One somewhat recent example:

http://metronews.ca/news/ottaw...

There are some people who feel that you have a right to speak on an issue only if they agree with what you are saying and will attempt to silence your speech if they do not.

That is why when you play online shooters, which attract many immature males, "faggot" is the default insult. They are insecure about their sexuality, as most young men are, and thus being called gay is one of the more hurtful things to them. they externalize that, of course, and thus that is what they use by default against others. However if they find something that works better, they'll go after that. Race, age, nationality, etc, etc.

They are assholes, sociopaths sometimes, they want to hurt others and they choose whatever they think is the most effective way to do it.

For that matter humans in general do it, women included. Bill Burr ha some hilarious bits, based in truth as the best comedy is, about women steering a losing argument towards personal attacks against their man. Saying he has a little dick, is a momma's boy, that kind of thing.

Well, that really happens. It isn't because women are some horrible creatures, but rather because they are using the insults they have learned will hurt the worst, when they get mad and decide to turn to insults. It's what people do when they lash out.

The difference between a normal person and a troll/asshole/ITG/sociopath and so on online is that most people do it only when they are angry, when they are lashing out at another person. These asshats do it for fun, just to get a rise out of people, and so on.

It is not something to be celebrated, or even tolerated (in any community I moderate trolling is a fast way to the banhammer) but trying to act like it is a problem limited to or directed at women is silly.

Of course it is assholes acting out. That's what happens when you remove consequences. Games have been an excellent example of that in terms of gameplay and mechanics. There have been games that have tried the whole "No rules but what the players make, they'll work out a stable system." No, actually it devolves in to a bunch of griefer assholes, and everyone else leaves. These people can't do that kind of thing in real life because they'd face consequences.

Sociopaths learn to moderate their behaviour in the real world because if they don't, they get punished. Online, they can run rampant and so they do.

We consolidated about 20ish old servers (and added new systems) in to two Dell R720xds that are VM hypervisors. Not only does this save on power n' cooling but it is way faster, more reliable, and flexible. It is much easier and faster to rebuild and stand up a VM, you can snapshot them before making changes, if we need to reboot the hypervisor or update firmware we can migrate VMs over to the other host so there's no downtime. Plus less time is wasted on admining them since there are less systems, and they are newer.

On top of that they have good support contracts, and some excellent reliability features that you didn't get on systems even 5ish years ago (like actively scanning HDDs to look for failures).

Big time win in my book. Now does that mean we rush out and replace them with new units every year? No, of course not, but when the time comes that they are going out of support, or more likely that usage is growing past what they can be upgraded to handle, we'll replace them with newer, more powerful, systems. It is just a much better use of resources.

Seems like you are trying to work out a solution to a problem you don't have yet. Maybe first see if users are just willing to play nice. Get a powerful system and let them have at it. That's what we do. I work for an engineering college and we have a fairly large Linux server that is for instructional use. Students can log in and run the provided programs. Our resource management? None, unless the system is getting hit hard, in which case we will see what is happening and maybe manually nice something or talk to a user. We basically never have to. People use it to do their assignments and go about their business.

Hardware is fairly cheap, so you can throw a lot of power at the problem. Get a system with a decent amount of cores and RAM and you'll probably find out that it is fine.

Now, if things become a repeated problem then sure, look at a technical solution. However don't go getting all draconian without a reason. You may just be wasting your time and resources.

Figure out what level of energy use, as a whole, is acceptable by your calculations. Then figure out how much that means you get to use. Make sure to include all forms of energy usage, such as heating and energy used in building and delivering goods. Adjust your energy use to meet that level, and see how that goes. Then we can talk. Otherwise, kindly STFU.

The reason I say this is not because I'm against trying to reduce energy consumption, I think conservation is always a good idea when practical, but because I'm sick and tired of hypocritical online eco-whiners. They'll bitch about how "people" should do something yet are unwilling to do it themselves. Somehow they see it as ok to bitch that others should be willing to make sacrifices but don't make any themselves.

So put up or shut up. Don't whine that "people" need to change their energy use, but then continue to live an energy intensive first world lifestyle. You are people too. If you cannot or will not adjust your usage, why would you assume anyone else would be willing?

I think a more accurate description of the Bitcoin community would be "highly greedy" or "has a poor understanding of economics". I don't think technical has anything to do with it. In fact if you've some technical knowledge, some understanding of the size of the financial system, and then knowledge about the bitcoin protocol you quickly come to the realization that it has a deal breaker problem (it has several in fact) and that is that it can't scale to be the amazin' world wide currency the faithful want it to be, it can't handle the transaction load that things like the Visa network does, because of the nature of the protocol.

So all the technically savvy people I know do not involve themselves in bitcoin.

Basically I see a few types of people who are in to bitcoin:

1) Hedge fund traders/scammers/etc. Basically people out to make a quick buck. They don't believe in Bitcoin other than they believe they can make money on it due to the volatility, complete counterparty risk, etc. It is just a market to be exploited and left.

