I had a win98 install that lasted almost a decade but it took a fair bit of effort to hold back the entropy (I resisted upgrading because of one win98 game...). NT was definitely a landmark in stability as was XP. I've been on Win7 at home and work for a couple of years now. I've been doing C/C++ development regularly for the last 25ys as a job, a bad pointer would often bring Win98 to it's knees, not so much with NT/XP and I've never managed to crash Win7 with bad code. In fact Win7 has crashed on me exactly twice, once when the SSD died, and another time when the video card started smoking.

From the POV of system stability you could line up today's popular O/S's, throw a dart blindfolded, and be still be sure to hit a decent general purpose O/S. This doesn't mean they are flawlessly designed, however most of the bitching I see from geeks is just the geek not understanding how things work before attempting to "fix" the "problem", and most of the bitching I hear from non-geeks is about the non-geek's ignorance of how malware got onto their machine. .

Indeed I did, but people who have invested in their worldviews have this nasty habit of only seeing what they want to see.

Yes copyright is automatic but if the mere act of downloading copyrighted material was a crime then the internet simply could not (legally) work the way it does since you would need explicit permission to visit a random page prior to visiting said page. So the reasoning goes that if someone puts something on the net, a third party can freely copy it. What the third party can't do is redistribute the material, so messages such as "leave your computer running" are going to hang them. When you think about it. It's not that different to the way libraries work, you can take the book home and read it, and even take a personal copy, but you can start handing out copies to all your mates.

No matter how much "downloading is theft" propaganda the MAFIAA spews, or how much I despise them for it, the above "default" arrangement is the only one that makes any sense. If we allowed redistributions w/o permission then I could simply buy up the iTunes catalog for a one time fee of $1/song and start selling copies at $0,90/song. Five seconds after I've done that, someone else does the same to me and sells at $0.50/song.

Different person here. This is in line with my own personal morality and absolutely correct. My life is mine to do with as I please. I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want, provided that the consequences are SOLELY confined to consenting adults (generally that would be just me).

Anything else is an evil desire to control other people, with the approval you get from your own conscience, by convincing yourself it's for their own good, so you can pat yourself on the back and feel like a good person. The typical lack of reasoning ability, wisdom or long-term thinking in most people today and the general shallow thinking of the popular culture sadly promotes and legitimizes this inability to be satisfied with one's own life while respecting that others will live theirs as they please and realizing that telling people how they should live has never worked in the first place (c.f. Prohibition) so there should not even be a debate about this.

Someone who cannot responsibly use things (usually due to either a lack of personal maturity and self-knowledge, and/or an inability to deal with one's own life that causes them to reach for drugs as a quick-fix "remedy") has a problem. There are many others who use drugs the same way you might come home from work and drink a beer and stay home. Like Bill Hicks pointed out, it sure is strange the way you never hear about responsible drug users on the news or see them portrayed on shows. That would contradict all the fear propaganda and think-of-the-children rhetoric. Pay attention and you'll notice that the major mass media outlets will generally never contradict either: each other, or anything that faciltiates control. Adult people who are expected to make their own decisions about their own lives in a responsible manner, without being told how to live, absolutely does not facilitate control. Qui bono?

That's exactly what they are doing, making sure you get the functionality you pay for. I buy my stuff from reputable dealers, in 25yrs I've had exactly one Nvidia card and one ATI card blow up, every other video problem I've ever had has been software related. Both cards were cheerfully replaced under warranty.

AFAIK from personal experience the practice of downgrading faulty chips to a lower spec has been around since the days of maths co-processors, probably longer. And no they don't exhaustively test every chip, the grading is done via random sampling at the batch level because, like science, "statistical analysis works".

"Tracking the RNG" would help you win the game, but it doesn't tell you anything about how to play the game. This AI learns to play the game, it then wins the game using experience it gains in the same way a human does - feedback from the game score. There' nothing really "new" in any of this, if you want a really impressive demo of what this kind of AI can do then pop over to youtube and watch the videos of IBM's "Watson" beating the snot out of the best human players in the TV game show "Jeopardy ". When it won Jeopardy the hardware filled a large room, nowadays Watson is available commercially and runs of two rack mounted servers. Their ultimate goal is to shrink it down to fit in a mobile phone.

I've found that Watson is actually a good way to test a person's understanding of AI - If you don't find the Jeopardy demo impressive (and a little scary), then you clearly don't understand the problem they have solved.

I formally studied AI and neural nets 25yrs ago, I recently came across this series of video lectures on YT. I started watching to refresh my memory and ended up learning quite a bit of new stuff that was unknown when I did my degree. It took me about a month or so to watch the whole series, definitely worth the effort if you already have the basics, but forget it if statistical maths or matrices scare you.

Peal/Python - A toy AI doesn't need to be fast, it's purpose is to play with ideas, scripts are much more flexible than binaries for this purpose.

Both the summary and article say "google".

Of course it's a tax by a different name, you live under three tiers of governments, local governments are the bottom tier and have the right to charge property owners rates and fees and issue fines for by-law infringements such as parking tickets, etc. A good local government can make a huge difference to the local economy by improving the general appearance and amenities of the town. A shitty one will do nothing and charge extra for that level of "freedom".

Your "revenge" sounds like the actions of a crank to me. It has successfully pissed off all your neighbours, but the garbo, even if he notices the rubbish, doesn't give a flying fuck what your street looks like.

As for political labels - My 80yo parents are "conservatives", they would never dream of littering any street let alone their own. I'm not sure the english language has a general label for the political opinions you post but the majority of them are much too radical to be labeled "conservative".

Fire an editor or two, starting with the consistently worst-performing, and Dice will have rediscovered a time-tested method by which employers have dealt with employees who don't even try to perform their jobs competently.

As it stands now, they have little or no incentive to produce quality. If they had a sense of shame, embarassment, or pride in their work then that would at least be an improvement.

Yet the number of Indians without electricity or plumbing is still greater than the entire population of the US.

That's what hydro dams are for. They already use them as "batteries" for coal plants because the demand curve of a city is not flat like the output curve of a coal plant. The buffer provided by the dam doesn't stop working just because you swap out the coal plant for a solar/wind farm.

So I am a bit confused about why that is a problem. The cost to the insurer of offering maternity care to post-menopausal women should be about zero. Why not tack that onto an otherwise good plan if that's what the law requires? Wouldn't that make more sense than scrapping the plan for such a flimsy reason?