That says to restart in Safe Mode, and many of the replies specifically say that does not work. If you have installation media, that's no problem. Otherwise, you've posted horseshit nonsense that helps no one.

And they forward satire as news to their too-stupid-to-breathe friends, and it becomes this whole big thing.

If you were the largest social media site, wouldn't you just throw up your hands one day and say "Fine, if they can't tell the difference, we'll just tag everything from The Onion with a satire tag"?

I know I would. And I wouldn't want to send the message that "you're too stupid to tell the difference", so I would do it with internal tests, then small public tests.

So what happened here is first line tech support did not get the message because it was not a new feature - t was supposed to be targeted to a very small population. The population target screwed up and some reporter found it. FaceBook had to either claim it was a bug, to Wired, or commit to a plan. They chose the third option, calling it a "small test" they could either dismiss or build upon.

The real bug here seems to be in FaceBook's "related stories" widget. Visit one link to a satire site, and the "related links" fills up with at least one story from that site, and two other links which will probably also be satire.

Now FaceBook looks like it is pimping fake news stories. Or, to the stupid people, now you are looking at something just as unbelievable, but obviously FaceBook thought it was real or they wouldn't display it.

It is the belief of people in FaceBook, and FaceBook's intention of keeping peoples' faith, that is at issue.

People being too stupid to breathe won't change because you pointed it out. Obviously, they are able to breathe or they would have stopped. Similar for breeding. Now imagine that your audience is smart enough to breathe and breed, but smart enough for little else.what would you do?

Remember: most people are very much like insects: they notice input and react to it. Posts here on dotslash exemplify it, when they take a predictable news story and post an obvious but unrelated "conventional wisdom" without giving specific consideration to the context. Input, reaction, and little in between. I suppose you would agree that assholes like that post all the time here? So what do we do about these stupid people?

The wall street journal thought it was important enough to write an article about, so go yell at them.

And some dude named Nate Hoffelder thought it was important enough to write some web page about so yell at him.

Then Nate shoveled it into the Slashdot Word Salad Shooter (tm), and Soulskill shat out this garbage. Go yell at it.

Even worse, Reason58 felt the need to post a statement which boiled down to "I don't want to have to think about difficult things like how different sub-populations utilise different resources and what kind of impact, or lack thereof, that might have on business and economy." So go yell at yourself.

I'm just stating the obvious, and I won't be back round in the morrow to see you fail to defend yourself, so again feel free to yell at yourself.

Fuck that, I'm staying with Project Gutenburg for my books on my Kindle DX.

It works perfectly for me, because I'm already behind on my reading list by life + 75 years.

I totally would have stuck around. If only to be able to talk to the next person into space.

"Did you like zero gravity?"

"Yep"

"Did you do cartwheels through the ship?"

"Yep"

"And grab the oh shit handles on the other side?"

"Yep"

"I rubbed my balls on that"

"Well they washed them down"

"With sterile pads"

"Yep"

"Balls on that too"

"Shut up. I'm getting coffee."

"In the coffee cup on your desk... ?"

"Beg the question" is a commonly misused phrase that you probably confused with the uncommonly used phrase "begs questions".

You are apparently objecting to something that did not even exist except in your own mind.

I suppose if I were not a native English speaker, I could not have a conversation with you because you would be constantly correcting me on idioms I supposedly misused, only to find I simply mistranslated something that you otherwise, if not for your thickheadedness, would have understood just fine.

Mr. or Miss "as if you care", we don't care, and we would be better off without you.

Here's why: Every year "the dictionary", read as various dictionary publishers, routinely add new words that are in common use. Why? To document their usage and meaning.

Here's why also: "The dictionary" commonly adds meanings to words because of the different ways they are used. Encyclopedic dictionaries typically give date ranges for when they were introduced as meaning that.

http://dictionary.reference.co...

According to dictionary.com, "prompt" as you used it above could mean any of 14 different things. How am I, as a simple grammar Nazi, supposed to determine which of 14 different meanings you intended? Maybe I can narrow it down to 5 or so by diagramming your sentence.

Here's an idea: go back in time and tell everyone who uses "beg the question" incorrectly to FOAD before their idiocy becomes popular.

If you can't do that, go back in time to the first instance of you reading some idiot complaining about incorrect usage of "beg the question" and tell that person the fight is already lost because people are too stupid to use words correctly.

If you can't do that, stick a sock in it and let us get back to talking about things.

Seems like you are talking about general computing and related applications of computing. This guy is talking about business IT, which is a tiny subset of computing.

It would not be inappropriate to mod parent off topic for posting a generalist reply to something written for a specific audience.

Are you sure of the legal basis of this? Or is it just logic?

Because in my state, the wording means their recording is legal but mine is not. So that makes me think people should not rely on logic for legal matters.

Why?

To write applications in one language, instead of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, and something else. Not including multiple levels of configuration files (website and web server at least).

What's the worst that could happen?

The NSA could insert backdoors which, unless they were incomprehensible crypto, would be easily found by both white and black hat investigators. Also, Carnegie Mellon University, which has a pile of research announcements every year, has its entire research department under suspicion of colluding with an oppressive government agency and spends decades regaining international status as someone you can do anything other than make the punchline of a joke.

CMU losing status is, to CMU, absolutely an intolerable option. I'm not saying it won't just because of the potential impact, but you asked what is the worst that could happen. Backdoors, and a respected university bursts into flames and is disregarded for decades internationally. That's bad.