2) Self described "Crypto-anarchists" aka "greedy wannabe libertarians" who think that bitcoin will free them from the tyranny of having to pay taxes for such unnecessary things like roads, clean water, and such. They like it because they think it'll lead to a world where they get to keep their money and be free of laws.

3) Doomsdayers/gold-bugs who have a poor understanding of the concept of money (namely that it is a theoretical construct and always has been, regardless of what item is used to represent it) and think that the world and economy are doomed, but if you have the right magic currency, you'll be ok. Because bitcoin has something "backing it" that makes it worth something no matter what and thus it is great.

4) People using it for money laundering, like the Silk Road. They use it because they figure it is harder to trace than dollars/euros/etc and so use it for payment for illegal items.

You pay taxes in US Dollars in the US. You need to convert anything to that. Like if you sold a bunch of goods to someone in Europe and got paid in euros. No problem, and you can keep some of that in Euros if you like, but you need to sell some of those Euros to a bank (or other entity) and get dollars to pay the IRS. They only take dollars.

Meile will do this. It'll cost you though. High end appliances, with a very high end price tag.

The original "MHz myth" came out of Apple fanboys back in the PPC days. The PPC was supposed to be super amazeballs, beat up those nasty PCs, all that stuff. Well turned out when you got a new PPC Mac, it was slow, since everything was 68k code being emulated. So they latched on to the benchmarketing, the few PPC benchmarks that ran well, and that the MHz of PPC would get much faster. They said that PPC has a positive second derivative (growth of growth) of MHz, x86 had a negative 2nd derivative and so on.

Then of course x86 went and scaled waaay higher, so all of a sudden they started talking about the "MHz myth" and how MHZ didn't matter, PPC was better (again at a select few benchmarks) etc, etc, etc.

Anyone on Slashdot who gets smugly superior about this and how "stupid companies are" is just being a hypocrite. We have ALL forgotten things in our lives. We've all forgotten an event we were supposed to be at, a bill we were supposed to pay, something we were supposed to bring with us. It happens.

What's more, everyone has been in a situation where something didn't happen because they, and everyone else, assumed someone else was going to deal with it. You don't go and check on everything that ever happens around you or involving you, you mentally categorize things you are and are not responsible for and ignore the latter.

So ya, companies, which are made up of people, can fuck up too. It's amusing, but perfectly normal.

My two big hobbies are computer games, and digital audio production. I spend easy that on either one of them. Like digital audio, I not long ago bought BFD3. $350 right there, and it is nothing more than a digital drumkit. I'll never make a cent on it, it is just a toy to me, but damn is it fun. That's just one set of tools I've bought, there were more in the past, and I'm sure more to come.

Or gaming, I buy new games whenever the mood strikes me, get new hardware when I need it and then of course there's MMOs. When I played WoW that was $130 or so for the game and all the expansions, plus $15/month for like 3-4 years. A bargain in my book, I got a tremendous amount of entertainment out of it.

For all that, my hobbies are cheaper than some I know. One of my coworkers is in to cars. Fuck me can you spend a lot on that shit.

Hobbies cost money. Everything costs money. That's just life.

And as you said in terms of a business cost? That's chicken shit. $40/month is hardly on the radar of a small business. When my parents ran their small business (about 4 employees) their PHONES cost more than that. Never mind power, heating, rent, payroll, taxes, etc, etc, etc. Just having the requisite number of phone lines (two) cost more than $40/month. Such a minor cost it was just inconsequential.

Is that he can't seem to milk the mobile app gravy train, or at least the perceived gravy train. I know a surprising amount of people who thought "Gee great, I'll learn how to make mobile apps and then go off and make my own company and be RICH!" They are the reason why there's so much same shit in app stores.

However, turns out that most don't make any money. Producing the 4,593,928,192nd tower defense game just doesn't excite anyone, unless you happen to do a really good job in an unique way, and these people aren't. So, these money chasers don't make much, if anything. Hence, whining like this. This guy doesn't wanna have a real job at a programming company, he wants to work for himself or with his buddies and shovel out crap and get paid.

That has never worked great, and what is left is drying up.

The idea that a tiny team can always make something amazing isn't true. Big projects often need big teams. The model shouldn't be "all tiny shops, all the time." You wanna do a tiny shop, go for it. Just know there are things you can't compete in.

Also it is a waste of resources to have people keep creating the same thing over and over. We should want to see 100 groups creating 100 word processors. If you can legitimately make one that would be an advantage for some reason then great, go to it, but don't do it just to "have another one."

But the Hobby Lobby issue was about religious fundamentalism, pure and simple. Insurance likes birth control. It is available generic, is reasonably cheap to synthesize and is way, WAY cheaper than a childbirth. A covered childbirth is stupidly expensive. The prenatal care, the actual birth and follow up (that's the biggest part) and then young kids cost more. They would very much like to not pay for that. Some cheap pills are far better than that.

The case was about controlling women's reproductive rights. That has been a major feature of a number of fundamentalist religions, and Christianity is no exception.