All it takes is 1%? You are talking about people, not the bubonic plague.

I'm a South Carolinian and a descendant of slave holders going all the way back to the London Virginia Company. There are many painful legacies that are still alive and kicking, but you are making easy assumptions to generate invisible boogey men. It is like saying Germans are essentially evil because there are Nazis hanging on the family tree.

Because of your kind of logic I spent the first 18 years of my life wondering why the almighty didn't shine his mercy on the human race and have my ancestors castrated to remove the evil from this world. How would you like to look in the mirror and wonder how such evil exists?

Eventually I had to grow up and realize all of that was really self-obsession, not a desire for justice.

Both statements are true. He was already doing work with the NSA before Booze Allen. Prior to that contract he had already voiced his concerns.

Reading old Ars posts of his, prior to working with Booze Allen, he struck me as being slightly to the right of most Slashdot readers, even a bit authoritarian. Somewhere along there he had a crisis of conscience when he realized that the NSA's actions were roughly in line with what most conspiracy minded folks already assumed and we were only a catastrophe away from a nightmare scenario.

Stallman was always insulted, but the recent wave is a part of the brogramming phenomenon and a desire to be an alpha male when most of us are betas. Really sad to be honest and it has problems that spread out far from personal appearance to things like a boom in sexism, nerd bashing, etc.

You don't have to, the answer is always the same: Mississippi and South Carolina. You are broke and you, your parents, your kids are stuck in eternal maintain/survival mode. Now how do you fix that when being ignorant and poor is your greatest asset?

Normally I hate throwing rocks at any particular technology, but Drupal has some issues.

Using module A will often require modules B-ZZ and the maintainer of A has nothing to do with B-ZZ. If one module falls behind, often everything begins to fall behind with it. If you are just using it for a blog or small news site, Drupal is awesome, but moving beyond that becomes problematic.

Perhaps if Drupal Core began bringing more common stuff into the fold I'd have a different opinion, but as is the ecosystem feels hacked together and weak. I don't enjoy saying that.

Yeah, nothing compares to NCAA football fans.

I may have not been a big fan of Deus Ex: Invisible War, but I wasn't sending under age girls over to Harvey Smith's house with beer to nail him statutory rape or dressing up as Warren Spector's biggest fan and smoking weed with him to get him fired over a drug test because he went to Disney instead of the studio I wanted him to go to. Some of those fans have gone to cold war era spycraft lengths to get what they want.

I'd happily never accept another income tax return again if it would make assholes shut up about how I'm rape-murdering their tax dollars. Of course it wouldn't matter. If I drive on the same roads that the logging trucks drive on I'm a co-conspirator in unwillingly sodomizing farm bill subsidies.

At this point I'd be fine with not accepting a single federal dollar, just to make the James Kunstler's of the world shut up, but it wouldn't. Until my living in a rural area makes you money there will still be the assumption that I fuck my cousin, rape my daughter and smoke meth every night. Wait, that won't happen either. Rome's client states made them plenty of money, gave then an army/food and they were still thought of as subhuman waste. Everybody has got to be somebody's Hitler.

Meanwhile NYC gets to cart off their homeless to cities in rural states because the homeless person's ex-girlfriends, brother's, ex-wife's sister lives there. But what would I know? Back to fucking my goat.

Depressing. Sad that we even have to go to race and sex to make this story newsworthy. Sad that some DA did this just to puff up their felony count.

18 years ago the "works bomb" was our introduction to stoichiometry, came just after going over basic safety in the lab. Didn't do it in class, but several kids made them at home, one even blew up a mailbox and had to pay for the damages. Good thing that DA wasn't around at the time, bet they could have gotten two felonies out of a 16/17 year old.

And I've yet to get a Pizza Hut ad with audio over Steam.

Because Microsoft.

I'm always wrong on these things, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if some manager in the Xbox Live division knew this would make him look integral to the company's success (instead of fixing the numerous broken aspects of Live, probably built on another stack of thoughtless compromises). So he scratched one guy's back who scratched another guy's back and the hammer was pulled on the gun that MS always shoots itself in the foot with.

For all of the things they do right, this is a place where they can't. It is in their DNA. See all the years where you had to have a Gold subscription just to buy something on the market place or that you still need it for Netflix (Why MS? I have a Wii less than 2 ft away? Are you stupid?).

I didn't play it until a few years ago, maybe 2 or 3, but the game stood up (along with Thief and Thief 2, also games I didn't get to until long after their respective studios were closed/bought out). Looking Glass/Irrational, either by design or happy fluke, really did create a few classics.

Granted these games aren't for everyone. They aren't pretty (though the sound design is awesome) and they aren't action titles. They are slow moving examinations of tension in games.

"We need more testing in this field, particularly on that white wall over there."

Depends on how you want to split it and people were very split and very scared at the time. Back then you could ask the average person on the street if they favored going into Iraq and the frequent response would be something along the lines of: I want to support the troops. It wasn't overwhelming support, it was fear for our children and anger and sorrow for our dead.

It was also a very heady time. I remember walking into a bar prior to the run up and a KBR employee was handing out flutes of Dom and wearing a platinum grill (really weird thing to see on a middle aged white dude). Asked him what he really thought of it and he asked me why I hated Capitalism. Told him I had nothing against it, but invading Iraq just seemed like a poor decision, an unnecessary expenditure. Then he asked me why I hated the troops. GO TO 10. No real discussion, no real discourse, just: Why do you hate America? You don't? Well then shut up and get on the bus.

On top of all of that you had Ashcroft and Rumsfeld making these really weird statements during press conferences about "sedition" and "I can't say that subversive sources can't be classified as enemy combatants, you tell me". The right knew it was hard trolling, the left went nuts and we still occasionally hear about "Bush Derangement Syndrome".

And at the time some wondered why the middle wouldn't go past "I support the troops"?

Win8 is perfectly fine for what it was designed for. Unfortunately they broke Fitt's law when they released it for the desktop.

Not sure how many rocks I can throw at MS. The new hotness was in tablets and they needed a proper tablet OS. I can applaud them for getting that right, but they should have at least thought of allowing users to run a pure desktop mode on their new emachine desktop. That would have saved them a lot of embarrassment.

Thrift stores are the cheapest bet (think out-of-the-way Mom and Pop Christian Ministry type thrift stores, not Goodwill).

Stopped by one recently and asked if they had any old keyboards in the back. The employee pointed me outside to a shed behind the building. There was literally a pile of old IBM Model Ms laying behind the place, had been hit by rain several times. Took a garbage sack of them home, let them dry out and everything was fine (there was even an old IBM model 5150, but my wife wasn't about to let me add that to the PC graveyard in the office).

The annoying bit is that so many of them are AT instead of PS/2 (good luck even finding PS/2 ports on modern hardware, now it is just 4 USB ports in the back).