What's the best?

Fewer bugs.

Why is the NSA interested in something like that directly?

Because despite recent bad press, they are interested in security. If we can write stuff with fewer bugs, we are more secure. Maybe there are still plenty of bugs in the hardware/OS that they know about, but fewer bugs in the application level, which means the foreigners don't know about them because they don't exist.

What is the potential for abuse?

Pretty small. White hats will vet the libraries, black hats will try to penetrate it, and it's no more or less secure than anything else a human has written. But people can make mistakes in fewer languages. And they aren't replacing languages, from the sound of it.

Is it to make code analysis that much more centralized and (supposedly) simple?

I suppose you could read the article.

Why didn't this come up with itself before now?

Why didn't the airplane come up before it did? Are you insinuating something? Do you know something we don't know? Did someone mod you up for any particular reason, or just because you spewed thoughtless rhetorical questions?

A watchlist of "known or suspected terrorists" have "no recognized terrorist group affiliation."

Did Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols have a recognized affiliation? They apparently were against the handling of Ruby Ridge and Waco, which I think a lot of Americans would agree with. Not so violently against, but also against.

Does that make them suspicious of being terrorists? No. But would it surprise you, after the fact, to know that they were 1) on a list and 2) not affiliated with anyone specifically?

This is not news. They could be affiliated with a non-recognized group. They could be not affiliated with any group. They could be loner whack jobs. They could be completely crazy and unpredictable to the point of potentially doing doing massive damage, like numerous lone gunmen have done, or lone bombers, or lone anything.

I don't doubt that there are people that do not belong. But if I started some crazy organization tomorrow and posted threats, everyone associated with me in that organization would be a suspicious person without being part of a recognized organization.

Quit foaming at the mouth about things that don't matter, and start to fucking care about the things that very goddamned well do matter.

Can we make this a little bit more generic?

You can't 100,000,000 users on 4 mainframes if you completely disregard how Java works. You can't make the database performant if you don't understand basic concepts like primary and foreign keys, and more than likely knowing why knowing where you database is stored may be important.

They could teach mainframe, or database optimization, or very advanced ancient Java. But the common lesson that needs to be taught is that there is a very low level that you have to keep in mind. CPU and memory usage are in your control, if you need it. And being aware that this is even possible is a very generic lesson.

Do we need to teach everyone Java 1.3? Or can we standardize on one low-level concept from which people can generalize? Can we illustrate that things can be done faster, better, more efficiently? And that at some point a trade-off needs to be made between memory and speed?

The best lesson I learned was that interpreted languages can be faster than assembly.

I'll say that again, interpreted languages can be faster than straight up assembly. Already know how?

If the program opcodes are so small that the opcodes and interpreter for the whole program exist entirely on the L1 cache (which was the only on-die cache at the time), and the equivalent program has to hit off-cache, your interpreted code will be faster.

It has no bearing on reality, because I will never have to produce something that runs that much faster than assembly. But at the same time, I'm very sensitive to what my magically powerful language does behind the scenes to accomplish what I ask of it.

So which examples do you propose to allow a generic education that teaches that you have options, and can perform faster? Be warned: your response cannot allow students to think "that particular query is slow", or "Java just does that slowly".

No. Because

1) These are not simple hashes, for more read the article. They seem to be able to distinguish images in the same way Shazam can recognise music while ignoring bar or vehicle background noise.

2) Once flagged, the image would be reviewed before further action is taken. A false positive would not make the news.

Now it's your turn. How will a hash collision lead to the jackboots ruining someone's life?

The word 'debatable' does not mean what you think it means.

From other comments, they threatened and backed down. But that's not the point either. Just having it in your policy is bad enough, that's not on any side of the word "debatable". Actually withholding money is likewise not "debatable", even if they cave.

We could debate, but it would serve no purpose.

You typed a lot of words for as little as you want to seem to care.

Were you trying to convince people to see it your way? Clearly not the way it was written.

You say you don't get it. What if I explained it to you? I'm sure I could find a way to make this relate to you, so that you could at least understand why other people care. Would that help? Was that what you were asking for, in your own strange way?

Dharma & Greg: "The show starred Jenna Elfman and Thomas Gibson as the title characters, whose characters were complete opposites: Dharma's world view being more spiritual, 'free spirit' type instilled by "hippie" parents, contrasted with Greg's world view of structure, social status requirements, and "white collar duty" instilled by his generations of affluent parents/ancestors." (from wikipedia)

Two and a Half Men - same basic "mismatched cohabitants" schtik.

BBT - Mismatched cohabitants combined with a mismatched love interest.

It's the guy who reinvented "The Odd Couple" for a new generation. The geek stuff is used as a punchline, not for any geek value. They may as well have written an actual "Odd Couple" script and inserted the word "tech" at random points when something wasn't as funny as they would like, and have a consultant fill in the gaps with things like "Write a GUI in visual basic to backtrace the IP address" only without the obvious mistakes.

The only reason it's not nerd blackface is the cast seems to be actual nerds, at least in spirit. It is just as insulting to nerds as blackface was/is to actual black people. It is just as based in stereotype and conventional wisdom, and ultimately ignorance.

There is nothing for any true nerd or geek to like, other than having someone finally represent your demographic, even taking it as the backhanded compliment that it is. Occasionally, as with Two and a Half Men, there is a really good joke that I did not expect to hear on network TV, and for that reason alone I'll watch if there's nothing more interesting available.