I couldn't give two shits about my state (the 10th I've lived in) of Texas, and am pretty sure even the idiots with the "Secede" bumper stickers feel more loyalty to the US than they do the old boy network that runs this place. I'm an American that happens to live in the region known as Texas. I sure wouldn't mind seeing all the anti-muni laws tossed out across the country. I would gladly fork $5k over to have true high speed broadband delivered to my house on the restriction that anyone could provide me with internet service at my own selection. The entire notion of independent states has not aged well and the populace as a whole is ignoring their states in favor of national politics, and doesn't even make sense anymore but to a few ill-intentioned libertarian interests.

With that said, I do have some doubts that the federal government has this right, that it can all be wrapped up conveniently in some verbiage in the constitution that never had conceived of this, without at least a protracted legal battle. This all smells like a politician trying to delude the masses into thinking he's helping while he's actually abdicating, or about to ignore his government doing something that is otherwise massively unpopular. For example what would we do if next month the FCC rules against net neutrality, but Obama & company get a law through congress that will (in 2 years) get overturned?

I would have thought it was to give the Federation an unbeatable enemy that they can't plow through with their highly weaponized "science vessel". It seems like the replicator makes Federation society nearly Utopian, not especially socialist, communist or capitalist. It was a little unclear exactly how their economy worked exactly, since clearly people needed to take on subservient roles on their "science" vessel, and some level of industry & resource extraction were certainly required.

When I saw the Borg I read the opposite evil: a society in which individualism was entirely replaced by a hive mind. It wasn't about their economics so much as their total deconstruction of individuality. I don't see that as a particularly communist trait, capitalism is equally bad in this regard (i.e. the working class is essentially fungible and replaceable, only the elite count as individuals)

I don't agree. I have two PCs by my feet, one a Dell and one a home built. Both are plagued with various subtle issues and bizarre design choices. They were indeed cheap, but they've required constant maintenance over the years (both are 10 year old chassis with 1-10 year old parts). By comparison I have an (old) mac pro and two macbook pro's, both work flawlessly (in windows too) and have never required any form of service.

It makes a lot of sense to run linux on a mac, depending on your threshold of pain vs. price.

That paragraph, used to explain "horrifying steeplechase" describes every tech interview I have ever been on, ever. I'm a man, it's not a thing we do to women just 'cuz. We're insensitive, socially inept clods and that is the defining culture in highly technical fields. I would think a woman would appreciate this MOST, we're purely and entirely interested in her brain and what it can do. I would have been far more disgusted with my peers if they were leering or chatting her up, trying to use this as a first date scenario... THAT would be unacceptable.

If these women are unable to tolerate geekdom, they probably will not enjoy working in their job. I'm sitting in a building with 120 people right now, it's quiet as a graveyard but everyone is here. I have an IM conversation going on with the guy in the cube next to me, not about football or his wife, but about cool compiler tricks. This is our job, this is also who we are. If you are a woman in tech, this is how you too must be, or else you're applying to the wrong sort of job. If you want to be tech-savvy marketing, apply to marketing. if you want to make business decisions, get an MBA. But if you want to DO technology, and be a practitioner, then we're looking for you and you should be happy to answer repetitive mundane questions about C calling conventions or the various drawbacks of exception handling. It's a calling, not everyone fits. I don't see it as mutually exclusive with women, just exclusive with women who want to be above it all. Much like men who wish the same, you need not apply, we're weeding you out.

I'm going to interview a woman in about 40 minutes. HR put on my agenda to make sure I ask if the candidate needs water or a restroom break. Because I trust HR (in this instance) I will do that, when someone tells me what to do in social scenarios I do it. But if they don't, I probably won't remember. In fact I may not remember if my computer shuts off during the interview. If you've been in tech school for the past 4+ years, or in the industry, you're used to this and don't think about it, you want to know about the job details and what I'm working on. If you're not really interested in being an engineer, but just want the paycheck and a shot at management, no one is going to want to hire you, including my female manager. First and foremost we're interested in your technical output, if it's not there and we don't think it can be there, go away. And if you are serious about doing this job, and understand what it means to be on a team, and to produce a product, you would be the same way. People who don't pull their weight crater the company, prove to us you're going to pull your weight.

