Even if there was a choice, there's nothing wrong with choosing to be black or Asian or gay. But there is something wrong with choosing to believe a fairytale, and we should be able to make fun of that.

For example:

The Windows 95 startup sound - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The ICQ uh-oh sound - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

RIngtones, notification sounds and alarms from old phones that we no longer use. I've found that I can still instantly recognize sounds from handsets that I haven't used in years, even old versions of Android (e.g. the default alarm clock from my Nexus S running Gingerbread).

I agree. Anyone who thinks that Apple's current software is bad clearly doesn't remember what Mac OS was like before X.

You're technically correct - the best kind of correct :)

Then why is my over-50-year-old dad always asking me to fix his computer?

Hollywood does take risks, the problem is that the movie-going public doesn't! There were plenty of good movies last year but 11 of the 15 top movies in 2014 were remakes or sequels or superhero movies. Sadly the previous list has no correlation to the movies that audiences and critics actually enjoyed.

The problem is that people choose movies to go and see by optimizing for the size of its marketing campaign, or opening weekend gross. So they go and participate in a feedback loop that encourages Hollywood to make more and more low-risk superhero sequels. A much better way to avoid disappointment is to choose a movie that other people who have seen the movie (i.e. reviewers) actually liked, and avoid the ones that reviewers have told you are going to be shit. It sounds obvious but people don't do this.

Even here on Slashdot where we were warned that The Hobbit would be shit. But I see other posts where Slashdotters still went and watched it and are posting here that it was shit. As if that was a surprise, and it's all Hollywood's fault!

A few people here have already mentioned Rotten Tomatoes. If you're not already using it or something similar, you should. Otherwise you're probably part of the problem.

Most DDoS attacks are launched from zombie botnets, so there's a lot of collateral damage when someone does a "retaliatory" or "self-defensive" attack. It usually misses the true perpetrator's computer.

Anyway I'm not saying that DDoS is "not really that bad". My point was more that bad analogies lead to bad conclusions. It looks to me like a disgruntled employee hacked into SPE and hurt the feelings of a few celebrities who made some shitty movie, and somehow this has resulted in two nation-states getting involved. All because our leaders, the media and society don't really understand what's happening, so they've shoehorned this into a flawed mental model that they do understand: war.

Does anyone else feel that using the term "cyberwar" to describe this is an insult to anyone who has ever been through a real war? Insofar as there is a conflict between two or more parties, it is like a war. But that's the furthest that the analogy can be taken without it falling apart. Let's get some things straight: computers aren't people, DDoS attacks cause orders of magnitude less suffering than real war, and using a hyperbolic analogy leads to massive escalations of a conflict (e.g. Obama getting involved and taking an entire country offline).

I propose we replace this with a car analogy :). A bunch of people, possibly North Korean, possibly not, have gone and stolen a lot of cars and parked them in JP Morgan's car park. Now all the bankers, and their customers, can't find parking and can't get into the office. Banking and financial services have been denied. Then some guy at JP Morgan realizes that those cars all have New Jersey plates - that's where the attacks are coming from! So they go steal a bunch of other cars, drive them across the Hudson River, and use them to gridlock all the streets in Jersey City. Problem solved - there's now ample parking for Jamie Dimon's Maserati!

Except that because cars were stolen and transported interstate, the FBI now has to get involved.

It was printed with ABS plastic: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

Not sure why people here are so hung up on plastic though. It's better than nothing at all, and doesn't stop you from getting a metal one in the future.

If they're comparing her to Steve Jobs and expecting her to create Yahoo's iPod, then it may be worth pointing out that Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 and the iPod wasn't released until 2001. Two years is a long time but sometimes great products take even longer than that.

Mandarin and Cantonese differ a lot when spoken, but have similar written forms (especially for more formal writing). Since the study looks at written languages (books and websites) it makes sense to lump the many written forms of Chinese together.

There seems to be this idea that rather than regulate something, you just need to inform consumers of the risks, and then the free market will sort everything out. It sounds great in theory but doesn't seem to work well in practice. How many times have you seen a sign saying that something "contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm"? Most Californians ignore it and most people would probably ignore this list of "unsafe" buildings too.

The only time this matters is during peak times - who cares how much space a vehicle takes up when you've got plenty of extra road capacity?

I suspect they do some, but either way you're still "the product". Or is it more about privacy (which is a totally different thing from being exploited)?

I bet it has something to do with the $5 billion they pull in every year in revenue.