Or Google Contributor?

Sigh. I saw the movie and it was a well-executed film, but it was essentially about a made-up person. I agree with your summary of the fictional character, but not the man. Turing was certainly eccentric, but he had friends, was liked by his colleagues, and had a good sense of humor. As terrible as his chemical castration was, it certainly didn't ruin his mind - he did some interesting work on mathematical biology inspired by those very changes. And he died more than a year after the end of his "treatment". And it was recast as an "us-vs-them" story, which simply isn't true - thousands of people were working on breaking Enigma and made steady progress throughout the war, with the support of the entire chain of command (in particular the Commander Denniston).

He's such an interesting person with a fascinating story - it's a real damn shame they basically invented a character to give his name.

There are fewer parties - a few servers and a few clients, both which are updated fairly frequently (the servers because admins, the clients because auto-update) are the only ones that matter. Google already supports HTTP/2 (nee SPDY) so a huge percentage of internet traffic is already set up to use it as soon as browsers update (Chrome has had it as SPDY for years, Firefox has it or will soon).

The v6 slowness was always the ISP (both on the client and server) and the CPE. Now that most of the big US ISPs have their heads on straight, things are looking better for v6 - but Joe Blow bought a WRT54G in 2005 and damned if he'll replace it - it works fine, after all, and who can blame him?

Despite all this, v6 is actually happening. About 5.8% of all Google's global traffic is v6, and that's more than double from last year. In the US, it's more like 13.9% - which puts us 3rd globally (a rare thing in which the US is internet-competitive). Interestingly, if you zoom in the global graph it's clear that workplaces are far behind residential connections (weekends are a big jump).

The White House is prohibited airspace (P-56). There are no conditions in which a civilian would be allowed to operate there (otherwise it would merely be restricted airspace, and you could obtain permission). You pretty much have to be the President's helicopter to be allowed in (that is, convince the folks with the missiles to not shoot you down, which they will do if you don't comply with their fighter-jet intercept).

The rules for operating in the DC SFRA can not be complied with by any drone on the market today (they require radio communication and a discrete transponder code).

Hahahahahahahahaha, seriously? This is fixed in 4.4 and the OEMs aren't rolling that out. What makes you think they'll roll out anything, especially because most manufacturers have a long history of not rolling stuff out?

I'm guessing Google just got tired of making patches nobody would ever see.

Yeah, I have no idea why gender is relevant here specifically. But in my experience women are more put off by the threat of mediocrity, so perhaps being told "you'll probably never truly excel in this" is more off-putting to them. Men are generally fairly mulish as well, and will (in my experience, of myself as well as others) generally take discouragement as a challenge. It's a cliche, but there's some truth to the idea that "you tell a man not to do something, that's the first thing he wants to do" while women take more of a cue from peers as to a reasonable, safe path. Some of those stubborn men will succeed, but it'll be painful for the rest.

Men should, but historically (or at least the last ~200 years) men were expected to work outside the house (i.e., for money) and provide food and shelter for his family, and women were expected to keep the house in order and raise the kids. But it's been a common complaint of men - as long as people have been asking, anyway - that they weren't around for more of their kids' lives. The damage of social expectations cuts both ways here.

It's foolish and offensive to suggest that women weren't working all those years - of course they were, and hard, too. Someone has to do this work, though, and when both parents work it's left to cleaning services and daycare and so on, which has its own concerns. Companies are starting to get better about paternity leave, though, which is helping a bit. Men are actually picking up these "domestic" tasks at an increasing rate - though unfortunately it's more because men were disproportionately hurt in the workplace these past few years than an actual conscious choice. Still, there's biological factors that mean that women will likely outnumber men in their children's care - between breastfeeding, the rigors of childbirth, and hormonal effects that we call "bonding", mothers tend to be more attached than fathers. Not that fathers aren't strongly attached to their children, but oxytocin is a powerful hormone and most of its effects are female-specific...

I think more people would be at home with the kids if they could be, actually. Usually 2 parents need to work nowadays just to break into the middle class... Now that the stigma of "house-husband" is deteriorating somewhat, one wonders if men wouldn't prefer to stay home if their wife could provide for the whole family. I know I'd consider it, playing video games while the kids are at school and the housework is done... or if I got bored I could freelance with no pressure to actually make lots of money....

Yeah, the first one was left over from editing, my mistake. I meant to move it to the second for emphasis but forgot to remove the first usage - I cringed a bit when I saw that it was still there.

And I did mean 'actually true in all cases' - to my knowledge, at least, every provider that has implemented some sort of payment for better service has ended up degrading service for non-payees. Even if only passively by foregoing needed infrastructure upgrades unless somebody else foots the bill.

Sure. The only problem with that world is that literally the immediately obvious next step is to degrade service pending a payment. This is already happening in literally every place that has such a scheme as the one you describe. That's the problem with non-neutrality - once an ISP realizes they can get paid for better service, they will do everything in their not inconsiderable power to force every provider's hand.

Hard to argue with that advice - if you don't want to be subject to the laws of another jurisdiction, you should avoid that jurisdiction in general. It's like the bubblegum laws in Singapore - sure, you probably don't agree with it, but if you go there (or keep your bubble-gum there) you should expect to be bound by them.

Google makes no secret of the fact that they are a US company and bound by US laws, though there is an industry-wide effort to convince the legal system that, for data they merely have custody of, the "jurisdiction" should be that of the user in question (see the current Microsoft case, with its numerous amicus curaie briefs)

Are you fucking kidding me? They got served a lawful warrant and spent 2.5yr to fight it and had to eventually comply. Look, you may prefer an anarchy where people can just get away with crimes, but I prefer the Bill of Rights:

If that was followed - and it seems like it was - then what's the problem? Just because there's abuse going on doesn't mean that everything - or even a preponderance - is abuse.

  - Warrants are an important and useful tool for law enforcement to keep peace and order in a society, and need to be possible to execute when given lawfully.
  - Law enforcement (specifically the TLAs) has been abusing various methods of extracting information from individuals, companies, and networks.

Both of these things can be true at the same time. That's what makes this, and most other matters of public policy, complicated. It is adolescent stupidity (or libertarianism, but I repeat myself) to think that we could just do away with the government's ability to execute a lawful warrant without severe repercussions. We can and should fight against their improper use, just as we can and should fight the improper use of the rest of our laws, but just like (most of) the rest of our laws they are there for a reason.

Yeah, but the WORD type hasn't had a relationship to the actual word size for 20 years. As you said upthread "The only reason it's called a WORD on Windows is because of legacy backwards-compatibility issues."

It was stupid for them to lock processor-dependent stuff into the API and it means you get these ridiculous anachronisms. Especially ridiculous that "WORD" is intended to mean a fixed-size value, when "word" is defined by its processor-dependence. The API is full of this nonsense - WPARAM and LPARAM originally referred to WORD- and LONG-length parameters, respectively, but now they're both 32 bit. LPCSTR - what the hell is a long pointer? So by now it's just random junk If they wanted a 16-bit value, they should've called it an int16 or a twobyte or... hell, something that described what it actually was. But no, they were intending to describe the actual word size, and then got caught with their pants down when it changed (as anybody could see it would).

Microsoft is to be commended for their backwards-compatibility, but it makes these poor design choices especially visible. By contrast, the POSIX API is almost completely free of anything machine-dependent, to the point that it can be a bit tricky to use sometimes "when the rubber meets the road". But at least it's consistent.