My read of it is slightly more favorable, though still not good. There are marketing firms which specifically target college students. I'm sure that as a property management firm which also targets college students they already have contacts with the marketing firms. It sounds to me like they want to sell ad space to said firms, who would then resell it to their advertisers. The ads would probably be injected by hijacking DNS requests and using transparent HTTP proxies, not unlike what some hotels and "free" wi-fi hotspots do. My guess is that they don't plan to give preferred or degraded bandwidth to any actual content provider (unless you count rival advertisers as "content providers"). As such it's not a net-neutrality issue per se, just another scumbag trying to capitalize on a captive audience.

It's amusing to me that just a couple stories before this is the one about OpenDNS phasing out Guide, which is a similar advertising grab. Maybe you can point to the OpenDNS article as an example of a provider dropping that revenue model because it pissed off the users too much.

Think of how this compares to pot hole repair!

You mean, the same pothole repair that can be done by one uneducated worker with a shovel and a pickup truck full of gravel or asphalt? Yeah, just think about how it compares.

In general I disagree with the idea of a "right to be forgotten". Rather than trying to "forget" the past pretend that all that embarrassing and/or illegal stuff never happened, how about if we all grow up and, as a society recognize that people do dumb shit and can actually change over time. You shouldn't have the "right" to track down and burn all the copies of photos of you smoking weed that you happily plastered all over your Facebook page when you were in college. It happened, and if someone still has evidence you can't compel them to hide or destroy it simply because it's embarrassing now. It would be so much better for all of us to realize that opinions, attitudes, and behaviors change over time; we learn from mistakes, and hopefully don't commit them again. Own up to it, and cut others some slack if they did dumb stuff of their own a decade ago.

Until an actual mechanism is shown for light causing obesity, I'm not giving up my blue canary in the outlet by the light switch!

I was born closer to the first moon landing than to today. That's because I was born on the other side of it. Hell, I was born closer to WWII than to today. And in another year I'll be able to say that about WWI.

Kids. Get off my lawn.

First, why does programming need to be accessible to more people? That's exactly the opposite direction a mature technology goes. It use to be easy to fix your own car, but now with the modern engine and manufacturing techniques it's damn near impossible for most people to do more than add consumables. It used to be easy to fix electronics, but now it's impossible to take things apart and if you do you find everything is done in literally a black box of a chip and there's nothing you can do to it. These things have good points and bad points and I'm not here to argue for or against them, just to say that mature technology tends towards "no user-serviceable parts inside". Why would you expect programming to be any different?

Second, the pain in programming doesn't come from the tools. Yeah, it's a pain to learn the tools, but that's a pain that's short-lived. The real pain comes from the nature of programming. It's caused by having to tell the computer in excruciating detail exactly what you want it to do. In order to tell the computer you have to figure it out for yourself, without glossing over any "you know what I mean" steps, because the computer certainly doesn't know what you mean. And not only do you have to tell it how to do the job when everything is working as it should, you have to anticipate all the ways in which things could fail and tell the computer what to do in those cases, too. THAT'S the painful part of programming -- the programming. No tool is going to fix that.

Have you read the BSD style(9) man page? It specifically recommends omitting unnecessary braces. In an organization which follows this style guide, not only would the lack of braces not be flagged in a code review but if there were braces around a single-statement 'if' clause the reviewers might require that they be removed. Now, given that OSX is derived from BSD...

Use a space after keywords (if, while, for, return, switch). No braces are used for control statements with zero or only a single statement unless that statement is more than a single line, in which case they are permitted.

[...]

Closing and opening braces go on the same line as the else. Braces that are not necessary may be left out.

if (test)
....stmt;
else if (bar) {
....stmt;
....stmt;
} else
....stmt;

(Leading dots added as placeholders because why the hell would anyone ever want to post code samples on a News for Nerds site, anyway?)

It should be noted that the "super-secure" OpenBSD platform ships with this same style guide. FWIW, I agree with you that braces should be mandatory. I think this is a supremely dumb recommendation.

How many employees work at these plants? How do the per-capita rates of these illnesses compare to the rates for those not employed by Samsung? "26 workers contracted leukemia!" sounds bad, but if the rates are commensurate with the overall population then Samsung probably isn't at fault.

(Please note that I'm bitching about shoddy reporting, not trying to be an industry apologist.)

Even after reading the article I can't tell what's going on here. Is Red Hat refusing to give any support for RHEL installations when used with non-RH OpenStack implementations? Or is Red Hat supporting RHEL but for problems involving non-RH OpenStack they're saying, "Hey, not our software, not our problem"? The former would be a dick move. The latter is perfectly reasonable.

We have a placebostat on the wall. You can spin the dial and watch the little LCD numbers change, but it doesn't seem to have any real effect on the HVAC. If I get too uncomfortable I walk into the server room. There I can get any temperature I want just by picking which rack I stand next to.

If only we could paint road markings with some magic substance which would take light from the headlamps and reflect it directly back to the light source, so the markings would appear bright to the driver. Nah, that's crazy. You'd have to make paint with billions of microscopic reflectors or something. And how would you ever get them lined up to reflect back at the cars? Nope, embedded LEDs are definitely the way to go.

TFA is certainly heavy on complaints and light on actual information. I totally understand the need for security in a military situation, and the need to save space on board. It sounds to me like the e-readers are probably a good compromise. But what I'd really like to know is how the e-readers compare to the existing libraries?

* Do these supplement or replace existing on-board libraries?

* How many paper books does a typical on-board library have, anyway? How many books are typically checked-out at a time?

* Is this a limited-scope pilot program or a full-blown library replacement? If it's not just a pilot program an average of five e-readers per vessel seems a bit small.

* Are sailors allowed to bring personal e-readers, phones, or computers aboard? If so, I'd say that the security of these devices is irrelevant and they may as well go with off-the-shelf devices.

IMHO, they can't make it worse. I hate the Gmail interface. And even if they do somehow manage to make it less usable than it is now, I'll just continue to use a stand-alone email client via IMAP.

Unfortunately that rule would cripple the net. The wording doesn't leave any room to filter out DDoS and other malicious traffic. It's essential that ISPs retain that ability.

What's wrong with pricing insurance based on the risk being taken on? Why should I pay higher insurance premiums so higher risk people pay lower ones?

In that case, why have insurance at all? Why not simply scrap the insurance middle-man and have each person pay their own expenses out of pocket?