Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

Again, relative

One time I was falsely accused of a crime (I really didn't commit the actual CRIME, but it was legally dubious) and I arranged with my council to take a private polygraph during the investigation to present to the detective. I can tell you as a regular, untrained citizen, that the polygraph test was accurate, at least in my case. It really could detect when I was telling a lie and telling the truth. It even knew if I was hesitant to tell the truth. At the end of the polygraph, the examiner asked me "Which question were you really unsure about when you answered?" I told him the question that I wasn't sure about and sure enough, it matched his results. Just my experience; I thought it was super interesting.

Because he doesn't believe there's systemic racism he's a troll? Most middle and upper middle class (read: educated) white folks really aren't racist at all. At this point, maybe blacks are still looking for excuses why they can't broadly succeed. As an employer, I try to hire the most qualified candidate whenever possible, but also the best cultural fit. Often times, black dudes are the coolest, funnest, nicest people you can hire and are far less political and catty than their white counterparts. In my experience, they don't fan flames or get in office politics or tell on people or try to strategically fuck their coworkers just to get a minor advantage. Just my opinion.

I'm a big iPhone fan (also, for what it's worth, an engineer) but I also carry an Android device -- a Sony Xperia Z Ultra along with my iPhone 6. I can tell you that when I buy a $900 device, "good enough" doesn't cut it.

It should be way easier for the US to conduct electronic espionage

Doesn't Linux still have problems with low-latency audio?

You must be white

Reality

Sometimes I think that too but I realize that there hasn't been a full-on war in the continental US since the Civil War

I'm not a Windows fanboy or anything (Full disclosure: I use it my media center and gaming PC, everything else is Mac (laptop and desktop), BSD (NAS box, FreeNAS and pfSense at my house) and Linux (my web hosting and ssh access to my house without exposing a PC with a bunch of data on it to the open Internet). That said, other than blind allegiance to FOSS, there is little indication that with regular updates and proper policies and procedures that later versions of Windows Server (2008, 2008 R2, 2012) are somehow defective by design or less secure than their OSS alternatives. Granted, we can't see the source code WHICH IS A MAJOR PROBLEM. However, I've used it plenty in the enterprise and it's just fine. In fact, our Linux boxes were targeted and successfully rooted (remote attacks) in my mixed-tenant datacenter more frequently than the Windows boxes, hands down. In fact I can't recall a single remote Windows attack post-2008. Lots and lots and lots of wordpress/apache/LAMP etc. exploits however.

I could see this as a good XBMC remote or alarm clock that shows weather when you get up or news if you made a nice stand for it. Maybe something to use in the bathtub or on the toilet to read stuff or the kitchen for recipes. Places where if it gets dirty or ruined who cares.

This is a really nice, eloquent way of legitimizing a bunch of conspiracy theories which, it turns out, are often true

they can just die for all the government cares

That's fine he always gets worked up about stuff like this and that's a good thing. He raises awareness by being fringe and, as a corollary, making a spectacle of himself. And whether or not he's happy about this, it's good that the platform becomes more well-developed and accessible to consumers. I'm actually cautiously optimistic about Ubuntu of all things... Imagine with Mir, better toolkits and some of the other improvements it becomes as polished as OS X AND is open-source. Far more trustworthy OS IMO in a day in age when we can't trust much of anything. Open source is really the only development model that is fully trustworthy, GPL or otherwise.

I feel way less bad about playing game "backups" on my Wii