Indeed and their goal with Linux is to have a gaming platform independent of Apple and Microsoft, from their perspective you have a choice of nVidia (closed), AMD (open and closed) and Intel (open) covering all the bases. I don't think Valve feels the need for more choice for Linux to be a choice.

So, this guy published the the fact that he was going to do this on his blog and in email before he did it. Here's the quote from "Thehill.com":

On the webpage thedemocracyclub.org, he wrote: ''My flight is not a secret. Before I took off, I sent an Email to info@barackobama.com. The letter is intended to persuade the guardians of the Capitol that I am not a threat and that shooting me down will be a bigger headache than letting me deliver these letters to Congress.''

Tell me again, what our incredible spying and surveillance program is supposed to be doing? Because, I'm pretty sure this is the definition of "intelligence failure" in all senses of the phrase.

A common misconception, with complex products there's always so many environments and conditions you never get all the corner cases worked out. So what you want is ten million people playing GTA V on Windows (7/8/Vista), not all these niche users finding subtle ways to break it on their special snowflake of a Linux setup. It costs time and money, hurts your brand and most companies would rather just sell to the 95%+ doing mainstream tasks.

Religious institutions own business and property. They don't have to pay taxes on any of this, which means that while *my* business and property taxes go up, they're free to continue on their merry way, polluting the airwaves with drivel, owning prime real estate forever without fear of confiscation by the authorities due to unpaid taxes, and so on. Nice deal, that.

If a religious organizations want to start a fan club with a big building, it's their business, but let them pay their share for the surrounding infrastructure (i.e. roads, law enforcement, flood control, sewage, etc.).

Well, yes and no. You can produce electrical energy that way, but it's not a direct translation to the cheap portable transportation fuel which is what hydrocarbons provide and on which globe spanning supply chains depend.

You can make hydrogen, of course, but hydrogen isn't as energy dense, is hell on metals and sure isn't as easy or safe to handle as liquid hydrocarbons. You can make these as well, but the net energy return is abysmal, even compared to our ever shrinking net energy return from extracted hydrocarbons.

Moreover, if there's a serious economic/social breakdown glitch due to war or ignoring the hydrocarbon net energy depletion problem for too long, we won't be building nuclear power plants, or even maintaining current ones.

Do I like Hillary Clinton? No?

Do I trust her? No, she's a career politician.

Is there a Republican candidate that's better? Right now, there's not one that doesn't make me want to spit on the sidewalk and curse.

As usual, we have the choice of the least awful. It may be a marginal difference, but it's what we have in our current oligarchy pretending to be a democracy.

What better way to no rid themselves of an annoyance than to open source everything? Microsoft's treatment of their own development community over the last decade has ranged from apathetic to clueless to abusive. No automated migration path to move code from one platform to another. Dead ending VB6. Effectively dead-ending Winforms. Basically telling ISVs with established businesses and skill sets that their only option is an expensive recoding project, after they re-educate themselves.

I'm pretty sure this is the beginning of the end. Of developer support, and eventually, of Windows as a desktop OS.

And good riddance. You're a damn fool if you invest in any Microsoft technology at this point.

And how long will it last? WWII lasted six years and after the war there was rationing on everything, I imagine an apocalypse like that only bigger and worse. Power will have been out for years, generators don't have fuel and people will be too busy doing what the illiterate masses has done for most of human history, surviving. There won't be any replacement parts so when your machine fails it's dead, assuming you got clean power to begin with. And they need something useful at their current level of technology.

I don't think you understand how much of a downward spiral we'll have simply because the infrastructure and division of labor is collapsing. I'd probably be out in the fields trying to make food and firewood for the winter and sorry but if I had kids that's the kind of thing that'd be my first priority for them too. Learning what I know about computers wouldn't even rate as nice-to-have because it'd be bloody unlikely they'd see a transistor made after the apocalypse anyway. Life span would probably drop to what they were 2000 years ago because there's no industrial production of hygiene, sanitation or medical products. And when I'm dead and the computer's dead, yes maybe there's some books on a shelf... but it's a long, long way to recovery.

More likely, it would change in character. Solar panels are dependent on high tech, petroleum dependent factories. More likely, mirrors and lenses would become the solar power devices of choice, employed as steam generators, smelting devices, water purifiers and pumps and so on. While they'd be intermittent, their maintenance and manufacture are within the abilities of relatively low tech societies and they'd be good enough to charge the batteries, keep the crops watered, provide a constant supply of potable water (a very big problem) and allow for the recasting of all that refined metal still laying around.

