Not to mention that they dropped driver support from the SBLive 5.1/Gold after XP, despite it being a *very* common card in many systems (partly, I believe, because it came with many Dell's and/or possibly HP's).

When Vista/7 came out, Creative dropped it like a hot rock and didn't provide a driver for the newer OS. There is a FOSS driver, but it lacked much of what was supported in the XP driver (while also adding other features).

What, you're telling me that my $5.00 USB "7.1 surround sound" card (that oddly only has two analog jacks) *ISN'T* as good as a high-end soundcard? :-)

Actually, the main advantage I've found for USB vs onboard sound - even with cheap USB - is that they tend to pick up less of the "electrical whine" that a lot of onboard stuff does. Dedicated cards oftimes have better filtering that keeps this out, and the onboard designs are better these days, but I do still find you can actually hear when you're moving the mouse from the background growl of many board-chip audio cards.

Hardly new. Slashdot frequently runs doom-is-nigh, overblown, click-baity summaries for the purposes of drawing in viewers (and thus, revenue). All those stupid social sites use vague headlines ending with "...you won't believe what happens next!" to try and intrigue viewers for the same reason. Calling it "mind control" is setting the bar pretty low.

All news is filtered. You wouldn't have time to digest every single piece of information generated every day. The question is, what is your news filtered by? I don't see how "upbeat" is any worse than "political", "tech", "sport", or "local".

[Citation needed]

Don't forget the RF shielded optical fiber interconnects, for true fidelity at high frequencies, and a mellow bass.

As intrusive as the Google Glass has proven to be, it will only be worse when observation recording tech is more difficult to detect.

I disagree. The exact opposite: when people stop noticing, they will stop caring. It won't be perceived as intrusive anymore, and people will be less annoyed by it.

It's the conspicuousness of the camera in Google Glass, the constant reminder that you might be recorded, that makes most people feel creeped out. For the previous decade leading up to that product, nobody cared about small+cheap camera tech itself. And people walk/drive by fixed-position cameras all the time, and don't give a fuck there either. Peoples's behavior shows that "intrusiveness" happens when a cameras looks like a camera, and I suspect it also has something to do with being face-level, literally "in your face" and you're making eye contact with it, unlike the case with less conspicuous cameras. It was never about privacy; it's some aspect of self-consciousness kind of related to privacy, but a different thing.

You might say "maybe you, but I sure care. Hell yes it's about privacy." Of course you say that. I'm talking about how people behave and the emotions they display. Not their innermost secret thoughts that they are always terrified to express in voting booths or policy decisions, yet are happy to speak of on the Internet.

You know, the Internet, where they don't have a camera in their face making them all self-conscious! The Internet, where instead of a terrifying 1x1 pixel image that makes you think "WTF is that? That's weird! Are you watching me?" you now instead see a bunch of "like buttons" which are obviously for liking things, not getting your browser to send a request to an unrelated tracking server.

In addition, there's a certain inevitability about it all. The cameras have been there a long time, there are more today, and there will be even more tomorrow. You can't do anything about it, except stay at home. So you'll either accept or you'll go insane and get selected out. You'll handle it. (Contrast that to Google Glass, the one small camera out of the hundreds out there, that you actually recognize and is also rare enough that there's little social cost to shunning. With GG you can refuse to accept and also stay within social norms, so GG is different.)

I have a sideline job doing computer servicing/repair. Since the issues between Russia/Ukraine have ramped up, there's also been a noticeable uptick in online/banking fraud coming from Russia.
Thankfully the banks seem to be on the watch for this - the notify customers of unusual transactions, e.g. western union, to Russian accounts - so most of my work is just ensuring that machines are clean after the fact.

I won't say that this is state-sponsored, but likely more to issues alluded to with this guy: mainly that Russia doesn't seem to be very cooperative in dealing with known international criminals - especially with the poor international relations of current - and the criminal element are taking advantage of this.

Bitcoin's primary purpose is to traffic/launder money and goods.

Objection. Will stipulate that its primary purpose is to traffic. But I call mega-bullshit on its primary or even secondary purpose being to launder, though there might be a way one could use Bitcoin for that.

I've actually had servers say that to me.

Usual cause: trying to execute certain commands while logged in as a user that no longer exists in /etc/passwd.

Also known as "oops I overwrite /etc/password!".

Bonus points if you get this while logged in a root. An associate of mine discovered that it's bad to use system variable names when he had this one in a script he ran (as root):
    deluser $USER

someone who never speaks, rocks in a corner, and screams if their normal routine is changed

So, middle-management then? Except for the never speaking part, they tend to speak at length *after* things go south. :-)

Perhaps so, but keep in mind those older models *still* resell for more than many others, and before the release of the PS4 you could see good condition CECHE01's selling for $100+ over the price of the regular models. When the PS3 first came out, the price jump over other consoles also included the blu-ray drive etc, and generally better build quality. The PS3 did have some issues, but the RROD and laser-burn (cheaping out over a 5c bumper, geeze) issues on the XB360 were legendary.

My understanding is that the main difference was in the chip that supported the older hardware, so why not just make it an option which could be easily added? A little socket for the chip and a dip-switch or jumper would probably do.

Yes, I was trying to echo the wording of the "Why I Vote Democrat" post as closely as possible (which is also incorrect of course). A more accurate statement would be "surging mass shooting rates".

What I think a lot of the utopian visions miss, as well as a lot of the posters here, is that the problems with programming are not problems with the tools, but with the code that these amateurs produce. Writing clean, clear, correct, modular, maintainable, tested, and reusable code is still a skill that takes time to learn.

Generally, most people understand following a sequence of steps to achieve a goal. They can follow a recipe's steps to bake a cake. Some can even write down the steps they took to accomplish a task, which is the beginning of automating it; but recording and playing back steps is certainly not all there is to programming. Almost anyone who can write steps down can then learn enough of a language to string together a dozen or even a hundred individual steps to then achieve a goal: StepA(foo); bar = StepB(foo); StepC(foo,bar); ... another 97 steps here...; return(). The problem is that because writing down all those steps is possible, people who manage to do it once think they're programming. But all they're really doing is scripting.

Once someone tries to add logic to their scripts, the resultant code is generally buggy, slow, difficult to maintain, impossible to test, and probably should not be put into production, let alone reused. What a professional software developer does is recognizes the difference. He or she uses his or her experience, skills, and knowledge to organize those instructions into small groups of functionality, and wraps them into readable, testable, reusable, methods. He or she recognizes dependencies in the code, follows design principles to ensure they are properly organized, groups related methods into classes or modules, knows when to follow design patterns and when to break from them, groups related areas of modules into architectural layers, and wraps the layers with clean, testable, usable interfaces. He or she knows how to secure the code against various types of attack or misuse, and to properly protect the data it's been entrusted with. He or she understands validation, authorization, authentication, roles, sanitization, whitelisting, and blacklisting. And he or she understands the many forms of testing needed, including unit testing, system testing, integration testing, fuzz testing, pen testing, performance testing, as well as tools to evaluate the code, such as static code analysis and metrics.

On the other end of the developer's life are the inputs to the processes: requirements, stories, use cases, usability, scalability, performance. They know that following certain development methodologies can make a great deal of difference to the software's quality. And then there are the realities of all the non software development issues: equipment, firewall rules, IDPs, networking, vendor contracts, software licensing, hosting, distribution, installation, support, bug tracking, and even sales.

Tools can help with all of these steps, but as you pointed out, having a word processor does not make one a poet.