Sure, but I also pay for content (the vast majority of bits streamed to my endpoint are Netflix, followed by game-related stuff), and surely blogs could still make money from non-tracking ads, right? It's only the likes of Facebook that would vanish, so nothing of value would be lost.

"Liberals" could mean just about anyone, but the very vocal SJW crowd are famous for being humorless, prudish buzzkills. What used to be the case for the right wing religious whackos is now true of the left wing SJWs: they lay awake at night worrying that someone, somewhere might be having a good time. No more representative of the mainstream left than the televangelists were of the mainstream right, but boy are they vocal. Heck, some of them are probably the same people, just with a new excuse for moral scolding and finger wagging.

Hey, now, there's only so much width to the printed page for that headline, so if we can save a few letters, we can get the larger font out!

Dang, man, you're really worried - did you get one of the CCs that still charges you the first $50 for fraud? Might try one with a $0 fraud promise.

Or is it something worse? Did you use your real email address for that furry porn site, and now it might have leaked? Sucks to be you, man.

The F35 and F22 aren't "stealth" fighters in that way - not like the B2. It's expected the enemy knows they're there. They're stealthy enough to get missile lock long before the enemy fighter does, and that's all that matters today. Dogfight indeed.

Drones will probably take over during the service life of the F35, but since we're not there yet we needed something. Sadly, we get this plane that's great at nothing but pork delivery, but it's not a complete waste of time. It's just sad that it was used as an excuse to stop building the F22, which really was great at air superiority, which is likely the last thing the drones take over.

Of course the work can be done anywhere - the key is it works better if everyone on a project is together, somewhere. I'd really like that "somewhere" to be the US!

Well, everyone wants higher pay. But supply and demand always win in the end. The big software companies already have development centers in China, India, Canada, and many other places. They can already hire cheap developers - cheaper than you pay US immigrants! It's not about driving down wages, when you can hire someone for $20k easily enough today if you just want basic competence. Companies want to pay these talented developers more, and bring them to the US because this is where top talent comes. What labor pool do you imagine you're protecting? The work can in theory be done anywhere, and we in the US benefit greatly from being the concentration of top talent.

I can't believe populist sentiment among programmers. This job can be done anywhere. You want to compete with immigrants, who have your same cost of living!

But that misses the most fundament point in all these "they turk or jurbs" arguments. You can't keep the business here by keeping immigrants out. If you want the US to be a center for the good programming jobs, then you must be pro-immigrant, because those jobs will go wherever it's easiest for programmers to legally assemble (it's not like you easily can spot the top 5% - you hire as many "good" programmers as you can, then observe their actual performance). If you want just the shit jobs to stay here, and all the best jobs to be elsewhere, then by all means get your immigrant hatred on!

Ah, the /. 30-second expert. Indeed, the TOR guys did think of that too.

Malicious exit nodes do not per se compromise TOR, though they are in a position to take advantage of some potential exploits (also, exit nodes are irrelevant to .onion servers) It's been known since the start that if an attacker both controlled the exit node and could directly tap your line, there'd be and endless stream of exploits possible - and IIRC the NSA had just such attacks in its arsenal. But that doesn't scale - you have to be actively monitoring a specific target to de-anonimize them, you can't do it to everyone. If the NSA actually got warrants when they did that to Americans [pause for laughter] I think it's a fine system.

TFA seems to be about taking over more than half of all TOR nodes, which can hardly be done in secret, and really makes 0-days in the TOR bundle visible.

Far more worrying, especially for the conspiracy theorist, is the never-ending stream of vulnerabilities in .onion servers allowing the operators to be de-anonymized. It's hard to believe TOR wasn't designed that way. TOR seemed designed from the start as a system to let Chinese dissidents use American servers safely, but not allow Silk Road-style sites (servers illegal in the US) to stay up. That IMO would be pretty cool if the US itself weren't growing ever more repressive.

Presidents can grant pardons at any time, not just as they're leaving office. If only we could somehow elect a president who favored the people over a stronger central government [pause for laughter]. I'm not even sure how the system would need to change to make that possible, but I do think the eventual death of broadcast TV (with the auction system for advertising airtime meaning you can never have enough political advertising budget) will help.

Maybe you've heard of "the cloud"? It lets you do this nifty thing where you rent servers by the hour - quite cheaply, too. Other companies manage to handle holiday surges just fine. Need, say, an extra 1,000 servers for a day? Won't even be that expensive.

I've seen the flag-on-the-truck thing many times - never seen a confederate flag. While there are many in the South that still hate the damnyankees for the War of Northern Aggression, it's mostly pirate flags now. For a while I was confused - why were there so many Raiders fans across the South? But it's just the current generation's Rebel flag, without confusing the Northerners that it was about racism.

I think you'll find most conservatives actually saying "it wasn't so terrible for grandpa, so let's see how this new untested idea actually makes it better". There will always be people opposed to any sort of change, of course, but don't confuse evidence-based (as opposed to "it looks good on paper, let's do it") and outcome-based (as opposed to "what matters is the lawmaker's intentions were good") with anti-progress. Any seasoned engineer will tell you that the way you'll make the best progress is to test before you ship, because it's so much less effort to fix mistakes that way.

The Hobbit movies lost me with Beorn. WTF, PJ? WTF?

I really wanted this to be a light-hearted adventure, focused on Bilbo's character growth, and the point made that adventures can be fun and rewarding, but war just sucks. The book was pretty amazing that way.

Actually, this is mostly done. The lifespan of women and men is quickly converging, as is pay (if you take into account lifetime hours worked - for professional women who haven't had a kid, I believe women are slightly ahead under 35 now).

Does Slashdot have to have a "gender gap story" every 2 Bennett stories or something? I guess it's out with "news for nerds" and in with "Reddit envy".