Wow.. 4 insightful to 0,Troll after folks stopped paying attention and it had 15 replies.

Crazy.

Here's what the original said:

Yea, well you were not kept as slaves, killed for learning to read, beaten with inch and a quarter thick poles (often to death). Your families were not sold separately to different owners and broken up. You were not systematically excluded from education, jobs, housing, medical care for generations and eveb lynched for generations (as recently as the 1990s for several of those). The police don't selectively stop you, shoot you, arrest you while letting other races go without an arrest record.

So affirmative not really so much about helping or hurting you or your minority group. It's about trying to correct evils of the past and make things fair enough again that we don't have violent civil unrest, mass rioting and destruction of property.

If you have 2% of the population and 2% representation at harvard, you don't need help from harvard.
--
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.

It's truth, not trolling.

Not necessarily. Greenland ice core records show that in the past the planet has seen temperature shifts of up to 7 C in as little as 30 years. 7 C is huge. It's like transporting Moscow to Rome. Of course, we have no idea what caused such rapid changes in the past. It wasn't CO2 levels, or particulates.

I would. If one or more isolated populations managed to survive more than a couple of generations after the event, I think it's highly likely that they'd continue to survive indefinitely. The worst of the changes would be past, and they'd clearly have learned how to survive in the new environment, else they'd have died sooner.

Human intelligence makes us highly adaptable, as evidenced by the extraordinary diversity of environments in which we live, and lived even before the advent of modern technology. Humans who lack the necessary knowledge of how to survive in a particular environment are at severe risk of death any place on the planet, but if they manage to survive for even a year or two, odds are that they'll have learned enough to be able to extend that time almost indefinitely.

Depends. My bet is that it entirely depends on the background of the "someone" you've taken.
- english speaker ? mostly used to litterature and philosophical logic ? yes, maybe as you list them.

- background in mathematics ? The order will probably be reversed, with probably Haskell, C and Fortran near the top. And probably APL topping them all. And the guy complaining that most of them still miss support for greek alphabet.

some people are used to see things written down in plain text, other are better used to see things written with symbols.

plain text has the advantage of being a little bit clearer for a person who happens to be fluent in the language which was used to create the language (say hello to dialects of Logo and Excel macros translated into various languages). Otherwise it's completely useless (most of the language you mention are based around english. useless non-english speakers. when I was a kid, I started learning to code in basic before I knew english).

symbolic notation has the advantage of being more compact (requires less typing, quicker to read)
cf. the well know geeky joke of "add 1 to cobol giving cobol" vs "C++"

And well, Perl, let's forget about Perl. It's a write-only language.
The only language your cat can write legal code in just by walking across the keyboard. :-D

(Disclaimer: I used to code a lot in Basic as a you kid. Started C a bit later, and learned english about this time. I code also regularily in Perl, C++, awk, php, 386 assembler, etc. I know bits of R, javascript, python, FORTRAN, did some Logo in french in school as a kid, etc.)

Well not very likely.

That did work for the openmoko because the neo 1973 and neo freerunner (i have one!) have been designed from the gound up with an open hardware approach.
They have been designed to be easy to open, easy to hack, easy to replace parts.
Thus upgrade kits like gta04 were likely.

That does work now for the N900, because they are a little bit older generation, back at a time when case were a bit bulkier, battery was replaceable, etc.
There are also a lot of them out in the wild. (Basically, for a long time the Maemo where *THE* definite platforms for geeks to go, N900 was the most popular, and there were only 2 others before).
You could make a Neo900 upgrade kit that is more or less practical.

That won't work with modern smartphones:
- first they are absurdly compact and small (just to have a "better number" on the check list. not that it's actually usefull, specially when the end users will enclose them in an over-priced after-market case anyway).
- they are often very hard to dissassamble (both because of the previous point, but also because it makes them more resistant to moisture etc. if they are in an enclosing never designed to be opened)
- some don't even have removable batteries.
- to make quick buck these companies tend to launch one new model every 6 months (yeah, imagine a replacement borad for iPhone. iPhones are popular, isn't it ? except that there are a dozen of them by now)
- also most of these companies aren't targetting geeks in the first place (unlike nokia maemo platform) and thus aren't likely to be held by users actually able to use an upgrade kit.

I suspect that the Jolla's sailfish phone is the only probable next target for an upgrade kit.

But in general, the case is the least problematice in smart phones.
It makes more sense to 3D print a new case around an existing board, rather than try to fit a new board inside an existing phone.

Usually, the screen is the most complex, instead.

The article is also based on some terrible reasoning, like:

That means there will be no asteroids left in the Solar System, because they all will have struck Earth, in another few hundred million years. Think someone’s overestimated something there? Yeah, me too. Let’s take a look with the flaws in our fear-based reasoning.

Yeah, in a universe where our solar system is some sort of perfect steady state. Which, of course, it is not. Asteroids collide or - more commonly, come close to other bodies and gravitationally interact - and throw each other into different orbits. When that happens, non-Earth-crossing asteroids can become Earth-crossing ones. For example, one of the candidates for the K-Pg extinction event is a Batisma-family asteroid. This family came from an asteroid breakup 80 million years ago.

A person well versed in the field would be aware of the fact that asteroids are not in some sort of unchanging steady state. Which is why they're the ones paid to do the research on the subject.

And more to the point, we really don't have a good handle on what's out there. We have trouble making out dwarf planets in the outer solar system. We really have no bloody clue what could be on its way into the inner solar system, apart from studying how often major events happen.

