>Seems to me that the problem is people wanting to complain over nothing. So what if an album (and it's not like it's something offensive) gets added to your iTunes account as a 'purchased' product?

Excuse me, you do realize we're talking about U2 here? That's not something I'd want my friends or coworkers see in my library.

NSA officials were unable to find any evidence Snowden ever had.

This is essentially the "I do not recall" equivalent of paperwork investigations.

The essential question here is whether the NSA can conclusively deny that Snowden never raised concerns at the agency. Since if he did raise concerns, he probably would have raised them to people personally, a document search is not nessesarily going to uncover whether he did.

What will uncover this conclusively is a simple interview of NSA and affiliate company employees and especially supervisors who worked with Snowden. But since such a set of interviews would either a) reveal that he did raise concerns, b) involve people having to sign their names to untruths, or most unlikely c) reveal he really raised nothing, then I think it's easier for the NSA to just pretend that a half-assed email server word search constitutes an appropriate investigation.

First Person Shooter players do not represent the entire gaming community. This stereotype is being used to label Pokemon and Super Mario players as misogynists and bigots. All gamers are being tarred with a toxic brush.

This kind of labelling is wrong and morally bankrupt. The gaming community is being forced to defend itself against these kinds of disgraceful libels, by people who are genuinely ethical bankrupts. Simply browse the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield twitter hashtags to get a sense of where these accusations are coming from, and exactly who is in denial.

Question, why do you (generally speaking) feel the need to lump all the people who disagree with you together into one group, give that group a sarcastic name,

I call the people involved in this scandal "Social Justice Warriors (SJWs)" principally because I refuse to insult the feminist or progressive movements by calling these people with feminists or progressives. Genuine second-wave feminists have publicly criticised their behaviour.

If you want to understand the difference, look up the #Gamergate and #NotYourShield hashtags on twitter. The Social Justice Warriors are hateful, disingenuous, at times sociopathic bigots. They are adult, internet-empowered versions of the bullies and tormentors which many gamers remember from secondary school.

Gamers are the victims here. The modus-operandi of the SJWs is to cast themselves in the cloth of underprivileged groups -- most SJWs are in fact white, upper middle class, college aged -- then proceed to level accusations of privilege, bigotry, and misogyny against just about anyone involved in gaming for even the slightest perceived infractions. A climate of fear has developed, first in the indie and later wider gaming industry as a result of the "social justice" witchhunts which these people regularly engage in. Worse, this has resulted in SJW-aligned developers and journalists rising to positions of power and being first in line for awards and increasingly development funding, with cronyism trumping competence.

For Gaming, so often a hobby of last resort for the excluded and isolated in society, this is an awful and tragic outcome. For gamers, male, female, straight, gay or trans, it is a frightening development. Their hobby, their refuge, is being taken over by bullies.

Because their rhetoric and especially actions come across as so farcically disingenuous, I don't believe for a second that SJWs actually believe in or support the causes of homosexuals or transgender people in video games. Their support for women is also largely forced, and disturbingly biased towards the conservative view of women as a weaker sex who must be protected/defended (A view consistently challenged by the games industry over the years).

My honest opinion of SJWs is that they are privileged Neo-liberals, who adopt a forced social justice persona both to project their own (increasingly obvious) bigotry onto others, and ultimately to benefit themselves socially and financially. They are disingenuous, extremist bullies, and the gaming community is under co-ordinated PR attack, and has been almost completely censored on gaming websites.

The Social Justice Warriors are right about one thing though; this is a historical moment. Whether they win or lose, the GamerGate scandal will be seen as a watershed moment in the history of online-communities, and who controls them. Two weeks ago, I would never have believed that a clique so small could all but take-over a community so large, but it is becoming clear that this is precisely what (almost?) happened to gaming. There are lessons to be learned here, unrelated to the immediate issues, and I only hope the right people will take note and heed them.

Is it possible that some of the entertaining, amiable geeks that I spar with, party with, code with and blow things up with turn feral and run in packs when I'm not around?

It is unlikely. If you read further into this scandal and its surrounding issues, you will find that it is the gaming community which has been libelled by a clique of disingenuous bullies. These people will routinely label their opponents as bigots while displaying shocking levels of bigotry and hatred themselves. You can see ample evidence of this behaviour in these very comments.

