No, the poorest do not rent. The poorest sleep on park benches and in alleys. Naturally, those people don't count, for some reason.

Her defense wasn't delayed by injustice; it was delayed by assholes. Injustice is a thing, a concept, one not entirely tied to reality; it is an abstract aligned to our moral beliefs. We don't consider the vicious treatment of pedophiles in America injustice because we hate them, even though empirically we can make some arguments about mental health and the fermentation of social pressures forcing people with an internal sickness into hiding, stress, and then the shape of something they could have avoided with proper social support. We consider victimization of Jews injustice because we've started this moral narrative about how hating on Jews is bad.

The fact of the matter is it's people who made decisions about their regards toward and actions about race that delayed this Ph.D. defense. It's assholes. It's people who decided to bar this from being heard. Injustice is a diffuse thing, like the injustice of a court system which executes more blacks than whites on similar evidence; it lifts blame off the participants and onto the mode of society or of misfortune. We pretend these actors don't exist, or at least that they aren't directly responsible for their actions, even though the victims are directly burdened by them. That nebulous ideal is immaterial to the consequences of society; the fact that people went along with it instead of using their human reason and empathy to decide against these happenings is squarely the fault of those people, not the fault of the speculation about what those people did.

What happened wasn't wrong; *you* were wrong for doing it.

For an individual or small group, I won't assume malice where incompetence or failure is an entirely viable explanation.
For a large group, inhuman malice towards individuals is generally indistinguishable from studied and successful neutrality.

Why? Because open naivete and narrow cynicism are both excellent spices, but neither fills the stomach.

The only way to ensure the possibility of a good paying job is to match labor supply with labor demand; that is, to make sure there aren't 100,000,000 computer programmers and 4,000,000 programming jobs.

"Keeping the US Economy competitive" is ludicrous. It's like eating shitloads of donuts to keep a sumo wrestler competitive: your body gets sick and you die, and all you really need is good sumo skills to wrestle people in your weight class successfully.

The US economy won't be competitive if it's completely and totally ill from a glut of computer science specialists and the constant suppression of salaries by state-subsidized college education. If the US economy runs well, a well-tuned machine with all of the parts correctly built and sized for need, it will outperform any other economy on earth. An arms race to stockpile perishable goods we have no intent nor ability to use before they expire is only going to make us a poor and shaky economy weak in the things we sacrifice for stacking up tons of tomatoes that are going to rot away next month.

Note to Obama: You are being lied to.

Seriously, and trying to sidestep most of the political angles: This is what happens when a person with authority collects a small set of advisers -- in an effort to cut noise/increase focus/get to data-driven decisions -- and then those advisers are not challenged or regularly rotated or infused with new thinking.

This instance pains me, partly because by my citizenship I'm on the wrong end of the Patriot Act aka "Putin's Law" ...but even more because I make my living by gathering and giving security and privacy advice on both the technical and compliance sides. When Obama's not even getting the quality of mid-market commercially-available advising, we're all in deep doo-doo.

To wit:
- Let's get real: metadata IS the data. Who/when/how/where you called is just as important as the what/why content of the call. The ears don't get much more totalitarian than this, we just don't have totalitarian fists yet. (Oh wait... *watches news about street cops outfitted with combat armaments and light tanks, then acquitted for movie-style executions*)
- NSA's collection of citizen's communication data and metadata have not led to even one single foiled terrorist plot. Not one. It's not even the right model to catch the stuff we know about in hindsight. The only reliable detection tool for decades has been manual notification by family and friends to authorities, and there's still no good unified repository and workflow system to handle it.
- There are multiple documented instances of abuse where the collected information was too tempting for federal employees not to do something stupid or illegal or both. (LOVEINT is almost funny, but multiple instances of commercial espionage have been alleged and documented.) If we amass this kind of information, people will use it for whatever purpose they imagine -- justified or illicit -- because admitting there's no legitimate function is the worst option of all.
- In the big picture, total security really does obliterate freedom. How I wish we could discuss that without hyperbole. Maybe we could stay grounded by involving the French, who are further into a discussion about how overreaction to Muslim immigration will destroy their governing principles as effectively as any perceived human threat.
- It deeply troubles me that Obama appears to have no better tech-sourced intel than 3rd tier CEOs buying security guidance from consultancies with 800 number to a sales guy and $150/hr bill rate.

What a sad state of affairs.

1 trillion billion years.

Any other moronic questions?

To clarify: the iPhone has been out for (almost) 8 years, and only now the offending string was found.

No testing provides 100% coverage, especially for the number of combinations of possible Unicode characters in a 160-character/byte message. Only a complete moron would blame this bug on lack of testing.

Apple's NSString implementation is at least 15 years old. Sure it's been improved over the years, but it's not like Apple's a newcomer to parsing Unicode.

Bugs happen.

Right. They never bothered testing for a particular string that was found 8 years after the iPhone's release.

Could you be more stupid?

We can't tell you. It requires Unicode characters that /. won't render.

You have to give up 2x battery life to get the same performance? What kind of shit hardware do you buy?

Seems like completely normal handling to me. Some shit head ran into a group of people, and Volvo said, "not our fault." What the fuck would you expect them to say? "Sorry we didn't foresee some murderous idiot showing off his new car and force him to buy an upgrade."

You don't seem all that intelligent to me. Were you hit in the head by a Volvo, by any chance?

I guess you got hit by a Volvo when you were younger. That would explain the extreme level of sheer idiocy you have demonstrated.

Are you fucking stupid on purpose, or did someone hit you with a Volvo?

What the fuck are you on about? How many vehicles even have the feature as an option, never mind as standard?