Like it or not, there are plenty of powers reserved for the state denied to the people, so this is a weak argument at best and certainly not much of a moral one. I'd argue natural law states that murderers should be killed as the whole purpose of laws against murder is to stop them from happening to us, a reverse of "kill or be killed" and most also believe in taking back what was taken. As much of our current law was derived from natural law there's nothing inherently immoral in it.

That said, I do believe in the death penalty very much, as strongly as I believe in our justice system to apply it inconsistently and unfairly. It's for this reason, I do not support state sanctioned murder, unless committed in self-defense.

The tablet PC is not new. It preceded the iPad and Android tablets by several years but the technology sucked. It's better now to the point that a tablet PC is workable and for my money, MS is proving the point well with the Surface Pro line. The iPad succeeded where the previous tablets failed because they reduced functionality down to media consumption only while taking advantage of the then more advanced technology to create a far more elegant design. It’s still not suited to real work while the Surface Pro actually is. I welcome it. I have an iPad and I hate having to switch to my laptop every time I think of some small bit of work I need to do. There is a huge market for a device like this among business users and less casual home users like me. I hope they succeed and if it brings them a windfall of new money. That’s exactly as it should be.

And apparently I didn't hit my head hard enough before I posted that.

...Gives new meaning to "rack you brain" for the answer.

One of the ways I always did homework and still use today is by pretending I am teaching someone else. This method works great for logical subjects like math or science where there are proofs, facts and well defined theories, less so for more disorganized and subjective material where rote memorization is required but it can work there too if I can get into the "story". It never fails to bring up, those "wait a minute" and "what now" and "why do it like that" questions I hated having on test day. At least in school, when I got to the point I could "teach" myself, I always made an A+.

Better or Worse, getting more credit and using it responsibly is the key to getting even more credit, particularly the more difficult products like lines of credits, construction loans, restoration loans, business loans and so forth. It's also the key to getting higher balances on new and existing cards. After totally destroying my credit during college, the first card I got again had a $500 limit. 5 year later, I had three cards and about $20K and needed it all to pay for a European business trip that ultimately would be reimbursed by my employer.

A few more years, I had six cards and close to $100K. I also had a $220K mortgage on and $400K house. A builder was preparing to replace a beautiful field beside my house with 60 town homes. I knew I would hate it but that I could also rent my house out for much more than the payments, so I did and bought another $350K historic house with a $260K mortgage while keeping the other. Being almost 100 years old, it needed nearly $120K in work. I paid part in cash and got a line of credit for $60K to finish the job. Done and 8 months later, I refinance the $60K back into the first but the house was now worth $550K, so I made nearly 80K on the deal. I then closed the line of credit. I still have the six cards.

Yes, I've been fortunate but I make an average IT salary. Many can do much more, some may do less at first, but anyone can find a smart ways to use their credit and it pays to develop it. There are three basic rules: One, always pay on time. Two, try to show some but 1% utilization. Three, never close old credit. You can still pay off your cards and avoid interest on rule 2 by letting the statement cut and then paying. For rule 3, with time and a good record, you can probably get your provider to upgrade your card without changing it, so it never has to be closed.

One might assume some 35 years after the advent of PC revolution, there are more than a few grey hairs running around like me with infinitely more knowledge on how to secure a computer than some smart mouth tweener. Having spent years securing their computers, I would not trust any child of mine to do a better job than I would and it's time to put the tired meme that kids know tech better than their parents to bed where it belongs.

No one knows the actual origin of the term "cloud computing" and what it means can legitimately be different depending on who you ask making the effectiveness of the term fairly useless. The only reason non-IT folk latch onto it is because there's a component of "I don't know what's going on" that they can understand and it makes it seem friendly. The op was merely pointing out why it's not.

BTW, the cloud symbol was most often used in the 90's on network diagrams to indicate frame-relay links between sites back before dedicated Internet access was common. There was an aspect of "don't know" associated with it because it used shared links, did not guarantee delivery and frequently had service interruptions. Wikipedia sites this as a possible origin of the term but I think it is the origin of the term having seen how suits quickly latched onto it when it was shown in demos and presentations. Not understanding was something they could grasp.

Institutions wouldn’t get this information straight from Facebook but would instead use one of the many smaller credit reporting agencies and if they make a negative decision based on this, they are required by the Fair Credit Reporting Act to disclose this to you. If that happens, the CRA is then required to provide you a copy of the report provided to the given company. They could try to lie and make up some other excuse but they wouldn’t get away with it many times before a pattern would emerge and they would open themselves up to huge lawsuits should they be caught doing it. It’s worth noting a lot of the smaller CRA’s have the same annual reporting requirements as do the big three and you can request a free report from them. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has a PDF that lists many of the smaller CRA’s and how you can contact them.

That said, I think that trying to plumb social networking information and deny credit is on par with redlining. It’s only started happening and I’ve heard of no legal challenges and I doubt the connections on any random social network can be completely separated from any of the factors that can’t be used to make credit decisions - race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or age. IANAL, but it would seem just looking at it could greatly increase your risk for an ECOA lawsuit.

Posted by Unknown Lamer on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @03:11AM

ME: Having heart attack, frantically searches for second episode of final season to torrent since I must have missed it only to realize this is Slashdot, where editors can't be bothered with facts, such as the second episode won't air until Sunday, August 18th .

For an interesting take on why the telegraph led in part to the modern computer and how both work, read Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold. He argues all the ideas needed to build a modern computer were known around the time telegraph use took off, and he uses those ideas to describe logic gates and put them together into a working computer.

In short, the relay was invented in 1835 as a way to extend telegraph runs further without requiring operators. Morse code, as the primary way to communicate, happened to also be a binary code that mapped letters to the equivalent of ones and zeros, dots and dashes. In 1854, George Boole published “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought”. Petzold stops there and essentially uses only those ideas to build his modern computer. It wasn’t recognized formally by anyone until 1937 when Claude Shannon published “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits”. Even Charles Babbage had known of Boole’s work and the telegraph but did not see how it could have been better used to build his Difference Engine.

Here's the VisualEditor FAQ which states:

• 24 June: A/B test on the English Wikipedia. VisualEditor is released by default to 50% of newly registered accounts.
• 1 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, available for all logged-in users.
• 8 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, available for anonymous and logged-in users.
• 15 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to most large Wikipedia wikis, available for all users. Which wikis are in this list is still to be determined, but will definitely include Wikipedia in German, French and Italian.
• 29 July: Deployment of the VisualEditor to all other Wikipedia wikis, available for all users, minus a few wikis (such as the Chinese Wikipedia) where the VisualEditor does not yet work.

Also of interest from that FAQ is that the VisualEditor can be installed on any MediaWiki installation, including personal wikis. As a MediaWiki user at home, I've found it a cool way to journal and track a lot of personal projects but the limit to using it has always been remembering wiki markup. This will go a long way to eliminating that problem.

You are being disingenuous. Both gun control and social welfare are most closely associated with liberals, not conservatives. Things that would help - equal access to education, social programs for at-risk youth, legalizing drugs, treatment instead of prison - where do you suppose they stand on those issues?

This tech was discussed there. It. was created by a guy in his garage using harvested mobile phone cameras and is already being tested in drones by Homeland Security. Per the show, the actual level of detail is classified but they did show an example where the were able to monitor dozens of city blocks at the same time grid style and then choose any point on the grid and zoom in hi-def and see full detail of people walking on the ground, all using a single lens array.