Say what?

Dude, either you haven't been paying attention, or you don't know how to use teh intertubes. Every movie is available as a torrent in full 1080p pretty much the day the blueray disks hit the store shelves. Many are available even earlier.

If by "race" you mean that the various release groups are tripping over each other in order to see which one can get theirs up in the shortest amount of time, then yes. "X-Men Days of Future Past" won't be available for purchase for another 3 weeks, but there's already a 720p blueray rip available on the torrent sites, and the 1080p version should follow in the next few days.

Got you one better: in this day and age it's pretty much inconceivable that they would disable bleutooth functionality. If you can pair your fancy unpiratable player to a PC rigged to copy the incoming audio stream to disk, you've got yourself a digital copy with essentially no quality loss.

I keep hearing this complaint - that there are devices out there which are "designed to be harder to repair" - but, at least in my experience, that's incredibly rare. More often devices are designed to be difficult to open due to concerns about warranty claims on modified items, and even THAT is pretty rare. Every electronic gizmo which I currently own can be opened with relative ease. Most of them I would be able to perform SOME repairs on, as long as it doesn't involve having to replace chips or capacitors.

There are some things that bug me - such as my Nexus 5 not having a (easily) replaceable battery. However, while I may not be happy about them, they're all design choices which the manufacturer made for reasons that have nothing to do with repairability. And, for the most part, they're things that don't really effect me (eg. it is highly unlikely that I will keep my Nexus 5 long enough to actually need a battery replacement).

If it were well supported by the data I wouldn't have said that it keeps being repeated without any good evidence. In reality, all of these claims are only supported by the "research" of S.A. Marshall, and there's no evidence that the guy ever actually did the research that he claims he did. There's certainly no replication of his results. But there is evidence that he had a habit of making up data to support his narratives.

This is like saying that the reason professional basketball teams are so good is because they actually try to score points. Silly, at best.

The actual reason veteran units are so dangerous is because:

1. They're experienced.
2. They're a (literal) example of the survivor bias; most of their crappy soldiers die off, shifting the bell-curve to the right.

That claim keeps getting repeated without any good evidence. Anyone who's actually studied history knows that it's complete bullshit. Human beings have been participating in organized murder and genocide for thousands of years. We have archaeological evidence of mass slaughter on every continent, amongst every major ethnic group. Plus we have evidence of lovely post-death atrocities such as scalping, ritualized slaughter, and even cannibalism; things which only further illustrate how unlikely it is for combatants to view the other side as "fellow humans". The idea that soldiers on the battlefield are reluctant to shoot at each other is complete nonsense.

You miss overpaying for goods?

A repair culture exists any time it's significantly cheaper to fix something than to replace it outright. A couple hundred years ago there was a repair culture about everything including socks, because a new pair of socks was a luxury and continually patching old ones was way more economical. We stopped repairing our socks when they became cheap enough to throw away. Do you really want to go back to a time when you had to keep repairing your socks because you couldn't afford new ones?

I don't miss that. Not at all. I much prefer having the choice to either tinker with my gadgets when I have the time, or just buy new ones when I don't.

There's no such thing as a natural map, unless you're talking about the geological outlines without any political boundaries. You know why your "natural" maps look so chaotic as opposed to your "artificial" ones? Because the former are a result of centuries of conflict carved out according to what each tribe could hold, whereas the latter are carved out arbitrarily by one tribe (ie. the British) which can hold everything. The latter is no more "artificial" than the former; it merely ceases to have any meaning once the all-powerful tribe packs up and goes home. The power vacuum gets filled by the old tribes all going back to their original squabbles.

The British didn't create conflict by putting up new borders; they put a stop to ongoing conflicts which resumed once the British left.

While there's a small bit of truth to your conclusion, it creates the false impression that "cleansing" is a modern invention. That's bullshit. These tribes were destroying and enslaving each other long before the white man ever set foot on their continent.

So we've given them lower infant mortality and more regular food availability, while they continued to kill and enslave each other at roughly the same rate as before. And you think that "messed them up"?

How so?

Seems to me at worst we've made things slightly better for them. I'm pretty sure the women, at least, are happy to see more of their children surviving to adulthood. Plus we've given them the tools and knowledge to build better societies, even if it hasn't happened yet. How is that a bad thing?

Not to mention that you whole comment stinks of condescension. "Should have left those poor dumb Negroes to their own devices; they'd be much happier running around naked chucking spears at the local wildlife".

Neither of those are a crime in any jurisdiction I'm familiar with. Maybe there are some ass-backwards states in the US where that's true, but they would be the exception rather than the rule. Nice try though.

FTFY. If you install P2P software and share files with the world, you are no longer operating in private.

Not really true. There are two things you can do to remain anonymous:

1. You can buy coins for cash from random people meeting up in coffee shops.

2. You can put the coins through a laundry; they get merged with coins from everyone else using the service, and spit out in a random number of accounts with random quantities all adding up to what you put in (minus fees).

Either one of those options provides a fair degree of anonymity. The two together make you untraceable, unless you've done something else to link those coins to yourself. Either way, there are definitely ways to remain anonymous while using bitcoins, even though they're inherently an open-book system.

That would be more of an issue for 3G than WiFi. Unless the guy trying to kill you is in your back seat. Which seems like a bad idea.

Well I dunno about you, but the first thing I would make sure of when shopping for a new heart would be that it doesn't have a remote-shutdown option. Who cares that the guy who doesn't like you can access it, if all he can do is make you slightly sleepy.

Anyway, probably the biggest cause of death with these things will be Slashdot users trying to install Open-WRT or something ....

Ok, let me try:

Dilanian has done some strong work and has at times been highly critical of the CIA. For example, in July 2012 he wrote a piece about sexual harassment at the agency that angered the press office. In reply to an email from a spokesperson, Dilanian said that complaints about his story were “especially astonishing given that CIA hides the details of these complaints behind a wall of secrecy.”

Hrm. Sorry, not seeing the "full editorial control" bit.

Newsflash: Reporter covering CIA does actual research before publishing. More at 11.

Actually, given the state of the current media, I guess this is pretty shocking. Most reporters just make up whatever they want, or interview "experts" whose sole claim to fame is having a blog with 10,000 daily visitors. Doing real fact-checking is pretty rare these days. It figures that Slashdot would see it as "suspicious".