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Comment Re:Fuck those guys (Score 1) 569

If people are actually being killed, then as soon as you get near the house you're likely to hear screams / gunshots. If they're just being threatened, then you have time to plan something that has a good chance of having the victims survive. Well-trained police forces don't rush in guns blazing.

Comment Re:Fuck those guys (Score 5, Insightful) 569

Step one, drive past the house - no sirens or lights, just see if there's anything odd. Step two, knock on a couple of the neighbours' doors - say that you've received a non-specific report of gunfire in the area, ask if they heard anything. Step three, from somewhere inconspicuous see if you can see in through the windows with binoculars. Step four, visit the nearest take-away and have someone in plain clothes take the food to the house pretending that they misread the number, look for signs of distress from the person answering the door. Step five, surround the house with armed officers at all exits and have someone in uniform knock on the front door and ask the person who answers to step outside - if they're refusing and showing signs of distress, then go in.

Or they could just forget all of their police training and pretend that their soldiers in enemy territory.

Comment Re:Normal women... (Score 1) 765

Racism is ok outside of the workplace? Thought not...

The workplace is special because it's somewhere where your freedom of association is limited. If you're being racist in a public place, I can leave or use my freedom of speech to tell you to shut up. If you're being racist in my house, I can ask you to leave (and call the police if you don't). If you're being racist in work, then my ability to do anything about it is limited by the management. If you are the management, then there's nothing that I can do about it except quit, and (depending on the state of the economy) that may hurt me more than you.

Comment Re:Animal House (Score 3, Interesting) 765

She sees the same absurdity in the "feminist" movement that I do.

The problem for feminists today is that their parents (or grandparents) won all of the easy battles. Now the only ones left are difficult and nuanced. Addressing them is hard - it's much easier to make up an easy target to attack than deal with real issues.

Comment Re:I choose MS SQL Server (Score 1) 320

Because needs grow. The entire point of the free version is to encourage people to use it for everything and then discover that their data has grown to over 10GB and they can either pay MS for the full version or spend a lot more migrating all of their data and software to something else. If you start out on PostgreSQL, then you don't have that issue.

Comment Re:Everybody gets a dime. (Score 5, Interesting) 54

When a class action suit is settled, if you are a member of the class then you should receive a letter asking if you want to opt in to the class. If not, then you don't get the money and are free to take it to court yourself. Opting out then turning up in a small claims court with a class action result and evidence of the value of your losses should get you a few hundred dollars fairly easily. If enough people do this, then it will discourage companies from offering too low settlements for class action suits. The cost for them to send someone to defend is sufficiently high that it's probably not worth it and small claims courts have a habit of ruling against people who don't turn up...

Comment Re:I can't find the commercial speech section (Score 1) 239

Exactly. There's a reason why 'no commercial use' licenses are generally best avoided: defining commercial use is hard. The problem for the FAA is that, traditionally, it's pretty easy with an aeroplane: if someone is paying you to fly the plane, it's commercial, otherwise it isn't. The distinction makes sense because you want tighter regulation on pilots who are going to fly with passengers, or for those passengers to definitely know that they're flying with a hobbyist at their own risk. For drones, it makes a lot less sense.

Comment Re:Write-only code. (Score 1) 757

Well, fuck you Slashcode! Apparently I was using too many junk characters by having the temerity to post code snippets. Posting lots of mathematics also triggers it. Remember when this place used to be for nerds? Rather than try to work around the filter, I have placed the contents of my post here: http://pastebin.com/HtQXTnX0

Comment Re:Multiprocessing (Score 1) 180

I don't think I understand what you think you're trying to do. You can't make a cache flush a line that you're modifying with an atomic operation to RAM, because atomic ops require the value to be in cache. Given an n-way set associative cache, however, you can typically force cache flushes (without requiring special cache flush instructions) by writing N+1 values at cache-line offsets (e.g. at address X, X+64, X+128,...) repeatedly. This probably wouldn't trigger the rowhammer issues though, because it's up to the CPU which row it evicts each time and you'd end up repeatedly stalling on loads without bashing a single DRAM line. You might be able to do something similar with the nontemporal store instructions that Intel added in recent generations of processor...

Comment Re:respectfully disagree (Score 1) 78

It's not just about freedom, it's also about economics. Copying software (and music) is trivial. Writing software is hard (well, writing good software is, at least). With free software, you don't charge for copying, but you often do charge for writing the software in the first place. And, because of the relevant licenses, there's a large body of code that you can charge for fixing / extending / customising.

Comment Re:Enlighten me please (Score 1) 450

I think that the single USB-C port is going to be pretty annoying for the people who buy one this year, but it is likely to have the same effect as making the iMac USB only: provide a sufficiently large demand for USB-C devices that it makes sense for peripheral manufacturers to produce docking stations, displays that can provide power over USB-C, and so on. In a couple of years, I expect that there will be enough devices on the market handle breakout from a single USB-C connector that people buying laptops won't have a problem with it.

However, just like the original iMac, there's going to be a lead time where the only peripherals that you can connect reliably are (expensive) Apple-branded ones. If you remember the iMac launch, you'll recall that about a year later computer stores were full of USB stuff all in the same sort of translucent coloured plastic as the iMac to encourage iMac users to buy them, but a year after that the vast majority were bought to plug into non-Apple machines.

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