"Neither Americans nor the rest of the world signed up for a fucking security agency which is no longer under anyone's control except people who feel they can do anything they want."
Uh, the CIA has been pretty much like this since its inception during World War II as the OSS and the CIA immediately after. It was reined in briefly by the Churck and Pike Committees in the 70's but that oversight and those reforms were pretty much rolled back by Reagan. Sure, they got to reach new lows after 9/11 with no hold barred torture, but the CIA has been torturing people through proxies for its entire history, so that wasn't exactly new either.
Not exactly sure why everyone is acting like this is some kind of revelation or anything new, other than its kind of amazing Brennan was foolish enough to admit to it. I predict his career at the CIA will soon come to an end, and he will be replaced with someone with larger brass balls.
The chances you all are gonna change any of this airing your indignation on
Have you actually shopped at Amazon? Amazon offers the first couple chapters of all their books for free.
Cool. I hadn't noticed that feature.
So there really is no advantage to browsing in physical stores.
Let's be honest here: most of the data can be backed up.
I'm aware of that. Say I were to back up my first-generation Nexus 7 tablet through Android Debug Bridge (ADB). How would I verify the completeness of this backup?
GNU/Linux PC owners are expected to have root.
Not on a kiosk, video game console, a TiVo, or any other "appliance".
Which such appliance is a "GNU/Linux PC"? Video game consoles do not run Linux (except for those few remaining fat PlayStation 3 consoles that haven't been upgraded past system software 3.20). TiVo DVRs run Linux but not GNU/Linux. You keep bringing up "kiosks"; to which kiosks are you referring?
And don't break after it within a year
I don't understand what you mean by "break after".
There is also something called open (relatively) specification
What exactly makes a specification "open"? The specification for Win32 is published on MSDN. Is it solely the existence (or lack thereof) of a promise not to go Oracle v. Google on developers of reimplementations?
Wine is great for software where wine is the target platform - which isn't for much of software.
I'd imagine that more desktop software targets Windows (and implicitly Wine) than GNU/Linux.
How should I "research" thoroughly if the product isn't even available for inspection in my geographic area?
Internet.
How should I go about determining how a device will feel in my hands through the Internet?
Du jour, and I was not anon. Peeze no retributtys.
I am in sympathy, but overuse of the class warfare meme-du-jure "privilege" makes me wanna pee on a puppy.
Anonymity of speech is a core aspect of freedom of speech, and is needed to prevent retribution against speakers.
Believe it or not, this includes retribution by cliques of folks who speak "check your privilege" every other paragraph. They want to expose, say, petition signers to get things on a ballot for the expressed (literally) purpose of harassing them, which the Supreme Court found "troubling", even as it approved the FOI request.
Anonymity protects everyone from all would-be centers of power.
Always fucking expand the first instance of your acronym in your summary. Always.
True, I agree that HVAC, ERP, and SBU should have been expanded. But some terms, such as "Hypertext Markup Language", "Motion Picture Experts Group", "Universal Serial Bus", "chief executive officer", "Federal Bureau of Investigation", "Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte", and even "application programming interface" are probably more recognizable to Slashdot's audience in the abbreviated form.
We live in a world with enough languages that pure technical constraints are unlikely to limit you to a single language.
But there are more than enough political constraints on developers to force their language choice. For example, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live Indie Games platforms could run only verifiably type-safe,
Which is to say, if you find a USB drive in your company's parking lot, toss it in the trash if you can't find the original owner.
Or I can connect it to a Linux VM and see what that has to say about it...
Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world.