Except in IT, of course. It's all pain there, regardless.

No combination of alternative fuels can or will ever replace the 160 exajoules of energy that industrial civilization currently consumes each year. Attempting to do so will result in ecological disaster. Thorium nuclear would get us near that again, but it's not likely to be something we do in the case of a complete industrial civilization collapse.

So what happens is that we "reboot" to a smaller scale civilization with a limited population. No matter what happens, there's still a lot of refined metal, particularly copper wire, laying around so we will probably have electricity no matter what. We also have plenty of mirrors that can be re-purposed for mini-smelting operations and water purification. Moreover, there will still be plenty of functional practical machines and devices. Cars will be a valuable source of alternators for electricity generation. Simple items, like stainless steel tables and bowls will last for hundreds of years. Steam is likely to make a comeback.

We won't reboot, and the population bottleneck from 2100 to 2200 may be quite severe, but some will survive and muddle through.

You barely survived bullying, so you should know better than most that many people don't. That's plenty of reason not to tolerate bullying.

Look at it this way: survival of the fittest is already being changed by modern medicine; would you withhold penicillin from a child with pneumonia because he's too weak to survive? By extension, we owe the same level of concern to people with psychological problems.

No, it's pre-crime if they've done no harm at the time they're banned.

The triggers or flags the algorithm recognizes are not themselves the offenses. They are just attributes of posts from people who in the past have exhibited similar early behavior; this algorithm knows how to recognize that pattern.

Let's say that you categorize a thousand historical troll posts, and study their metrics (I'm going to make up some fake metrics here for example.) The average number of posts before they actually get to spewing the bile might be 15. Of those 15, an average of two of them might contain the misspelled phrase "your wrong". Another indicator might be writing five posts within the first hour of registering a new ID. None of those posts contain an actual troll message, but 75% of the time someone matches that behavior, they will have written a troll by their 10th-20th post.

Pre-crime would be banning people based on matching this pattern without waiting for the actual troll post to be made. It would ban 100% of pattern-matchers, but of those, only 75% would statistically have gone on to actually troll. The other 25% would be unfairly banned for their poor spelling and bad timing.

While I believe that people who are less sensitive tend to thrive more than others, I don't agree that "thicker skin" is a workable solution. Too many people have fragile emotional states and simply don't have the neural hardware psychological capacity required to dismiss the hate and insults that often happen on line. There have been some high-profile suicides among teens who were attacked online, and who knows how many people remove themselves from public comment because of the hate they've received? For safety reasons I don't think society should completely abrogate the forums to the trolls.

Does that not mean some people are overly sensitive? Sure. But just as we shouldn't velour-line the internet to cater to absolutely every person with a psychological disorder; we also don't have to tolerate the diarrhea that spews forth from the trolls. We don't have to draw a hard-and-fast line on the ground, either, and define "these words are always 100% bad in 100% of situations". Instead, we should be welcoming humans in the loop, asking them to pass judgment when needed. That gets us to a more fluid state than full automation. It also lets the user choose. Don't like the judgment process on Slashdot? Don't hang out on Slashdot.

I know full automated filtering is the holy grail of internet forum moderation, but as soon as you deploy a filter it becomes a pass/fail test for the trolls, who quickly learn to adapt and evade it. Human judges can adapt, too, and are about the only thing that can; there are simply too few for the volume of trolls out there. A tool like this might help them scale this effort to YouTube volumes.

How many years is it since you first heard "Don't feed the troll", which clearly refers to it as the monster and not the fishing technique? Certainly before the dotcom days, in my case. I think you've fallen into the trap of defining the finer art of trolling as the only true trolling, when the ones posting goat.cx links were trolling for newbies just like you. Or taunting the guy with a short temper. Or tricking the veteran into writing a long, insightful reply just to realize he was wasting his time on a troll.

Baiting, flaming, pranking, bullying, flamebaiting, pretty much any way of subtly or not subtly at all trying to disrupt a discussion and have people go off on wild rants and off-topic discussions and flamefests and whatnot has been known as trolling for a very long time. Sure the elaborate trap to lure the wary was one part of it, but there were always those looking for the cheap lulz. And if you can't win by trolling, you can always accuse someone else of being a troll. And if you can't find anyone to take the bait, be the clueless n00b too so you can get everyone to shout at you to stop feeding the troll.