Imagine a Beowulf cluster of exercise bikes!

True, but even just throwing compression on every track and extreme compression on the output just makes it sound loud. Even the most highly compressed commercial releases are highly mixed and mastered to sound good before run through the loudness grinder. There's still a difference between "would sound good if it wasn't so loud" and "this sounds terrible, and it's so loud I want to claw out my ear drums".

They're no longer 'needed', but they are definitely helpful. Access to a better studio (and more importantly, a better recording and mixing engineer) will give a better sound. Getting sounds recorded to 1s and 0s is indeed easy to do well, but making it sound good is still a huge pain in the ass, especially if you don't know anything going into it (in other words, if you're indie). The barrier to entry is smaller, but only if you don't need quality.

If you don't believe me, look at a publication or forum dedicated to home recording. The biggest question/topic is "how do you make [any instrument] sound good?" or "10 tips for a better sound using [some tool]". If it was so easy and obvious, there wouldn't be so many questions on the topic. When my band recorded several years back, I learned a lot, but the best I could do was make it sound like a decent demo. If I got a few years of experience under my belt, I think maybe then I'd be able to get reasonable 'indie radio' sound, but it would never match a pro. Access to these guys (on someone else's dime) will cement labels as a mainstay for those who are large enough to want to get on the radio, but haven't been around long enough to pay for their own professional recording help up front.

And their PR tools are still going to beat whatever you can leverage on your own, even if you are a hit on last.fm, iTunes, et al. There's an argument that record contracts will eventually be mostly for this PR package, but it still requires the band is able to finance their own professional studio with engineers.

No, it doesn't

Not really, an assumed impact would 'only' kill millions. There would be no long-term climatic disaster to kill everyone.

Unless, of course, we try making a massive pile of the entire planet's nuclear weapons to cushion the impact...

Only when I'm being facetious ;)

Isn't the point of privacy protections to prevent these unlikely circumstances from ever needing to be considered? Add the fact that the dataset is publicly available and it's even more severe. It's a breach of privacy, regardless of whether it is exploited or not.

Besides, I'm sure there are trolls out there who would get their jollies purely by skimming the dataset to find people with embarrasing movie habits purely to expose them. Why wait until that happens when you can file as a Jane Doe to prevent it in the first place?

Yeah, only people who want deliveries to their actual house give their correct ZIP code!

It's a catch-22, no doubt, but at least this way she can possibly force Netflix to fix the initial problem.

She chose to be proactive, rather than sit and worry. Can't fault her for that. Besides, it is hardly a forgone conclusion that she will be revealed as the Jane Doe in a reasonable time frame.

But if your code works on 80-90% of your installed machines (Windows) and you're certain to keep that architecture, it can be justifiable to lock into the platform. Unless you absolutely need to be multi-platform (how many people really need that?), C# is often a better choice.

Remember, Java was supposed to be used on embedded systems, like VCRs. It never caught on because it wasn't portable or powerful enough, and people just continued to write C for their microcontrollers.

In other words, lower bitrate can be better, but only if you compare to shitty and inefficient compression.

Personally, my favorite are the games which take you to a high score page with a URL something like this: facebook.com/silly_game/score.php?score=1364

Replace that with facebook.com/silly_game/score.php?score=999999999 and instantly top the leaderboards. Hooray! I don't see why that would be part of the game if they didn't intend for me to do that...

She is being investigated, and until the disciplinary board reviews the case she is barred from campus. Assuming she (or anyone else) was a danger to others, you wouldn't let her continue to go to classes until after the investigation was completed, would you?

Not if the same student also expressed a desire to 'split someone's skull', then looked forward to 'cracking heads monday' shortly thereafter. The second statement, on its own, is nothing to worry about. It's when there are corroborating messages that violence can be implied.

Unless the student made a habit of mentioning their desire to go to class, it might be reasonably assumed odd that the order of messages was "I want to stab someone with an embalming instrument" -> "I can't wait to go use embalming instruments". I'd be uneasy as well, since the implication is that a violent urge is the impetus for enjoying the class, rather than simply thinking the embalming process is bitchin'.

The context is there as well. Her other posting says "I still want to stab a certain someone in the throat with a trocar though. Hmmm ... perhaps I will spend the evening updating my 'Death List #5' and making friends with the crematory guy. I do know the code ..." Suddenly the context can be seen to shift from simply about class, to referencing her desire to do violence.

Keep in mind that earlier this year we had a mentally unstable student charged with murder. The offense? Poor lab protocol. So, a college student going off the rails isn't unprecedented. I see no harm in a little additional caution when an already stressed (by nature of university) college student is having violent thoughts or fantasies and is looking forward to their next classroom time with sharp instruments. She has the chance to appeal, as well.