He only claimed that they paid no attention to user experience, not that they're shoddy at engineering things. The examples you provided actually demonstrate that point.

For instance, I read a few years back about how Bezos had then-recently hired designers to redo the website since its design seems like an over-crowded holdover from the '90s, before disregarding their ideas entirely because he couldn't bear to be without all of the stuff that's currently packed in. Likewise, their software for the Kindle Fire line can do some really neat stuff, but everything I've heard and seen indicates that it's sub-par from an experience perspective (e.g. unresponsive/laggy UI, inconsistent app designs/flows, disregard for common and obvious use cases). As for AWS and logistics, what of them? Logistics is entirely internal, while AWS isn't aimed at end users at all.

They can and do make cool stuff that's well-engineered, but there's a big difference between good engineering and good design. I, and I believe the OP, are accusing them of lacking the latter when it comes to their consumer-facing endeavors. Pretty much everything about Amazon feels like a cheap commodity, which is fine when I want cheap cables from their Amazon Basics line that I'll plug in once and never touch again, but isn't so good when it's something I'm interacting with on a daily basis, such as their site.

If you Plumber doesn't shoot you when you happen to pick up a pipe wrench, then yes, hats off to him too.

Now it's just 5 years of environmental studies, lawsuits and billion dollar "mitigation" measures.

It is easy to make good DACs these days. Basically any DAC, barring a messed up implementation, is likely to sound sonically transparent to any other in a normal system. When you look at the other limiting factors (amp, noise in the room, speaker response, room reflections, etc) you find that their noise and distortion are just way below audibility. Ya, maybe if you have a really nice setup with a quiet treated room, good amps, and have it set for reference (105dB peak) levels you start to need something better than normal, but that isn't very common. Even then you usually don't have to go that high up the chain to get something where again the DAC is way better than other components.

Now that said, there can be a reason to get a soundcard given certain uses. For example you don't always want to go to an external unit, maybe you use headphones. In that case, having a good headphone amp matters and onboard sound is often remiss in that respect (then again, so are some soundcards). Also even if you do use an external setup, you might wish to have the soundcard do processing of some kind. Not so useful these days, but some games like to have hardware accelerated OpenAL.

Regardless, not a big deal in most cases. Certainly not the first thing to spend money on. If you have $50 speakers, don't go and buy a $100 soundcard. If you have a $5000 setup, ok maybe a soundcard could be useful, but only in certain circumstances.

As a side note, the noise in a PC isn't a big issue. Properly grounding/shielding the card deals with it. A simple example is the professional LynxTWO, which is all internal yet has top notch specs, even by today's standards. http://audio.rightmark.org/tes...

In 2013, 101 firefighters died in the line of duty.

In 2013, about 110 police officers died...mostly in traffic accidents. Only 33 due to firearms and even among those few actually killed by bad guys.

Firefighters risk their lives on every call and are protected by nothing more than a thick coat and helmet and their brains.

The Police face risks on every call but most a boring and not dangerous. They are protected by firearms, theirs and their partners, ballistic vests, and overwhelming firepower when needed.

The Police kill innocent people all the time. Firefighters rescue innocent people all the time.

Hats off to Fire Fighters.

Flashbangs are the new Binkies

Maybe there is Google technology that Slashdot could use to prevent duplicate stories from appearing within days of each other.

Because great men like Winston S. Churchill are now long dead.

It's more that he created an enterprise to facilitate criminal activities, particularly contraband smuggling and sales. Operating a business for the purpose of facilitating crime in general is different than "being a criminal".

What? This is bullshit, dude. Programming isn't a layer on top the physical world of spatial relationships; it's a layer on top the physical world of discrete, numeric algorithms.

In the real world, you have analogue power levels--voltage, current. Then, we build digital circuitry, such that being about 2.8-3.8V from ground state is "3.3V" or "ON", and being below that is "OFF"; being above that is "HALT, CATCH FIRE". This is a purely numerical behavior: the variations in the real world do not apply to digital circuitry.

On top of that, you build a set of operational codes to manipulate states, i.e. assembly. You also build programming languages such as C, Python, and so on, which turn complex algorithms into a static analysis tree, optimize the tree, and then convert that into optimal procedural operational codes.

The best we have for programming is object orientation, which takes a lot of procedural stuff for repeated modules away; but then you need to build the procedural framework to use those objects, as well as the discrete procedural behavior of the object. You're reducing complex procedural code down to a limited interface so that you can write other complex procedural code to handle that, thus reducing the amount of complex procedural shit you have to think about interacting with other complex procedural shit.

You can't program a computer by putting a ball on top a stick. Computers need programming in terms of what is absolutely understood and non-ambiguous.

I would have ruled that money laundering laws are stupid and should be thrown out! There are a lot of other shits we could charge this guy with. For example: Continuing criminal enterprise.

Okay seriously, some people are retarded. They can't manipulate numbers because their brains are broken. Low-functioning sociopaths can't understand social interactions, and don't connect the pattern behavior together to fake it; high-functioning sociopaths recognize it as an academic subject, and fake it.

How is it hard to believe that some--perhaps many--tasks require an uncanny ability to do a certain thing, which nobody has? Maybe any idiot can learn to make a shitty program in Visual Basic; but, for the vast majority of people, no investment of time and effort is going to make them John Carmack. Similarly, some investment of time will teach you to sculpt; no investment of time will make you Michelangelo. Your creative writing courses won't make you Brandon Sanderson, Stephen R. Donaldson, or J.K. Rowling; the best you can hope for is being the next no-talent hack like Tolkien.

A guy told me some 20 years ago that he read about an artificial life experiment in which a specially designed operating system was created to allow programs to execute code and, like computer viruses, reproduce themselves while competing for the resources to do so. He said the result was a program that copied itself very efficiently in a manner that the researchers found very hard to understand and was totally unexpected.

Sadly he couldn't explain the details and didn't know the experiment, but if what is says is true, did it pass the Lovelace test? It certainly seems like something that could have occurred given the capabilities of computers at the time.

All these people can file SLAPP motion. Even the legitimate ones can claim she's running SLAPP cases around the whole issue, and have her barred from bringing this shit up ever again.

Thick, aren't we?

These are things that were predicted to happen within a short time, yet have not. It is Alarmist information meant to sway public and official opinion. It is misinformation.

Pass these laws or you will never see now again. Make these changes or the Midwest will be ravaged by Tornadoes, etc.