It takes an absurd argument to counter an equally absurd argument.

One absurd argument is that configuring a web server to instruct a browser to download a bunch of image files (as linked in the HTML) is a crime if a human being did not grant you that permission directly, since permission via configuration settings clearly doesn't matter.

This argument has been used (successfully) in court before, and in the US is a crime.

So an equally absurd argument is that me making my web browser connect to their server and being fed data, despite my browsers configuration to go ahead and do that, what matters is nothing but my wishes. If I wish for that data to not be downloaded, then at that point the data was forced upon me, and should be equally criminal.

You don't get it both ways.

A CPU is nothing but a ton of logic gates wired mostly to each other inside of a tiny package, and logic gates are made from multiple transistors.

Here is a page showing how each type of logic gate is made from transistors:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g...

Within a logic gate chip, all gates have their ground and power lines wired together and out to two pins on the chip, while the inputs/outputs typically also end up at pins on the chip, with everything else being internal to the IC.

Scaling up a level you can wire together multiple gates similarly.
A CPU is generally nothing but thousands to billions of these transistors wired together into gates that are wired together into "logical blocks" (think basic lego parts put together to form shapes, which you make a lot of, and then build your thing with the shapes)
This is why even today CPUs generally have a "transistor count", the number of the most basic elements on the chip making those gates that make up logical blocks that end up actually doing things.

The first CPUs in fact were boards (and boards and boards) of nothing but transistors wired together this way, before we could put them on a tiny silicon package in a small enough form to be called a microchip.

The first chips (at least that I am aware of) that packaged standard gates together in an IC is the 7400 line of chips. A 7402 chip for example contains four separate NOR gates for example.

Here is a Z80 CPU built using nothing but these 7400 gate chips:
http://cpuville.com/Z80.htm

The Z80 was used in home computers like the TRS-80, the ZX Spectrum, the Osborne, and I think even some of the old Commodore line. It was also in the original Nintendo Gameboy and Gameboy Color, and a ton more systems.
It's still used today although more for things we would think of as embedded devices. I have a SCSI card powered by one, for example.

Instead of a tiny IC measuring roughly an inch squared, when using 7400 chips the CPU is as large as you see in the picture on that page.

Just as it is rare to code in assembly these days, assemblers take higher level commands that consist of many assembly instructions and compiles those high level instructions down to blocks of assembly code (and then proceeds, hopefully, to optimize those blocks... but pretending optimization is disabled may give you a better idea visually)

Hope that explains some of it and didn't make the confusion worse ;}

It's been tried. Nobody bought. Except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, no news outlet adds enough value that people will pay for it.

The usual rules on this have to do with consecutive days worked. Six days in a row -> 1.5x pay. Seven or more days in a row -> 2x pay.

There was a time when most US employees got that.

What's with the "photo" of the 2nd stage / capsule separation? It looks distinctly like a 3D render, not an actual photo. Or if it is a real photo, how did they get it?

And double time on Sundays.

Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.

Oh nonsense.

to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

Back here in the real world, this is how this sounds:

"Ben decided that someone was making changes to the codebase that had no technical purpose, which served solely to push someone's weird social agenda and desperation to modify the language to suit them, as well as to refer to anything which went otherwise as sexist. Since this is pointless, and since Ben has been in communities where this created unnecessary shitstorms, Ben rejected the PR in the hope of preventing a bunch of drama-driven developers from wasting a year complaining about unimportant things. When Isaac decided to merge the PR, Ben felt slighted: he had been given the authority to make these decisions, and Isaac decided to make a social point that Ben would get trampled no matter what."

That's all fine and good. One developer is being a neckbeard about not wanting to hear a cry of oppression in something that has nothing to do with social justice. The other developer is being a neckbeard about being all inclusive no matter the tone.

Then you get to the point that adults are angry about.

and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

That says "we value Ben so little that our disagreement over the nature of an unimportant, purely social justice related, non-technical PR would have caused us to fire him on the spot, instead of to have a discussion."

That's *ridiculous*. Employers have an obligation to their employees to create safety and stability. There is no legitimate cause on God's green earth for that to be a fireable offense. Joyent's management are PR-oriented children, and that you're standing up for them is an embarrassment to the 'movement' you're trying to rationalize.

I am a gay and trans ally.

But nobody should get anything sterner over something like that than a stern talking to. That's *obscene*.

Target and K-Mart understand consumers far better than you ever will. Target's the company that knows people are pregnant before they do themselves.

Despite that you disagree with this, your extremely superficial read is probably self serving.

It is very likely that protestor revenue loss simply outweighs game loss after the high sales launch. I expect that they know exactly what they're doing.

The worst thing I can think of in The Bible is the Great Flood.

If you think that's ten times worse than anything that happens in video games, I think you might need to play some more video games. That doesn't even cover Final Fantasy materia.

Sephiroth will straight up destroy Saturn like five separate times per fight while trying to kill you.

I agree, pretending that a company choosing to not sell an item in its stores is a form of censorship is likely to get you karma on Slashdot, despite being critically incorrect.

Hopefully nobody notices that they still sell Lifetime specials and so forth in their TV section.

Maybe Romper Stomper and Mad Max got through on local cultural relevance.

Mod parent up.

"HTTPS Everywhere" is security theater. Most stuff doesn't need to be encrypted. Worse, as the parent post points out, it causes the creation of security holes. This weakens security for the few things that need to be encrypted.

We don't need "value added services" in the middle of the network. Not for secure content, anyway. Perhaps some content should be signed, but not encrypted, so it can be cached, but not modified. Cloudflare, which decrypts everything that goes through it, is a huge security hole.

Or she might get knocked up in highschool and drop out. Kids don't always turn out the way you plan and being a good parent means encouraging your kids to succeed and still loving them even when they fall flat on their ass.

It's also a bit hypocritical when geeky/nerdy parents act all shocked and shaken when their offspring would rather go out and interact with other kids than stay at home and play with a chemistry set. Hint: it's just as bad being the stereotypical jock father who smashes in his son's door because the kid prefers reading over sports.

An iPad is a more power computer than any I had access to all through school

Yep, if you're talking about the innards.

It's also a more capable general-purpose computer than those Apple II-series computers and early MacOS 6/7/8 machines

Nope.

An iPad is an appliance for running apps, not a general-purpose computer. Go ahead, just try to program on it, or hook it up to manipulate some random gizmo.

Sure, it can be done -- by someone with the right development tools (which wont run on the iPad) and skills. A far cry from what school kids could teach themselves to do with Apple Basic or Hypercard.