How, pray tell, would a gas pump identify you as gay or Jewish or atheist and then refuse service? How also would a supermarket identify your beliefs?

I have a Samsung XP941 (the "proprietary" drive that you can easily buy) and a regular 840 Pro in my desktop. You can benchmark the difference easily, but I don't notice it, at all, in day to day operation, in my particular use-cases; yours might noticeably benefit from it depending on what you're doing with the system.

Fixed that for ya.

Depends on how that money is spent. In a more socialist setting it would most likely be spent on a social program to help take away some of the cost of living on the low income population thus freeing up the money to spend on the increased prices of the companies... Even someone with a rudimentary understanding of economics knows that government spending does help to spur the economy if spent on the right thing.

Now if they take that money and blow it on military invasions and other money sinks with low RFI for the population, then it does hurt overall. Bottom line turns into, which ass hole do you distrust less the businesses or the government?

There's a variable missing from your equations: Government Efficiency (or lack thereof). Self-motivated people are almost always going to be more efficient at figuring out how to do things than a government that's spending everyone else's money, at least for governments that don't have balanced-budget and/or term-limited constitutions. Add the additional variable of "Social Justice" into the metrics and it gets even more messy.

If a "rich" person spends 500x what a poor person spends at their shop, and giving them a deep discount still means you made 40x the profit you'd have made from 5 poor people, would you consider that injustice or another form of marketing success?

We don't need independent verification and reproducibility anymore. The science is settled because we have consensus.

Yes, I realize that's a bit of cherry-picking examples but all too often logical fallacies are used to justify when these things happen. I'd suggest it's an ethics crisis rather than a science crisis.

I guess by "people" (with quotation marks) you mean corporations.

Yes, let's not have any rules or oversight on "people" who were born in a lawyer's office, can potentially live forever, are motivated purely by greed, and will gladly break the law when it suits them. What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, let's put all of the authority into the hands of a few people who were born in a lawyer's office, bought their way into public office, can potentially live forever, are motivated purely by greed and power, and will gladly break the law when it suits them. What could possibly go wrong?

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Then research on the other side of the coin is invalid as well. You can't have it both ways.

Also, "New York Times study" lol.

I have two family members that use new Blackberries. One has a model from about 14 months ago and my brother just got one about a month ago. They are both somewhat limited in terms of apps but conversely, they both have stupid amounts of battery life and they Just Work(tm). They're business phones so obviously they aren't getting stressed with Youtube/Netflix/etc. Still, it appears to be a solid product, if probably unsexy to the people always on my lawn.

You may have already realized this but engineers operate on facts/empirical evidence and it is absolutely critical to identify screw-ups (both individual cases and as a per-person trend) and call them out so we don't repeat the same mistakes. Far too often, I've worked with people who were more concerned with negative perception than with shipping product. Understand that we who are trying to produce care less about your feelings than your work product. Constructive criticism only works if the person being criticized can personally accept responsibility for failure. Without that bit of introspective honesty, we who can are not going to be predisposed to helping you find yourself.

I just peeked in to see what the comments said (obvious concept of moderation applied to hashtags is obvious) and see that most of the comments already covered what I was going to say. Bravo, folks.

Here we see people clamoring for government regulation of tech issues after numerous stories on that same government's lack of understanding of tech issues. Really?

If the banks charge the retailer that suffered the breach for the damages resulting from the breach, then only the offenders suffer rather than making everyone suffer under onerous and ill-conceived regulations. Not to mention that charging for the damages from a breach means the punishment will actually fit the crime. Further, punishing a single guilty retailer for a breach means the customers can go to another retailer that is not having to raise prices to cover a breach fine, which is even more incentive for a company to protect against a breach in the first place.

And all this takes place without the need for 2000 pages of regulation that nobody will be able to understand and no risk of unintended consequences resulting from it that nobody can fix because of the same gridlock the article summary complains about.

It's like that scene in Kill Bill where Budd's manager tells him that "fucking with your cash is the only thing you kids seem to understand."

Police departments nation-wide have placed on hold all orders for Ford Taurus police models and have now moved unfulfilled orders to Dodge Chargers and Chevy Malibus.

If anything is gonna kill/delay the automated vehicle market, it's gonna be people suing the shit out of car manufacturers when anything at all goes wrong. And make no mistake, it's gonna be up to the manufacturer to prove it wasn't their hardware/software that caused it.

And unfortunately, the people that would normally argue in favor of being reasonable with new tech will be suffering from inner turmoil as that idea conflicts with the "big corporations are ruthlessly profitable" belief.

It's gonna be interesting to watch, for sure.

Witness the increase of standard memory configurations in PCs from 512-1GB to 8-16GB and the same with 5400RPM ATA HDDs versus SATA 6GB/s SSDs. The former is 16-32x more memory and the latter is in some cases two orders of magnitude faster, yet people in the millions still use these older PCs to use the internet. They won't be able to watch 4k HD video, possibly, but it's not going to be an exclusionary evolution.

Man, some of you people are just hell bent on dividing everyone up into classes. One wonders if the very existence of such arbitrary divides (and, concomitantly, the bigotry of anti-individualism that necessarily underlies it) and the loud excoriations of such are indicators that we have nothing better to complain about and should appreciate that we have the luxury to sink to such busy-body mundanity.