Seriously, some people are pro the "USA Freedom Act" because they think it's a start on the path to reigning in the "Patriot Act", and then again others with same agenda are con the "USA Freedom Act" because they would rather have the "Patriot Act" expire.

And on the other side, people who want more surveillance, are also split between the two, either seeing "USA Freedom Act" as the only way to avoid everything expiring. Or seeing the "USA Freedom" act a blocker for getting the "Patriot Act" re-authorized.

It's sad you can't just agree to disagree and then vote on the subject (perhaps compromise), rather than playing games trying to out smart each other.

Sure, if done right automation may replace a lot of what doctors do today.. But doctors also do research, experimentation... And they'll become skilled in fixing other things... Who knows maybe some day health care costs will begin to decline. But no, doctors are still going to be around, they might not be doing all the same things, but they'll probably still have plenty of work to do.

If you run any linux desktop environment you have virtual desktops... I have on for each project I'm actively working on... Each desktop features: text editor, file-browser, terminal and a web browser window with multiple tabs. Those tabs are usually opened on relevant documentation, bugs, github pull-requests, stackoverflow or any other resource related to what I'm coding.

Sure a desktop can sit idle for a day or two, but usually I come back to a project just to make a quick adjustment. This is a flow for node based projects, with many components. For larger code bases I usually have a clone or two of the code base, so that I can develop my main patch in one desktop, and try small hacks in others or go searching for code examples of how do something (In large code bases with custom C++ string and container type implementations nothing is trivial).

I've been wanting to move away from gmail, and have an .com domain, but I can't figure out what to put in from the of the @, Ie. what goes here: @.com.

So for now I'm stuck on gmail... and that email address is getting used so many places I'll never be able to stop using it.

Still we're talking non-violent crimes... Compare this to the money laundering schemes many major American banks have been fined for... But in which no criminal persecution took place.

Yeah, I find that if you read the article, it totally ruins most of the sensational headlines and outrages summaries :)

From my understanding this is about two thing, (1) income diversification, (2) demonstrating that recommended sponsored content can be done without compromising privacy. As the tiles can't run code or track you, and recommendations are all done client side. At least as far as I understand.

Give me a break, we also want better performance, process isolation, UI tweaks, new HTML5+ features, new javascript features (ES6), new video codecs (daala), all the stuff that makes web the platform, so we can do more with it...

Did I mention research in VR, yeah, that is crazy, but if Mozilla doesn't participate in the standards development it'll all be proprietary (or hard to implement).

And if we actually did optimize how we use our resources we would likely never run out...
Seriously, if we in the first world really did want to fix poverty and was willing to spend as much (in relative terms) as we did on say the second world war, hunger would end rather suddenly :)

Same thing for resource usage. We could probably engineer our way out of that too. Through recycling, process optimization and renewable energy sources.
But we focus on optimizing profit, rather than pulling people out of poverty or preserving resources.

Tomorrows headline: "Secret Service drone jammer interferes with pace makers - Half of congress deceased" :)

What possible downsides could an EMP have...

If you don't make it as a software engineer developing big complicated systems.. .You can go work on web designs. maintaining old school php deployments, do QA, or work as a software engineer in a place with lower standards. It's true that some shops have high expectations, especially in the valley, but around the world there is also lots of places where you don't make 150k and don't have to work 40 hour weeks.

I call BS... No non-trivial code base with 1M+ lines of code is clean... And a clean room rewrite if that is what you argue here is never trivial.

That said, yes, if an existing SaaS project is too easy to deploy on your own what is the benefit of buying it.. To me zero maintenance is key. Either way, I don't believe there are many proprietary projects that are clean enough to be easily redeployed either...

Fact is mostly users have flash, silverlight or the vlc fork that hbo uses installed, and they will gladly install these "security holes"..
At least the FF DRM is a sandbox within which DRM content can run, the sandbox is open source (by FF) the module proprietary by adobe and only downloaded if you want to use it.

Or use the button to disable shaped like a "gear" to disable it...(oh, it's that simple)

I'm nightly user too, and haven't seen any of these tiles yet.

The only problem is availability... Short of maybe database and legacy software... You shouldn't be writing distributed system that can't handle individual node failure..
So the only thing holding this back is the fact that they don't promise availability and that they can take down all your nodes at once.

I would argument one ought to run a percentage of ones servers as spot nodes... or preeamable VMs.

But the gun that has anti measures to prevent you from shooting your foot off, isn't necessarily more complicated to operate.
One can argue it's simpler because you have fewer body parts to watch out for ...

In rust sense, one can argue it's simpler to code because there are entire classes of bugs that can be avoided with static typing. So you don't have to worry about that kind of bugs anymore.

Similarly one can argue that haskell is simple because if it compiles, then it'll very often do the right thing. So you don't have to watch out for bugs, the compiler will... Of course it's very hard to write anything non-trivial that compiles in haskell :)