Touche. With a scalpel.

However, I will never be stuck in that situation. :)

Police should be required to get a warrant to get any information that I can not get without a warrant.

The federal and state governments have more constraints than you do.

The president can't get rid of existing laws. That's congress, and (because they usurped the power to do so), the courts. Learn how the system works. Then you might have some chance of making relevant commentary and/or writing accurate sarcasm.

Triangulating a location based on radio waves you are emitting isn't anything special.

Technically, no.

For the government, as it is explicitly constrained from legitimately doing so by the constitution, yes, it is something special.

And by "we", of course you mean the tiny, tiny minority that isn't... sitting in front of their television, a string of drool trailing from their partially open mouths, while the latest reports of Kim Kardassian's antics reflects from the their glazed eyes and the Doritos grease spots around their mouth. Or the deluded information-poor who consume Faux News broadcasts as if they were (cough) actual journalism.

Metaphorically speaking, little tiny soapboxes located at huge distances from one another, that no useful number of people pay any significant attention to... yep, that's pretty much right where we are.

It's not a slippery slope. It's a deep pit, and we're at the bottom already. They've just painted the sides with jingoistic and fear-inspiring slogans, that's all. The only way out is to stand on each other's shoulders, but that would require the use of backbone, which our society currently lacks in any significant sense.

Well said.

From TFS:

"We find no reason to conclude that cellphone users lack facts about the functions of cell towers or about telephone providers' recording cell tower usage."

In other words, we assert you probably know your privacy is being violated by existing technical means, so we'll just ignore the obvious constitutional instructions about warrants when dealing with personal information -- whereabouts, in this instance. Because the constitution is abused and/or ignored by most judges now, so that's ok, right? RIGHT?

Let's say some people commit murder in parks. Because they do. So, using the "reasoning" of the utter morons in this court:

We find no reason to conclude that park users lack facts about the prevalence of murder in parks.

And therefore, it's perfectly ok. Mr. Murderer, go forth and murder some more. Next Case!

More subscribers means more bandwidth, so you locate the servers in a distributed fashion, near where the users are. This is already the trend, but it would be moreso.

What's a river cruise in Egypt going for these days?

Oracle? SAP? Slashcode?

I can bog down a core i7 with 16GB ram, with a SSD external drive for dedicated cache, etc.....in seconds with one decent render or Photoshop project with 4-8+ Smart Objects open.

And more and more...if you are even a decent hobbits photographer, you depend on post to do your magic and you can overload a computer pretty quickly even with decen cpu, gnu and ram.

That doesn't even get into having a nice monitor(s), wacom tablet...etc.

I'd put this group maybe in between the #2 and #3 you listed above.

In this case, it is people with wells on their properties.

People still do water that way...wells on their property??

If so...I'd guess it would have to be a very small minority these days, eh?

I am in the midst of building a CarPC right now, as parts trickle in from far-flung regions of the globe, which is to say mostly HK. I'm saving my money for the display so it's a budget build based on a Boxer DA078L motherboard. I downgraded the processor to IIRC a X2 3800+ from a 3900+ because the specific processor model I ordered had almost 30W lower TDP, bringing the total system TDP down well under 100W which meant I could use a PicoPSU 120. I haven't tested my el cheapo 300W (headroom! which I will leave unused) boost-buck regulator yet, that's next. It has 2GB of RAM and I installed Kodibuntu, then installed navit. It comes with chromium and I am running the system on an 8GB CF card, currently in a USB adapter and soon in a SATA adapter. Maybe someday I'll buy it a real SSD but again, this is just a pocket change build based on something I had already. A $8 low-profile AM2/3 cooler is coming.

Why care? I can run Kodi and navit at the same time with no problems, using compiz as my window manager. and it can easily run chromium under LXDE. And I have no swap whatsoever. It would be dog-slow on my CF card (It's a "133X" Transcend, whatever that means) and I don't want to beat up my flash device anyway.

2GB is a lot of RAM. It seems like it isn't because of all the crap we run these days. But 2GB will actually go hilariously far if you use a limited desktop environment, or in fact none at all. If you just put the smallest Linux you can come up with (puppy?) into a partition with chromium, make init keep X running and make X keep chromium running, you'll have what you're looking for. I presume the only reason to want this is to have it as a multiboot option, since as others have said, if you wanted an actual chromebook you would have bought one. To come back around to my long introductory paragraph, I installed Kodibuntu when I wanted automotive navigation. That seems dumb, but it makes sense in the view of trying not to buy stuff. I also wanted more CPU power and didn't care about GPU power, so it made sense to me not to buy a Pi 2 and use a turnkey solution. (That's where I got the pointer to the skin I'm using.)

Just give each person a few programming tasks that should take ten minutes or so.

Yeah, but actually no. Each skill set is different. I could write you a PCB router in under an hour, or whip up an image processing mechanism, layered image editing, signal processing, write an FFT from scratch. I can do assembly coding as fast as I can type while higher up, I favor c and Python for their various and highly disjoint abilities. I'm good at documentation, and I can manage effectively -- without getting the team to hate me. But fizzbuzz? Sort of boggles me. I solve it very slowly. Perhaps because there's no point to it and I don't really give a flying crap. :) But perhaps also because it's just not my thing. I despise puzzles-for-the-sake-of-puzzles, and avoid them like the plague.

Bottom line, any type of interview question or test will sit poorly with some high quality programmer. Some don't know a language, some have an unusual process, some aren't great communicators, some don't function well with someone staring at them or under immediate pressure... there is no perfect interview method, and surely no way to determine programmer competence outside of their actual accomplishments -- which, even when you can pull it off, is not the same thing as measuring their skills against others, placing them in an objective relationship to the skills of others, either.

Personally -- and this is strictly anecdotal, but reflects many decades of experience -- I've had a lot better luck asking many-possible-answer questions about techniques and areas of knowledge in a friendly, low-pressure atmosphere where the interviewee is made to feel they are welcome and respected the moment they walk in the door.

There's only one: you have very little RAM. Then you may well need to use some swap to get a modern browser running well enough to hit newegg or eBay and buy some RAM.

No. Swap causes graceless degradation. It's not so bad if you have SSD or hybrid disk, because it can handle seeking all over hell when it happens. But it's better to just let the OOM killer murder the out-of-control application. Save early, save often.

There's nothing wrong with a suspend file. You could make the argument that it's possible to fill up the disk to the point where there's no room for one, but that's a feature. The computer can inform me that it cannot suspend, and let me know why. I can then decide what to do about it.

Swap was awesome back when RAM was expensive. RAM is now really cheap and you can do a hilariously huge amount of stuff with just a couple gigabytes of it and no swap. With four gigabytes of it I can run my database, map, and pbx servers in their own full-fledged VMs on top of a machine already providing other services... and still have room left over to run a Windows XP VM for automotive manuals. Now swap is just stupid, unless you know you have a specific use case where it won't unacceptably degrade performance. And frankly, if it helps you, it's probably because someone allocated a lot of memory they weren't using.