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Comment Re:N4N? (Score 2, Troll) 365

tech how?

It's not, but Friday night is #GamerGate and MRAs night on Slashdot, when 8chan empties out and all the manbabies meet here to cry about how the feminazis are taking away their games and comics and action figures.

Look back a few months. It happens every Friday. There is a story about gender or sexual orientation or something that can be construed as violating the natural order of the primacy of white men. Then, the tears start to flow and it all ends in the gators and the MRAs in one big group hug.

It's harmless, really. If it keeps them off the streets, I'm all for them having their own neckbeard hugbox.

Comment Re:There is no need to prove "further" damage (Score 1) 56

However, we don't normally award punitive damages in civil cases here in the UK, so even if there is a definitive judgement at some stage that Google was invading privacy and failing to protect personal data, it seems unlikely they will suffer more than a token slap on the wrist from a privacy regulator provided that they cease and desist (as it appears they already have). Unfortunately, civil trials here are not very effective at recognising damage that comes in forms other than actual financial loss and doing much to compensate for it and/or discourage similar behaviour in the future.

Comment Re:Wrong target (Score 2) 56

The target should be Apple not Google.

That's a stupendous way to end software development overnight. Yes, Apple had a bug. All software has bugs. They clearly intended for a different outcome and surely never expected Google to actively attack it.

Of the two, Apple made a mistake but acted with good intentions (at least on the surface, but there's no point going full tinfoil because then there's no point having a conversation about it). Google acted maliciously, and if someone's going to be held accountable for this then it should be them.

In before "lol fanboy": I would say exactly the opposite if, say, iCloud.com exploited a bug (not a feature: a bug) in Chrome to do the same thing. In this specific case, Apple seems to have acted honorably and Google unhonorably.

Comment Re:The butting edge (Score 1) 42

I got modded down a few times here (unsurprisingly) when I mentioned who needs more than 1 TB besides some niche use. Everyone and their brother went on how creating a NAS from scratch and their database project at work was average Joe stuff and I didn't know what what I was talking about.

I think the Steam hardware survey is a pretty good indication, of the people on steam only 23.5% have >1TB disk space. And they're probably way above average as the average officer worker (no, not you with the MSDN collection and 14 VMs) sure doesn't use that much, nor the kind of people who could use a Chromebook. The "problem" for HDD manufacturers though is that they've killed any interest in anything but $/GB. The most typical big media people have is video and it's accessed linearly and for that hard drives work just fine. Everything else you can put on an SSD. So the incentive to invest is really, really low.

I guess same reason we should be seeing 128 gig ram machines but are not. Simply there is no market but it could easily be done today

Yes, I looked building an 8x8GB rig back in end of 2012 when the RAM market tanked but couldn't really find any reason to. In fact the 4x4GB RAM from 2011 is pretty much the only component I kept when I upgraded last year. By the way, for $2-3k you can now get an X99 mobo, Xeon E5-2603 and 8x16GB DDR4 Reg/ECC RAM but unless it's all about the RAM performance will be very anemic. But I haven't even found the incentive to bump it up to 32GB yet, which I could do any time. It doesn't exactly help that prices have more than doubled the last 2-3 years.

Comment Re:Compactness and Readability (Score 1) 298

Well in this case I'd say there's Google and Wikipedia, use them. The source code is not the right place to teach someone about what CRC32 is or when, where or why you might want to use it. It's almost as bad as comments that try to teach you the programming language you're in. If you're implementing something that's not in an RFC or standard of some sort, I'd agree with you.

Comment Re:Ummmm ... duh? (Score 2) 385

No, he's saying it should be illegal to keep things like mental instability and dangerous suicidal mindsets secret from the state when the state is what licenses you to be entrusted, day-in, day-out, with the lives of hundreds of people. If you've got mental problems, don't look for a job where that is by definition a disqualifier. It appears this German guy knew that, and was hiding his problems from his employer and the regulatory agencies that license his operation of giant passenger aircraft.

Except if that was truly the case, the economy would take a nosedive - approximately 1/3rd of people are suffering from mental illness (typically depression) at any point in time.

In fact, depression that's treatable is no longer a disqualifying factor - the FAA has just recently allowed a whole pile of antidepressants as safe to take without grounding.

This was done because guess what? Pilots WERE hiding mental illness from the FAA because it was, until recently, a grounding factor.

Truth is, mental illness is wildly under-reported - it's not seen as either a "real" illness, or they think you're headed to the rubber room - depression, etc., are all seen as "just man up, suck it up and get on with it".

So yeah, that's sort of why mental illnesses are problematic - no pilot wants to be associated with straightjackets, rubber rooms, short buses, electroshock, etc., so they're not likely to want to report it, nor take (until recently) medicine that grounds you. Plus well, the whole "man up and be happy" attitude prevails.

Comment The lack of debate (Score 1) 52

Was astounding. Especially since I heard at least three better plans- community sponsored healthcare (in which LOCAL taxes fund LOCAL facilities with LOCAL doctors, managed like schools used to be with a local hospital board), subscription based healthcare (in which the rich pay more to fund clinics for the poor, but everybody pays what healthcare really costs, not job based but rather what it costs to have doctors on duty in clinics and hospitals, whether you are sick or not), and finally, free market health care (with no middle man, but again, no assurance of care).

Of course, all three of these cut out the insurance middle man cash cow- who was Obama's cronies as well as the cronies of certain key Republicrats. Can't hurt the cronies, so once again any form of subsidiarity goes on the back burner in favor of federal control.

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