It's stupid if you're benchmarking relative efficiency -- it's not an efficient implementation (and you'll have no trouble finding explanations for why the Python and Java code they wrote, while simpler, is not efficient).

Not at all. If you wrote your C in memory string handling as stupidly as they wrote the Python and Java you will still get worse performance in C (e.g. each iteration malloc a new string and then strcpy and strcat into it, and free the old string; compared to buffered file writes you'll lose). It's about failing to understand how to write efficient code, not about which language you chose.

There was an article a few years ago about how Congressmen judged popular support. I don't know how true it is now, but back then most of them got under ten letters for any given bill. Anything that got 100 was judged to be really important to their constituents. Basically, if everyone on Slashdot who is a registered voter in the USA actually bothered contacting their representatives (a form letter doesn't count, those are ignored, but a couple of short paragraphs will be counted as a separate mail) then they'd be perceived as representing popular opinion.

Sounds like a good way for Uber to end up in a lot of courts. If they thought that the lawsuits for violating various taxi laws were bad, wait until they see the ones for violating every variant implementation of the EU data protection directive...

OK, this isn't the Velicovsky thesis, but it's reminiscent of it.

The lack of seatbelts makes sense. If you're on a spaceship that can accelerate quickly enough to turn everyone into a fine paste and relies on inertial dampeners (adjustments of the artificial gravity) to prevent this, then there aren't many situations where you'll need a seatbelt: either the inertial dampeners are preventing you from needing them, or you're dead. The problem is that the drama needed the ship to seem to shake. It's the same issue as feeling the ship warm up as you get close to a star: it makes for good drama, but the difference between 'humans are comfortable' and 'humans are on fire' is tiny compared to the difference between 'humans are comfortable' and 'nuclear fusion is happening' - it's far more likely that the shields would work fine and no one would be discomforted right up until the point where much of the ship vaporised.

I was quite surprised by the numbers they had for the old model. On my 2014 MBP, I recently did some tests doing sha calculations of VM images. These were multithreaded and not CPU-bound, but they ended up getting almost 2GB/s reads from the SSD. The benchmark is interleaving reads and writes, so that may account for it, but if you're just loading game data from disk then the old model can fill the whole of physical RAM in 8 seconds, so I doubt that's the bottleneck.

If people are actually being killed, then as soon as you get near the house you're likely to hear screams / gunshots. If they're just being threatened, then you have time to plan something that has a good chance of having the victims survive. Well-trained police forces don't rush in guns blazing.

As you say it was stable under the Ottoman empire, because they took over and kept it, America needs to do the same thing. The US, Canada, Australia, NZ were all British colonies, but the difference is the white people never left, so they remain beacons of progress. Hate to sound all racist here, but there is a strong correlation between those and African, Middle Eastern states that were given back.

I think you should probably read a good history of the British empire, followed by 20th century history, before posting nonsense like this.

The causes of problems in the middle east have a lot to do with the long term history of the "beacons of progress" fucking with the region. Specifically when the Ottoman Empire collapsed the colonialists divided the region up along entirely arbitrary borders that often drew straight lines right through native tribes and populations, then appointed flunkies to rule these new countries. There was zero attempt to make something that worked for the people who lived there. This caused serious long term resentment.

Have you ever watched the ISIS video of them blowing up border posts? The ISIS soldiers keep talking about the end of Sykes-Picot. Even though I actually have read a history of the British Empire, I still had to look that one up. It turns out to be the British-French treaty that created the borders of Iraq. Families in different villages were suddenly divided from each other, etc. The people who live there apparently still hate Sykes-Picot to this day.

Plus, when countries in the region got leaders the western powers didn't like, there were interventions (e.g. Iran). There were invasions. Not to mention the gaping wound that is Israel and the absolutist support for it from the US.

There hasn't ever really been a time when more powerful militaries weren't fucking with people who live in the middle east. Religion certainly plays a part, but the USA is a lot more religious than other western developed countries and it doesn't seem to hurt them much ....

You are an idiot. The entire purpose of drone strikes is to carry out very targeted killings.

.... of civilians. You know, when the US says it killed "militants" what it means is "any adult male in the strike zone". This has been verified beyond doubt now, they openly admit it. Often they have no idea who they are killing as the drone strikes are targeted based on e.g. NSA tracking of a mobile phone. Whoever holds the phone at the time gets whacked. This is how they end up drone striking weddings and the like.

If we didn't care about collateral damage and didn't mind indiscriminately killing people, expensive drones would not be necessary.

Obviously you care about collateral damage, not because the USA is such a bunch of caring hippies but because the purpose of drone strikes is to exercise power. You cannot exercise power over dead people. You have to instead kill anyone who does something against your will, or is suspected of doing so, or just someone who got in the way to serve as a lesson to others. If you see the purpose of drone strikes as minimising casualties in a conventional war then you don't understand what drone strikes are for or why the USA uses them. Their purpose is power.

Drone strikes set people on fire if they aren't close enough to be completely incinerated. They're called "Hellfire" missiles for a reason.

You're right that they don't tend to end up on YouTube though. Better that they end up on CNN instead.

And there it is! That European smugness. I didn't expect to see it in this thread but I can't say I'm not surprised. Tells us again, for the millionth time, how your shit doesn't stink....

Yes, there are a lot of smug sounding Europeans posting on Slashdot when stories about the US doing something dumb crops up.

However, today is not one of those days. The OP talked about "other countries". The USA is practically alone in having a problem such as "swatting". It's not just Europe that lacks this issue - it's Australia, Canada, China, Russia, India ...

SWATing seems like a natural consequence of a heavily militarised society that worships soldiers and has decided it makes sense for everyone to be heavily armed all the time. If the rest of the world didn't point out that decisions have consequences, you guys might think it was normal.

You've only heard one side of the story. Perhaps Google would argue it wasn't really like that at all.

Step one, drive past the house - no sirens or lights, just see if there's anything odd. Step two, knock on a couple of the neighbours' doors - say that you've received a non-specific report of gunfire in the area, ask if they heard anything. Step three, from somewhere inconspicuous see if you can see in through the windows with binoculars. Step four, visit the nearest take-away and have someone in plain clothes take the food to the house pretending that they misread the number, look for signs of distress from the person answering the door. Step five, surround the house with armed officers at all exits and have someone in uniform knock on the front door and ask the person who answers to step outside - if they're refusing and showing signs of distress, then go in.

Or they could just forget all of their police training and pretend that their soldiers in enemy territory.

The workplace is special because it's somewhere where your freedom of association is limited. If you're being racist in a public place, I can leave or use my freedom of speech to tell you to shut up. If you're being racist in my house, I can ask you to leave (and call the police if you don't). If you're being racist in work, then my ability to do anything about it is limited by the management. If you are the management, then there's nothing that I can do about it except quit, and (depending on the state of the economy) that may hurt me more than you.