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.

You know, 'word' actually means something, and it never referred to a particular number of bits - it was always a property of the architecture. Generally, word size == register size == memory address == unit of memory that can be operated on. 32-bit machines are 32-bit because they have 32 bit registers, and the size of a memory address is 32 bits long (=4GB), and you can't move less than 32 bits to/from RAM.

So, yeah, it absolutely depends on the CPU, because it's the fundamental unit of the CPU. It's actually hard to imagine a less useless specification...

Probably not. I mean, it'd be a bit weird, but I'd set the boundary, explain that it made me uncomfortable, and expect it to not happen again. If it continued it would be something other than offense.

Honestly, I don't get offended very much because I consider "offense" to be intricately tied with intent. If someone spat at me or flipped me off or something, I'd take it as it was intended. There's lots of explicit ways various cultures have to indicate "I intend to offend you", and in my culture, those are two pretty good ones. But other cultures have different ones, and they generally don't apply to outsiders. A Frenchman wouldn't be offended if you shied away from a "faire la bise", unless it was your cultural norm as well. The Japanese have a very complex business card etiquette. Someone doing business in Japan regularly should make a point of getting to know this, but a one-off instance of a Japanese person interacting with someone from a different culture shouldn't be offended if somebody doesn't realize that just taking the card and pocketing it after a glance is considered offensive. Indian culture has a thing about shaking with the left hand since that's the ... "wiping hand" (gotta do something if you have no toilet paper). These are generally amusing tidbits shared later (by either party), not tense moments.

It's hard enough to get offense straight when it's entire cultures - when it's random individual's sensitivities it becomes impossible. I will behave in a way I believe to be appropriate - if it offends you, the onus is on you to realize that I didn't mean to offend, because that's how interpersonal relationships work. I will make a good faith effort to avoid doing that in the future - if it's reasonably accommodable - to avoid repeating it with you, but I expect you to forgive my lapses since this stuff is hard (especially for me).

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's a lot of people who can't tolerate other people behaving in ways contrary to their exact wishes. We generally call them "two year olds".

I can't imagine being offended more than a few times a year. It sounds exhausting - that is, with my definition of offense. But since you're explicitly saying that intent doesn't count, clearly we disagree. I'd call your definition more like "mild irritation". And I don't think I can (and have so far failed to) really interact with you, or people like you - I mean that 100% seriously. I don't mean to presume to tell you when you or anybody else should be offended, but I think you, bible-thumpers w.r.t evolution, and the anti-gays have a lot in common when it comes to offense thresholds...

Bull shit. Sorry, but as a pasty-white American I commonly get asked this - and in this exact form:

Someone: Where are you from?
Me: New Jersey, northern part
Someone: No, I mean your parents/ancestors/family/etc
Me: Oh, a bit Irish, a bit German, [family history]

You know why? It's because we're a nation of immigrants. Almost everybody here including me and her "comes from" somewhere else. The only reason I don't often get asked specifically about my parents is because I look further down the generations. I'm sure my great-great-grandmother (a German 'Weber' in Ohio) was asked about her parents' origin since she looked rather more German than I do.

If someone is interpreting this as a "microaggression" in the absence of any... you know, aggression - then they can not be interacted with because they have a worldview that everybody is out to get them. And that's really sad. It's a victimhood that's enforced - if you don't feel like a victim, it's just because you've internalized the attitudes or it's a "microaggression" you're missing or something. It's like no-true-Scotsman applied to feeling like crap. I mean, you're a woman/Asian/black/etc - you must be a victim somehow, right?

I'm not kidding. It's becoming increasingly dangerous to have conversations with people lest you slip off the cliff. It's a shame because frank conversations in good faith is the best way we know of to dispel prejudice... you know, friendships with people unlike yourself and so on.

Sorry, that should have been "a very small fraction, like the amount you could stick a pole into" followed by the quote:

--

Anyways, I just thought I'd add that I really don't have anything against drones or RC planes or anything as such, just their reckless operation. Just as the big jumboes tolerate me, I figure I should tolerate them. But my life is on the line, so I expect them to know the rules that keep us safe. I trained for 70 hours of flying time, and took a written, oral, and practical test to get my flying privileges. I know the FARs and so does everybody else in the sky, and we all follow them or people die. I'm not being melodramatic, people die all the time. Here's one from a few weeks ago where the guy likely (the report's not done) broke the rules and paid the price. The regulations are absolutely written in blood.

RC folks practice pretty hard as well, and they have a very good community that's interested in interoperating with "the system" and keeping everyone safe. The drone guys - as has been demonstrated - do not. The growing list of encounters that this article is about shows that self-policing isn't working. All I want is for people to know the rules and be held accountable to them - which is pretty much why the FAA is working their way up to requiring some sort of certification.

I cannot emphasize this enough - I consider the drone fliers to be the equivalent of a drunk driver, except worse since at least a drunk is also risking his own neck. They're going to kill someone, and it's only a matter of time.

Did you read what I wrote? The vast majority of the airspace of this country - including lots of airspace that drones have been using - is regulated by the FAA. Inasmuch as "a fraction" is "a very small fraction, like If you're a pilot, but not a crop duster, what are you doing flying at low altitudes when not around an airport?

What? That's the regulation and I'm allowed to be there whether I'm a crop duster or not. What is the drone doing there, is the question. In any case, the vast majority of this country has no altitude restriction since it counts as "sparsely populated areas". Otherwise it's 500 feet - hence the RC limit of 400 feet (since they generally fly in "other than congested" but not "sparsely populated" areas).

Exactly. Like I said, the FAA came up with rules in 1981 to have planes and RCers get along. The AMA is pretty careful about this, actually, and it works well. But these drones don't require any skill or investment (and hence limited likelihood of interacting with the community), and the self-regulation isn't working any more. Do you expect the guy buying a Phantom on Amazon to be able to read a sectional and figure out where planes are likely to be? If they all did, we wouldn't be having this problem! So we need tighter regulation to make sure the drone guys follow the rules... unfortunately for everybody who was getting along just fine.

Jet engines are designed to "ingest" a certain number of birds of a certain size. Not drones, which have pesky metal bits. And even then, it turns out that hitting birds can still ruin your day.

Not to mention that small GA planes aren't even rated for bird strikes. If I'm flying my Cessna 172 and I hit your drone and survive (which is pretty doubtful), I will be coming for you. Every pilot and person who "does" aviation feels the same way - and guess what/who the FAA is made of/for?