It's true that funky names are ubiquitous in the free software world, and I often wish developers came up with something better. But unhelpful names aren't limited to FOSS. What would your grandmother (if she's familiar with computers, pick another relative :-)) guess Adobe Acrobat does? Or Microsoft Silverlight? Windows? Visual Studio?

That same filesync software just messed up all of your other files too, so you just restore them to an earlier, good state. I'm not really a fan of meaningful whitespace either, but your scenario is solved by backups/version control, not change of language.

What about pictures of one's baby or young kid nude, is it illegal to send such images to the kids grandparents for example? It can be very hard to tell from just a picture whether abuse took place or not. Sometimes it's clear, and I hope the victims get all the help they need. But in other cases, would these automated systems mark the images as "child abuse" and get the parents in trouble? The topic is so heated that even slight suspicions can lead to big problems.

If you owned TV networks, newspapers and such you could do it very efficiently. You don't need to directly hurt anyone or mess around with bombs to cause terror.

That's pretty interesting. Any idea what criteria they use for splitting between mobile or desktop content?

Telling the customer to update the contact information and then calling the customer again is the only good method I can think of right now. Anything else relies on the customer giving out more or less sensitive information to the caller who may or may not be working for the bank.

I don't understand. I pay all my bills online with a wire transfer. If I didn't trust my bank to keep records of transactions why would I trust them with my money in the first place?

You don't have to be insanely lucky, just lucky enough to be born in a country with unemployment benefits. You'll have 24 hours each day to tinker with whatever you want. It has its moments, but you're right, it really isn't that great. However, the option is there if you value free time over a lot of things (some of which aren't material, like respect).

Also there's the fact that one company has the power to expunge whatever they don't like.

What difference would that make? All the same changes, released on the same schedule but using smaller numbers. I don't see why it matters.

Another fine example of a /. meme :-)

It seems to me that unless one is very wealthy, it would be in their best interest not to further the research and construction of these robots. Which is a shame, because this stuff is pretty cool.

This isn't a new problem of course; I suppose similar issues were being discussed whenever significant productivity increasing machines were invented.

I'm not sure I agree with this. Shouldn't an offended* party be allowed the opportunity to settle their grievances in a court of law?


(* even if the offense seems really minor or imaginary to impartial observers)

I doubt anyone really cares how Blizzard does the merges as long as players don't have to rename their characters (which they accomplished by appending realm names) and performance doesn't suffer noticably. I sure don't, and I would probably be considered hardcore by many casual gamers.

Will switching to Macs solve the problem though? I was under the impression that Apple supports old OS X versions for a shorter period than Microsoft supports old versions of Windows. Snow Leopard was released in 2009, XP SP3 in 2008. According to Wikipedia Snow Leopard isn't supported anymore, let alone anything released in 2001 when XP first came out.

With a libre software solution you would have the option to pay someone to backport security fixes so you could run the current versions for a long time, but I guess this would be too expensive to do properly.