hardcore" implies some level of violence or coercion.

Anyway, I introduced the word into the conversation, and what I means was the sort of non-consensual violent porn which I think would be damaging to children. Whatever the words used, there are some extreme images which are capable of damaging children. While I accept that consenting adults should be able to access such stuff via moderately protected channels on the internet or similar, they should not, as the OP suggested, be transmitted free to air on any wavelengths the transmitter chooses, including those already in use for domestic TV. There is a need for a regulator of some sort - though the rulebook for that regulator is not obvious.

Of course. But the OP was suggesting people should be free to do whatever they wanted - which would include using bandwidth wastefully and overwhelmingly (i.e. at high power). Hence the need for some form of regulator to enforce the use of efficient modes, and power levels no more than necessary, not as the OP implied at complete liberty.

I agree that modern technology makes possible a greater variety and greater number of uses of the available bandwidth. All the more reason for a good regulator to share it efficiently

No, I would not describe reasonably consensual sex of the sort required to make children as /hardcore/ porn. Hardcore porn probably requires strange ustensils, use of bodily orifices in ways that do not lead to reproduction, often blood, pain or simulated pain, obvious coercion.

Children, not having yet developed the sexual drive, do not understand the motivation for sex. However, I do not think that seeing normal consensual sex, which I would describe a porn but not hardcore porn, would be seriously damaging to children. But the violence, simulated or real, common in hardcore porn is very frightening for children who do not understand the world but know that they are weak, uninformed and defenceless. I would ezpect it to be seriously traumatising for a majority of pre-pubescent children,

I never claimed more moral authority. I claimed my right to express my opinion on /. I also suggested that I am probably in the majority. That is not a moral statement, it is a personal view. No, I think the OP is a short sighted selfish git, but I do not see it as a political statement, just an ignorant one. That, also, is a personal opinion not a claim of moral superiority,

In, I don't need evidence for "Think if the children". As a parent, I think if the children. A purely emotional response, but one that I share with most of the human race. Which is how we got here - species that don't think of their children tend to go extinct, at least at our scale (insects etc do fine on lay 'em and leave 'em). It is one of my fundamental values, along with free speech and not being eaten.

And I think expecting small children to work out what is happening and take appropriate action when Bugs Bunny is sudsenly replace by sado-masochistic sex is to have totally a unreasonable understanding of what children can and cannot do, and betrays someone who, so far as children are concerned, does not know what they are talking about.

I entirely agree one should supervise children. Children should only be watching safe channels, and adults should supervise them. But your proposal is to invade the safe channel - to replace Cartoon Network with snuff movies. This is not putting porn where the unsupervised can find it, this is forcing porn into areas where reasonable people would not expect to find it.

It is not "children might", it is "you are forcing on children". The difference between consensual sex and rape, the difference between guns in self defence and firing at random in a shopping mall.

So you want to subject children to hardcore porn?

I have no problem with adults viewing what they want, but children are different, and broadcast TV goes to children. I don't think I want to live in your world.

Not only is does it have negative value in the phone marketing, it's confusing and disappoints people - they think because it's Windows it will have more compatibility with their PC and will run PC applications and then find "yes it's Windows but it doesn't run Windows apps". Apple didn't call the iPhone the Mac Phone for a reason (even though it reputedly runs the same OS kernel).

Microsoft would have been better off just calling it Metro instead of Windows. Or pretty much any other easy to pronounce name.

EM spectrum is a scarce resource, shared between all the community. If one person fills up the spectrum with high powered broadcasts, they deny others the use of that spectrum for potentially more valuable resources. You cannot buy or manufacture more electromagnetic spectrum: what we have is all there is, and more people want it than than there is space for. Would you be happy if, for example, I knocked out all WiFi and cell signals for ten miles around my house? Would you be happy if I overloaded the frequencies used by the emergency services? Would you be happy if I filled the TV frequencies with hardcore porn or a terrorist manifesto?

You have to be a sociopath not to expect there to be some sharing of limited resources.

(I still do things the classic way: filesystem on lvm on luks on mdadm. not using ZFS yet.) I'm not sure it's exactly about what's required.

Consider wear leveling on SSDs. Only the filesystem really understands which blocks need to preserve data and which ones are don't-care. So to do SSDs right, it needs to pass info about unallocated storage down to the volume manager, whch then passes it to the encryption, which then passes it to the RAID, which then gives it to old-school "real" block device (which then passes it to the wear-leveling firmware, I guess). Sure, that can work. But when the filesystem can talk to the physical block device, it's easier. If you're writing block devices that implement things like volumes and encryption and RAID, from your PoV, things that are allocated vs not-allocated are totally different than how the filesystem sees it. To you, a block is just a block and a whole bunch of ioctls are totally irrelevant and not related to what you're working on. You're going to find this type of information to be pesky and you might not handle it right (or more likely, it takes a long time before you handle it at all). And in fact that has happened a few times, where certain block devices' feature set lagged a bit, behind what people with SSDs needed.

I suppose another easily-contrived example would be if you have a few gigabytes of data on a few terabytes of RAID, and need to [re]build the RAID. If your RAID doesn't know which blocks actually have data, then it'll need to copy/xor a few terabytes. If it's a unified system, then it can be complete after copying/xoring a few gigabytes.

Get rid of your dictator and adopt a representative democracy and it will be over. Indeed, nobody could have thought it would go on this long.

..contracts requiring NDA's that now allows customers to review secret details of products or company practices on public forums.

Can someone who favors this, explain why this might be a good thing instead of a bad thing? Maybe an example? It sounds to me like endangering such a (seemingly, to me) bad practice might be an intended consequence, not an unintended one.

I can't even see how a review made under an NDA might be useful. The premise is that the reviewer is withholding information. "The spaghetti was excellent. [censored]I am prohibited from saying anything about the sauce.[/censored]"