Rather than "save us from the Machines", maybe "save us from our children", because that ends up being more or less the same thing: systems far too complex and independent to be controllable, with the capacity and occasional desire to cause harm, to which the creators are responsible for a little while.

I was unable to read your post because it didn't contain any pictures to look at or a monkey I could punch.

Clear justification for net neutrality and taking content & services away from them entirely. Yes, they will still stick us with the bill. But we can limit our involvement and simplify the discussion to BW/$. Bundling makes the conversation confusing and gets too many "interested third parties" creating misleading noise.

I'm not going to disagree with most things. I'm curious what issues you are having with Family Sharing. After a few updates (noteably 8.1) I found it actually works like I expected, and my son can request apps and I can approve them on my own device. Usually. That's more or less what I wanted from the feature.

I have a few issues in decreasing severity:
- It wasn't clear when it rolled out that you don't HAVE to give your 6yo his own Apple ID (or your 13yo), and once done can't be undone. It's quite clear now though. So back then, I set one up, and live in fear of all the communication tools he has access to that i can't restrict. I'm somewhat conservative in that I don't think a 6yo should have open access to all persons, and I should be able to shut that off.
- Sometimes permission requests get dropped, or don't get to my iPhone. Bug. Much less frequent lately, but still lurking.
- Annoyingly asks for the youngin's password too many times

I suspect that merging IDs will never happen, but the reason I would want that is exactly family sharing.

I don't, that means there will be wasted memory that i could otherwise be using. I'd rather free up space for an upgrade if I want it, than have excess space I can't use.

What "we" as consumers really want is less $ per GB for the upgrade iDevices, but that would require someone other than Apple producing decent hardware, when the trend is Chinese shitshops producing junk.

I didn't complain but I found some of the pictures it unearthed to be painful reminders, the early part of the year was lousy for me individually which evolved to be generally fantastic. Nevertheless, I think it's legit to complain and remind them that we upload pictures for a number of reasons, and the emotions attached to them change a lot over a year. Complaining in the form of feedback is perfectly acceptable. It's the incessant lawsuits and mass media editorials that wear on our nerves.

I think the reasonable solution is to make this an optional feature that they advertise for instead of just dump on your page. Even allow you to choose the photos to show and save for posterity.

Yet "high-tech" started long before that, and was already very gender biased. The article specifically said "email", which was quite common in the 80s on college campuses and high tech industries, I know because I had to maintain some legacy scripts, rules for which were set up in the 80s and nobody really understood anymore in 2000.

The article is correct on some facts, but is entirely lost in narrative.

I thought it was serious until I read that students showed up at Stanford in 1994 barely knowing what email was. Then I realized it's satire. I mean, you can't seriously propose that the tech revolution started in 1994, right? Even Intel, Apple and Microsoft are latecomers to teh tech revolution, which was already very gender biased in the late 70s. When did "high tech" begin? I'm not sure, maybe WWII, maybe the industrial revolution, or maybe as late as teh semiconductor. All of these were well before Stanford class of '94 graduates were BORN. Even I knew what email was long before 1994, I even had email of my own.

This isn't intended to be a geriatric post where I try to claim I'm an OG, most things high-tech were invented before I was born. C existed, Unix was a thing. The only thing the mid-90s meant to high-tech was the birth of the popular internet, which many of us remember being the death of the useful internet.

It's true they can't interfere with other communications intentionally, or through some byproduct of their transmitter that doesn't fit within spec. However if they are sending data over all the available channels on their wifi links, that is "legal" as long as they have plausible deniability and feel comfortable defending it in court.

No one can stop them from building a faraday cage around their hotel, but they absolutely should not be allowed to jam anything (via intentionally emitting interfering signals)...that can only ever do bad things.

More or less. If you build a faraday cage around your house, that's legal. If you build a jammer, that is illegal.

It seems like jammers are bad because you can't control the range of their effectiveness. On the other hand faraday cages tend to block more frequencies than you'd like, ex. you probably also would block cell reception.