Software doesn't hate black people. Software doesn't dislike Islam. Software doesn't think kids these days need to pull their damned pants up and stop playing that crap music too loudly.

Apologizing for a program miscategorizing an image it has never seen before as somehow "racist" makes about as much sense as GE apologizing because my toaster looks like a frowny-face from just the right angle.

Yes, Virginia, we've taken this shit too far.

1999 called and wants its meme back.

Seriously, have you actually used any modern Linux distros? Hey, good news, it has gotten so easy to install and use, you don't even need to install it! Download any of a dozen LiveCD / DVD / BRD / Thumbdrive versions, burn it to the appropriate media, and reboot. Bam! You have a fully functional modern OS at your fingertips.

Give it a try, and if you don't like it, it comes with a 100% money back guarantee.

Because that should definetly be the benchmark, right?

Not in the way you meant it, but yes, it should!

If it disgusts us to hear about $150M wasted on an endeavor that enriches all of humanity, how much more disgust should we feel over F-35s that cost twice as much and don't even work? How much more disgust should we feel over spending trillions on a never-ending war on terrorism? How much more disgust should we feel about paying 250 times that much to oppress our own citizens in a show of Security Theatre?

Yes, NASA wasting $150M disgusts me - Because of all the complete bullshit our taxes go toward, NASA shouldn't even need to blink at the cost to human-rate this thing.

Here, let me quote TFS to you:

"I found a game world with a lot to offer. Player created civilizations, unique monsters, and the sheer mystery of the world combine to keep this ancient MMO compelling. For all the ways in which the genre has improved, Ultima Online remains one of just a few MMOs that let you live an alternative life. That feeling of ownership ... combined with the diversity on offer, keeps players coming back day after day."

Does that help, or should someone post an mp3 of themselves reading it for you?

How about you respect your wife's choices and let her decide what she wants to do, you're treating her like a teenage child.

The subtext of the TFS makes that pretty clear - Because "sitting around the house watching Oprah and eating Cheetos" doesn't pay the bills.

Hey, guess what - I feel "not very eager" to get my ass out of bed every morning just so I can go make some rich inbreds even more rich. But the mortgage doesn't pay itself.

I think he just means that optical disks don't have quite the same amount of inertia or need to do internal self-checks as HDDs, before you can actually access them. They still "spin them up", but it happens in a few ms rather than on the order of 5-15s.

then draw a wild conclusion that people are using it to get Windows 10?!

I recently helped a local nonprofit upgrade to Win7 for exactly that reason.

Yes, I can think of plenty of other reasons for people to pick up a Win7 license (as the most obvious, "I just got a new laptop with Win8, help!"), but the average retail customer will realistically just use whatever the computer comes with, and keep it for the life of the machine.

If, therefore, we see an uptick in sales of an OS you can't even easily get on a new machine anymore (yes, we geeks can still get it, but Granny, not so much) - That means something.

Soo, you want to replace a democratically elected government because you disagree with the electorate?

Did you even read TFS? The electorate fully agrees with him. Congress mostly agrees with him. The 2nd circuit agrees with him.

...And yet, we still have these asshats in FISA blatantly saying "to hell with all of the above, fuck 'em even harder, NSA!".

Yeah, we have a problem here. And the "democratically elected government" ain't it.

For a while chrome was better than safari but not any more. Safari consumes much less resources than chrome and it handles multiple tab loads much better on my boxen. The final straw was when chrome deleted every single bookmark during a synch. Lost everything and no way to recover it. I tried restoring a backup but chrome just resynched and erased it again . With safari time machine works beautifully.

My faborite browser is Firefox but that's only because it has the zotero plug in.

This article is total rubbish

You Could See Asteroids In the Night Sky...

It already does. Sickness inducing is one of the biggest problems with current VR implementations, and one of the main reasons its still in development and not being released to the public.

Yep that's the problem. Drilling down on this one sees how slippery this greased pig is. Example. Company zflix offers consumers a swell deal: they will pay the consumers bill for anything over their current data cap up to the number of bytes they stream from zflix. This if the consumer has a low end 1gb data cap and streams 4gb from zflix then zflix pays the differential to the consumer (at some winky wink preferred bulk rate to Comcast). The net effect is the same as if Comcast had ransomed zflix but that would be barred by the net neutral ruled while the scheme above would not.

Since consumers already can purchase different data caps and different late cues and different up down symmetries none of that shenanigans is disallowed. The only thing that saves our collective asses is possible competition for ISPs.

I suspect that for conventional services that the easy to apply rule is that if a competing ISP can deliver a service without exemptions then woe to the ISP trying to claim exemption. It's smart to keep it end-user-pays to keep the com casts from ransoming the net flixes,

Even so it's hard to see how this works automatically even under U.S. Rules. Let's assume that in a neutral world there is some advantage to be had for a better stream. Would not a Netflix competitor want to gain that? And the way they can do that is by offering to pay the consumers bill for a them to get a better connection over a private network backbone.

In a related note I just had a surprising experience with HBO Now. The picture quality and startup buffering time were massively better than I'm used to from amazon or Netflix. I'm puzzled why. In doubtful that HBO has figured out some superior codec all on their own. So this means either they are getting some privileged delivery channel or that what I get from amazon or Netflix is less than the best because they are trying to save money with lower data rates or more overloaded servers.

I should mention I have only a 6mbs Comcast connection. This it's not like Netflix and amazon are trying to serve the lowest common denominator. That connection is the lowest Comcast teir.

Finally I want to dump the odious Comcast and go to DSL but I have to sign up for a year and I'm afraid DSL might suck. Any opinions?

Freedom of speech is a government thing.

Court orders to reveal someone's identity are also a government thing.


anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion

And the real courts have fuck-all to do with that. Using them as a tool to out your enemies goes against everything we supposedly believe in.


In this particular case, the business owner believes that the reviews are malicious, fake, the act of a single person, etc. etc.

I "believe" Google should pay me for beta-testing their various products that almost never leave beta. When can I expect the courts to make them send me a check?

If you think CS grads only marketable skill is programming - than you have a far more serious problem. Look up systems analyst.