I'd always planned to burn .isos anyhow, so this is a good option for me. (Yeah, yeah, "USB stick, blah, blah". Why am I going to use a $5 USB stick instead of a $0.50 DVD for something I don't expect to use more than once or twice?)

The worst mistake we could make is to try to simulate emotions. That's what true psychopaths do -- simulate and fake their emotions.

I'm looking forward to the Popular person in a production car and seeing their feral racing driver the Gits test supercars. ;-)

So city slickers need something to piss on?

Any farm boy can tell you all you need is the wind at your back and you're good to go. Literally. :P

Even "Blue Chip" companies like IBM are a pale shadow of their former selves. Microsoft has lost billions on failed acquisitions and "new technology" that never took hold of the market.

The point is, former success and profit are no guarantee of the same in the future. Companies come, and companies go.

Expecting to be employed by one single company for an entire career is a fools game in the internet age. The sooner you wake up to the fact that even if you do save a company from itself, you're not going to be appreciated nor rewarded for your efforts, the sooner you can start planning a career of moving from one interesting job to the next.

Anyone who is targeting the executive levels of business knows damn well they are going to get their next "promotion" by jumping ship for another company, leveraging their current skills and position as the experience needed for a higher level position. You just flat out don't get promoted into those positions by companies any more, because they don't want you to leave your current role if you're doing a good job. And if you're not doing a good job and are replaceable, they're going to replace you anyhow with someone who isn't replaceable, or they're going to farm out the work of your position to some agency that uses cookie-cutter staff to fill the role.

Companies don't owe you anything, and you don't owe the company anything -- especially not "loyalty."

Get over the idea of "saving" the company. Do your job, do it well, find a better position, and get the hell out while the getting is good.

I think you need to look at the first Mac keyboard. There was no "control" key. Just the Command and Option keys. The Command key was for keyboard shortcuts and the Option key was to enter special characters (accents, extra symbols, etc). They later added the "Control" key where the caps lock key is typically located now and moved "caps lock" to a tiny button next to the space bar. This was done to be compatible with terminal applications.

To be fair, nothing ever good came from buying a PC with ME or Vista... you picked the lesser of two evils. I had 98SE on a machine well into the XP era. I had an XP machine well into the 7 era. Strategic skipping of versions is just as important to a Windows user as not touching the installed system.

I run a P4 3.8GHz single core system as my main desktop, even though I do development with it. Switching to a newer Core i5 system will make it run 10 times as fast, but as the runtime on my huge (tuned) code base is under 5 minutes already, it really won't save me *that* much time compared to *editing* the code. It will save on build time, which is a boon to me, but even that savings is only due to the nature of my build process -- I do full instead of incremental builds.

I do plan on buying a new machine in a few months when I've saved the money, but my main point is that the hardware we use has been "good enough" for a good decade. It is the crappy software the people shovel out that drives hardware upgrades nowadays, not the actual need for faster hardware.

So it is to the hardware manufacturer's benefit that as much software as possible be absolutely incompetently written crap so that people will buy the latest shiny-shiny because their old one is "too slow."

"Ha-ha!"
-- Nelson

What would be fitting is for all those "settlements" to be automatically overturned and the troll forced to refund the money.

But I know it doesn't work that way. If you wuss out and pay the toll, there is no getting your money back from the troll.

Do you comprehend the difference between the old 32-bit SPARC processors and the ones Oracle sells now?

I thought not.

Turn in your geek card.

Yes because total control of the commons worked SOOO well for the Soviet Union and their satellites. Governments with total common ownership are responsible for the worst ecological catastrophies in history. Even today, China, with total control of their energy industry, has the worst air pollution in the world.

Face it, the idea that command and control is the only way is a total lie. An open and free market for technological innovation will save the environment, not mimicking failed God damned central planning from last century.

Even a megapixel display at 24 bits required 3MB per frame... and a megapixel display has been "low end" for a lot of years now!

Seriously, though -- why does everyone sneer at the fact that not everyone is a gamer? Why are gamers so god damned fucking ARROGANT about their "my dick is bigger than yours" hardware?

The point is to write a "feel good" letter because "we tried to stop them."

Besides, everyone knows the US military and it's mega corp providers are probably the biggest researchers in this area, probably have been for 50+ years, and are unlikely to ever give up their funding just because a bunch of people with degrees think they should do so.

As the letter points out, the technology needed is widely available. That means that even Joe Blow in his basement could work on such AI systems. From there it's just a matter of connecting the AI to a weapons system, and there is no shortage of remotely-controllable weapon systems already. (Drones, anyone?)

Personally I applaud the letter writers for trying. They're incredibly naive to think their letter will have any impact on the decision makers, but they did try! :P

It amazes me how many rappers are gang-bangers first, and "musicians" second. So many of them put their loyalty to "the gang life" above everything else. :(