And on that note, another flaw in his logic, given that until recently, the vast majority of Tunguska-style events would never even have been detected, having occurred over the oceans, remote deserts, the poles, etc. So by all means it's perfectly fair to say that the fact that an asteroid hitting earth is more likely to hit a remote uninhabited area is perfectly fair. But saying that while mentioning the rarity of inhabited areas having been hit in the past is double-counting. The historical record is evidence of how often they hit populated areas, not how often they hit Earth.

Lastly, his claim that only one person has ever been "hit by an asteroid" is ridiculous. 1500 people were injured by the Chelyabinsk one in 2013 badly enough to seek medical attention. Yes, they weren't "hit by rocks", but that's not what large asteroid impacts do; they mostly or completely vaporize by exploding in the atmosphere and/or on impact. And there's lots of reports throughout history of people getting struck by asteroids; just because they weren't documented by modern medical science doesn't mean it never happened. Seriously, what's the bloody odds that the only person to ever in historical times be hit by an asteroid would be in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation? Now what's the odds that someone being hit in the 1950s in the middle of a first-world nation would be well documented, publicized, and believed?

Just a lot of really bad arguments.

I'm under the impression that: as currently lots of the precussors of future IoT projects are from the maker culture it's probably one of the more hipsterish languages like Python and Ruby which might see more rise.

If you think of it, currently it's platforms like Raspberry Pi which are the forerunner of all the future connected small things. It's the "plant tweeting when it needs water" of today, that are the "intelligent fridge which automatically fills your grocery list" of tomorrow.
And currently, Python is *the* most popular rapid prototyping language on these platform.

Well, try to be gentle with them. Do to run too fast so they can try to pretend they can keep up. And while running, please push aside all the various garbage laying on the ground so that these Javaminators don't trip on them and fall (or stop to automatically collect it up).

Also be kind: if you meet more than 1 of them, it would be proper etiquette to act as a translator between them so they can understand each-other (specially if one of them speaks microsoft dialect)

Try also to be understanding toward their sensitivities. There are a few of their kind that the remaining Javaminators consider untouchable (specially the one called Dalvik). Try not to madden them because you don't agree with that rejection (Even if you consider that actually that pastry-obsessed-outcast is the cool guy you want to hang around with).

Funny that here around I've regularly seen and read different numbers (random source in fr. key point < 10% for latex based condoms, < 5% for polyurethan. that's just a random example. I don't have enough time to kill to do a complete litterature mining and meta analysis)
Either North American are much dumber or worse at using condom than European, or your condoms tend to be made of a self-destructin material~
Xenophobic jokes aside, actual result vary *wildly* depending on the considered population, specially the level of sex-ed.

*when used properly* condoms can be very much safe. When used *haphazardly* not so.
See this table (again quick search). Pregnancy rates vary a lot. (See the specially low level among "motivated women" in israel. They probably had better knowledge on proper prevention than the (poor) women in the philiphine that still did get pregnant up to 60%).

The difference in number seem to be linked in the level of education and motivation of the people. A *properly* used condom is effective. That means that you need to educate better the people, to that they use the prevention better.
(instead of completely ignoring condoms, and opting to outcast HIV positive people, as suggested by top troll).

(I know it's only an anecdote, but that also match my personnal experience with <1% breakage among the hundreds of protected intercourses I've done. But both I and girl(s) knew how to use a condom properly and the necessary precautions to take).

We know that your average principal has to check the school policy manual to figure out which leg to put in the trouser first. And then they mess it up half the time anyway.

It might be as much as 3/4, as they also have to get the front/back oriented.

So for at least one weekend, there will be no NSA spying

A more cynical person would find that to be +5, Funny.

Right - but you know who didn't show up? Bernie Sanders (S-VT). He claims to be a civil libertarian but couldn't bother to join the other Democrats who came to support the issue.

I think we know where his masters are on this issue - he's deep into the F-35 fighter jet fiasco; MIC is where his bread is buttered.

Perhaps now they can bring back background play for mobile devices, so I don't have to stay on the youtube app to listen to music/podcasts/etc posted there.

This was the #1 most-requested feature on the YouTube app since it first appeared. Google *finally* released it - and it's the most expensive in-app purchase ever - you have to pay $120/yr to get it.

At the same time they changed the YouTube ToS to forbid third-party apps from providing the same functionality and aggressively started pursuing legal claims against the developers.

"Don't be Evil", 2015 skin.

Which is doubly annoying/funny because Google, at least, doesn't give people brain teasers.

Though there was a good reason for the original compact Macs to discourage users from opening them up -- there were exposed high voltage monitor electronics in there which could give you a hell of a zap of not properly discharged.

The later all in one Macs of the 90s were better in that regard. Their user suitable parts (motherboard, drives) all were easy to get at, but the monitors and power supplies were fully enclosed.

Losing data goes with the territory if you're going to use RAID 0.

In particular, RAID 0 combines disks with no redundancy. It's JUST about capacity and speed, striping the data across several drives on several controllers, so it comes at you faster when you read it and gets shoved out faster when you write it. RAID 0 doesn't even have a parity disk to allow you to recover from failure of one drive or loss of one sector.

That means the failure rate is WORSE than that of an individual disk. If any of the combined disks fails, the total array fails.

(Of course it's still worse if a software bug injects additional failures. B-b But don't assume, because "there's a RAID 0 corruption bug", that there is ANY problem with the similarly-named, but utterly distinct, higher-level RAID configurations which are directed toward reliability, rather than ONLY raw speed and capacity.)