I didn't and never have advocated muzzling anti-Semites.

Further, anti-Semitism is rooted in the belief of false conspiracies about Jews. Charlie Hebdo's satire and lampooning of Muslim fundamentalists is rooted in actually fulfilled conspiracies to kill civilians by Islamic fundamentalists.

Step 1.5: Show still images from the CTU on 24 as an example of "doing it right".

Everybody knows you're serious if you have giant, wall-mount displays showing your threat statistics, a world map showing the ISS positional telemetry and a half-dozen cable news channels.

Bonus points if you include several giant red buttons throughout the room with clear plastic safety covers over them with red sirens mounted over them. People will be reassured knowing you can hit the big red button when you need to.

If Charlie Hebdo had ridiculed Jews by drawing cartoons about the Holocaust, they likely would have been arrested instead of lionized. But, in France, Muslims are fair game.

That's a false equivalence. The Jews were *victims* of the Holocaust, not the perpetrators. Islamic fundamentalists are the *perpetrators* of terrorist violence. You entirely miss the point if you reduce Charlie Hebdo to just some guys making fun of brown people.

You're absolutely right about the outrageous hypocrisy of Saudi Arabia. Not only are they a repressive, theocratic regime, it might be argued that unfettered export of Saudi Wahhabism contributed greatly to the existing problems with Islamic extremism.

Taking a bribe is consider corruption in our culture. In another it may be considered payment for expedited services.

Except that bribes are almost never for "expedited" services, they are given to gatekeepers who won't provide the service they're supposed to provide without them. Can you give me one concrete example of an official who accepts bribes for better service but will still perform the service in a reasonable time without them? Or isn't using some kind of negative outcome (often criminal charges) for not paying the bribe?

Even in a commercial realm where differentiated services are the norm, the differential service price is usually known and advertised and the owner will generally get pissed if their employees are giving stuff away for side payments. You can't buy a coach ticket and then slip $100 to the flight attendant and get seated in first class.

In America we Tip our servers, the size of our tips are based on what we figure was the quality of the service.

Bring that one up at your next meal out and see how many people disagree. A lot of people don't view it that way and instead think of tips as a fixed percentage service charge or have some sympathy for minimum wage servers and tip the same regardless or don't think one person should be punished for service elements outside their control (food was cold, bad quality, server was tied up with a huge table, etc).

It feels strange that Apple is making such a profit with a rather smallish that may be 12% of the market and no particularly eye-popping new products since the Steve Jobs era, just a series of well-engineered refinements.

I think you underestimate the "eye-popping" value of the 6 Plus screen size among consumers. I've owned every new iPhone since the 3GS and despite waiting a couple of months after the release date, still had a backorder time of 6 weeks when I ordered a 6 Plus. That hasn't happened for any other model.

It may not have been an eye-popping change in absolute technology terms or geek credibility, but what would be and would consumers care? There's too many constraints on size and battery life for more much more than incrementalism.

Plus I think all smartphone vendors want to maintain the current niche paradigm for these devices -- the consumer understands the "role" of the smartphone in their larger electronics ecosystem.

I think it will take someone willing to gamble on the idea of a dockable phone that can be used with KVM as a PC and/or tetherable to a "screen only" tablet to really shift the paradigm a lot. Apple could do it since they control the whole ecosystem but likely want to protect their product segments from sales loss, x86 is too power hungry and Windows failed on RISC and with Metro.

Google seems likely since they aren't specifically tied to given CPU and so much of Chrome is web-focused. Maybe Project Ara is sort of the start of this to sort out the modularity aspect so that you can assemble an Android/Chome system from parts or dock components with other components.

No, this is really an absurd profit, Standard Oil's net profit from 1882 to 1906 was $838,783,800 equal to roughly $22B today, so on an inflation adjusted basis Apple's quarterly profit was nearly equal to the majority of the lifetime profits of one of the classic robber baron trusts.

The problem is the previous build was visually different while being MORE functional, this build is less functional if you have 19+ years of Windows experience. The previous build had the Windows 7 Start Menu with the addition of a live tiles dock area to the right, it added new useful functionality to the familiar and functional paradigm, the new build is basically a shrunk version of the Start Screen with all the crap that entails and which the majority of users have derided as being less functional on desktops (still the VAST, VAST majority of Windows machines). We had actually started plans for a Windows 10 rollout to our enterprise based on earlier tech preview builds, but those are now on hold and will be cancelled if they don't reverse the insanity. We can just keep using Windows 7 for the next 5 years.

Perhaps the research could help over time those distinctions exist and pair like-minded people together.

I thought most modern games already had systems to at least try and match players with similar skill levels.

Why not let abuse take place online in virtual environments?

Because it sucks and leads to much more offline abusive behavior by otherwise good people after they have been repeatedly harassed.

Instead, this psychology of banning and throttling likely leads to more offline abusive real-life suffering.

The opposite is true. Because the natural abuser is inclined to fight through any system thrown at them, throttling and other attempts drain their energy more than simply letting them post would, leading to more relaxed (or at least less) behavior offline.

Not to mention, we all know that trolls online are probably losers who would never in a billion years have the nerve to say or do anything offensive offline...

Asking myself the same question, I went with MDisc technology, in the BluRay capacity, in addition to my hard drive backups. MDisc uses an inorganic pigment as opposed to the organic dyes that are common on CD/DVD/BluRay recordables (and degrade over time).

I'll do an MDisc burn every year and move it offsite, to keep with the 4TB ZFS drive I rotate offsite weekly. The MDisc won't get my mp3 or mp4 files, but the stuff I can't recreate.

My best idea currently is to write PAR files of loop-back mounted LUKS volumes and include the PAR software source and ISO of the distro on the disc, in case I need the data in 20 years (emulators should be readily available for 2015 hardware).

I needed a BluRay writer anyway, so I went with this LG and it's been a great drive so far, and at the right price point for me.

Buckshot is most often #00 which is the size of a .38 caliber bullet. That would definitely hurt if dropped from 50 feet or higher.

#9 is .080 in diameter. It'd like being hit was a handful of sand.

The NY Times' article on this said a "government employee" (no name, no affiliation) had come forward to claim the drone and said he was flying it recreationally and that the Secret Service had interviewed him and said that all evidence indicated this was the case.

This seems odd -- who flies a drone recreationally in the vicinity of the White House at 3:30 AM? Or anywhere in DC for that matter. And a government employee? If you were a government employee, wouldn't you generally choose to avoid flying your drone around ten zillion government buildings

Why was he identified as a "government employee"? How likely is that the Secret Service is going to just accept a "oops, my bad" explanation?

Something about this seems off.

The other major problem I see is that this thing will have so many holes in it within months that there will be significant distortion to the image. Perhaps they'll use a self-healing material? In fact a quick google shows these students are working on testing such a material on a micro-sattelite.