For a better understanding of where the real "Ugly incidents" in this scadal are coming from, simply look up the #GamerGate and especially #Notyourshield twitter hashtags. The vitriol, hatred, and misrepresentations in this debate are coming from Social Justice Warriors (I refuse to apply the terms feminist or progressive to these frauds.)

It's a minor piece of trivia that was certainly not worth posting on slashdot in lieu of another Raymond post, but it's something I would've enjoyed reading when going through his blog. Check it out, there's tons of interesting technical and historical information there.

This isn't about Zoe Quinn. This is about Gamers being bullied and their hobby being culturally colonised by corrupt hypocrites.

Gamers are the victims here. The people crying misogyny are the real bigots. Look up the harshtags #Gamergate and especially #notyourshield on twitter to get a real feel for what is going on here.

Well it does solve some problems, just not problems many server administrators largely cared about while creating problems some systems administrators really do care about.

Well, if the project really is an NSA backed obfuscation of Linux a la SELinux, then confusing sysadmins and hampering their ability to control their own systems would be less of a bug and more of a feature.

Why replace pam.d, crond, init, and add complexities like dbus in a single package that runs at PID1 when it doesn't need to?

Because confident young men in a hurry to make their own mark on the world have little time for learning the tools or the lessons of the past.

I don't get it. Germany is the most dependent on Russian gas and Angela Merkel has been the one most dragging their heels on even sanctions. Why would the open letter be addressed to her? Why all the Iraq WMD comparisons when the open letter even admits Germany didn't even want to get involved there? The Baltics states will be the only ones pushing for direct action, and Britian the only one able to take any.

In fact reading through their previous open letters they all seem a bit confused. The only common thread appears to be Russia should be allowed to deny Ukraine access to NATO and a bunch of odd vaguely but not really related historical incidents being thrown in to make the letters appear longer. Their language such as calling the separatists "anti-coup federalists" makes the letters appear to come from a Russian rather than a non-Russian perspective.

I think the "bury out heads in the sand and hope Russia doesn't do anything" is a little late. He's already invaded Georgia once and Ukraine twice. His home propaganda is a resounding success, with the people prepared to back future invasions, and the parliament is filled with his puppets. Ukraine joining NATO or falling under New Soviet rule seems inevitable and they probably prefer the former.

Phillip.

The invasion of Europe by Russia is pretty big news, and will have an impact on everything from the economy to space exploration. NATO has direct evidence of the invasion, and Russia is hardly trying to hide it any more apart from the loopy puppet Sergei Lavrov (the new Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf). Ukraine has already introduced conscription, so that's already a pool of potentially talented young programmers off to get slaughtered by Russian tanks. The Russian murder of those Dutch people in the airliner also has affected air traffic.

As Europe gets sucked unwillingly into war with Russia, this is going to get quite brutal as the Putin doesn't care how many people die on either side even his own. He's got a fair amount of cyber-warfare talent to call on too. Maybe this will be the wake-up call to start putting in place proper encryption EVERYWHERE. War with Russia is a little more important than the NSA passing on tips on drug dealers.

Phillip.

Mars as the next step is a stupid idea. And that NASA also keeps suggest it as a next step proves to me how unworthy NASA is of funding. Same whenever they keep doing stupid studies on humans spending long periods in confined areas (they can always ask the nuclear submariners about it).

The true next step for anyone serious in making actual progress in space tech is to build a space station with artificial gravity (tethers+counterweights or other).

Once you have that you can test various animals (rats, food fish, humans) at Earth and Mars "g" concurrently to see how well they hold up for months in space.

And if you succeed in making that tech practical and cheaper it means you don't actually have to go to Mars - you can colonize the asteroids.

There's no actually much benefit going to Mars in the next few decades. The "g" is wrong, the pressure is wrong - you can't really use the tracts of land for farming without effectively building a "space station" on Mars (pressurization, shielding etc) - so there's little advantage over a space station with the disadvantage of not being able to pick your "g".

Thirded. I wasted so much time (and some money) trying to get Plex up and going on my server/devices and the quality of the video is crap. I use ES File Explorer now on all my devices to browse the NAS and play videos. This and K9 Mail are two I install and it's not even worth looking for a replacement as they do their job so well.

Phillip.

It's possible to be a lucrative demographic without having PR money. Case in point: Alcoholics.