Damnit. That's what I get for posting within 30 minutes of waking up.

In my defense, I do hear people seriously arguing that position.

... you really think China isn't doing the same with Huawei? As an added bonus, we know China will pass trade secrets to Chinese corporations.

I know this is Slashdot and all, but the OP was talking about rape. Are you really equating the two?

True in theory, but... honestly, how often are directors held accountable? At best, it's usually just a company-paid settlement with no admission of guilt.

I'm willing to bet some money that no CxO or board member will serve jail time or be fined more than 50% of their net worth, despite direct knowledge that their negligence caused deaths.

There is no contradiction, just nuance that I perhaps did not effectively convey. To get to 51%, you can either boost support for a candidate or reduce support for their rival.

Romney's campaign likely knew all of the following to be true:
- With 100% turnout, Romney would never be able to achieve 51%
- Effective negative ads increase turnout among the GOP base ("more important to vote so we can get that evil commie out of there!")
- Effective negative ads may decrease overall turnout ("they both suck, why vote?")
- Effective negative ads against an incumbent leader of a political party trickle down the ballot (you can turn Congressional elections by running against the President)
- Romney had a non-zero chance of winning (despite my hyperbole)

Sure, Romney could have won. Possibly. But his loss does not mean those who donated to the cause got nothing out of donating. They improved their relationship with the GOP, gained key Congressional seats, reduced support for Obama, reduced Obama's success rate in implementing his policies, probably moved Obama to the right, and so forth.

As for ~$1B, sure, it's a WAG. But I was talking about total negative ad spending on that election from the right, not just the Romney campaign. I haven't seen a good source on the data, and it is a reasonable estimate.

And yes, Democrats use negative ads for most of the same reasons. Though Democrats tend to benefit from increased turnout and suffer from decreased confidence in government, so their calculus is slightly different.

This happened to a colleague, who most certainly followed all the instructions and made a dozen calls to Apple. Two weeks ago. Still can't get texts from iPhone users. This is squarely on Apple.

Let me guess, you're one of those admins who requires a 16+ character password with at least 2 lower, upper, special and numerics, changed every 30 days, and you get mad about "lusers" forgetting their passwords?

That's a nice logical-sounding rant and all, but at the end of the day you're telling me unions, corporations, and some very informed people spend billions of dollars every year without getting any return on their investment? Even though there is a giant mountain of evidence showing that lobbying has higher ROI than any other investment?

No amount of money could have convinced people to vote for Romney. He was a terrible, terrible candidate. But with ~$1B of negative ads, they probably dissuaded a lot of people from voting for Obama and many other Democrats (or made them less eager to do so). And you're ignoring the fact that Romney wouldn't have even been a contender if he didn't have vast financial support.

You're right to wonder that. Unfortunately, I can't exactly share my data, but I do have a pretty large [non-random] sample size. Companies that are too small to have dedicated, competent storage and mail server admins have far higher uptime with reputable cloud providers. So far around an order of magnitude.

For every "omg, AWS region was down for an hour!" slashdot story, I've seen at least two businesses lose data on poorly architected storage that was not properly backed up or maintained.

For every "omg, Gmail/Office365 was down for an hour!" story, I've seen a company down for a week because their in-house Exchange server died or suffer constant outages because they used a cheap hosted Exchange solution.

If you can't afford to do it right, with a DR site, on- and off-site backups, and physically redundant systems, managed by competent admins, you are probably better off with a major cloud service.

Most of the small businesses I have worked with have an "IT guy" who knows how to troubleshoot Windows and do a few other things. I haven't been in a sub-100 person shop that had qualified storage, networking, and system admins.

SMBs need to outsource for specialized IT expertise, whether to consultants or cloud providers.

I have heard talk of using thunderbolt or similar for server interconnects, allowing servers to become more modular. Picture a rack with a computer node (or two) connected to some storage nodes, connected to a GPU node, etc. through PCIe. My [limited] understanding is that you could essentially make one server out of a rack of gear, interconnected at a much lower level. It would theoretically be more easily made redundant or upgradable, but we'll have to see what gets developed.

I can definitely see a use for it in the server space. Aside from that, we are already using thunderbolt in media. You just can't do uncompressed 4K streams over USB.

It's relevant. "Type44Q's Blog Throttles FCC" is rather different from "Google Throttles FCC".

Ahh thank you for the extra information, that does make sense. I actually want remote start for summers as well, but I've dealt with harsh winters in the past.

Did you agree to a contract of that rate for, say, 24 months that you can't cancel at any time? I doubt it, and hope not. You can almost always cancel without penalty.

I don't have U-verse, but I call my cable provider once a year asking cancel, then let them talk me out of it and offer me a better deal.

I agree on breadth vs. depth, but I think you're unfairly categorizing "education" as breadth. While undergrad is about broad knowledge, grad school is about specialized knowledge.

A CS undergrad at a good uni is going to be studying history, religion, politics, physical sciences, math, and a wide range of CS topics. A CS grad student is going to be focused on, say, machine learning, with more closely related courses. By the time they're doctoral candidates, they should have a very deep knowledge in one particular field combined with a broad knowledge of related fields... which should allow them to go multidisciplinary or work with people from other disciplines.

I suspect you know all of this and agree, but I wanted to bring it up just in case.

I know some grad students who would beg to differ about being "enslaved".

Jokes aside, I think I agree more with globaljustin here. While I see your point and would not equate the two, there is a similarity in the humor. I'm sure there is a technical word for it...