So what does happens when you give a left-leaning spokesmodel unfettered power and no accountability?

The same thing that happens when you give a right-leaning spokesmodel unfettered power and no accountability. The Bush administration started the escalation of spying powers with the PATRIOT Act and kept escalating and expanding those powers for seven years. Get over your partisan bias and recognize that this problem exists regardless of which side of the aisle our numbnuts in power came from.

Obama seemed sympathetic to the idea of allowing more disclosure of government surveillance requests by technology companies, according to a tech industry official who was briefed on the meeting.

The problem is not that the government isn't telling us that they were fucking us in the ass, at least not after Snowden anyway. The problem is that we don't want to be fucked in the ass at all. We wrote you a note letting you know that over 230 years ago and for the first ~200 years you were somewhat good about honoring those wishes, but lately you've been coming home drunk on power and having your way with us without our consent. Letting us know how you're going to violate us isn't enough - it's time for you to stop violating us altogether.

That's kind of scary when you think about it.

Not really. Thanks to the checks and balances, the President can't do a whole lot without the backing of Congress. And right now our Congress is so dysfunctional that they'd spend days arguing over which way to hang the paper towels.

Hybryde Linux: Changing your desktop is as simple as busting out the Hy-menu!

Well played. I guess the thing I will take away from this is that it's probably best to keep my ego in check to avoid making emotionally-charged comments that draw the conversation away from technical ideas and toward personal differences. Doing otherwise wouldn't make me feel good about myself.

you took it personally for reasons only you could know.

I took it personally because you said "Imagine this guy is a commercial airline pilot." (emphasis mine). Personal insult aside, you're comparing apples to oranges. Of course piloting an airplane for the first time carries more risk, and thus different training requirements and safety precautions, from driving a car on a previously travelled route.

You taking your eyes off the road to fiddle with a GPS could, at most, kill the handful of people around you

Which is why I used the voice control feature until it proved useless and then had the passenger enter it manually. I stated that very clearly in my original post. My eyes were on the road the whole time.

You need to 'chill out' on the emotional responses. FYI, that wasn't an insult

It was an insult. Your statement may have been directed at the rest of the Slashdot community instead of directed toward me, but the content was insulting to me. If you didn't intend on a little bit of insult, you would have said something like "Imagine this approach to piloting a commercial flight". Yes it is subtle and I didn't take a huge offense since it was far from the worst thing someone has said about me, but I felt it was worth calling you out on.

I know many people on this site are going to start flapping their jaws (err, fingers) about how subjecting someone to such deplorable conditions for a nonviolent offense is unjust, but most of you don't understand how the prison system works. In the prison system, there is a hierarchy of criminals that control the behavior of all of the other inmates and hackers are always at the top of that hierarchy. As soon as a hacker gets sent to prison, he immediately finds out who is in charge and beats that person within an inch of their life. At that point, the hacker has earned his place at the top. In order to maintain this position, he must rule with an iron fist and beat people on a regular basis just to send a message that anyone that challenges him will end up nearly dead. The hacker is easily the most dangerous person in prison and the warden is simply keeping his prisoners safe by keeping this guy in solitary confinement. It has nothing to do with this particular hacker making some powerful people look bad and possibly marginally reducing the profits of some corporations via his web site, it's about safety.

Are you suggesting mandatory training simulators for operating car navigation systems? Or are you insinuating that I'm somehow incompetent because I attempted to use a GPS in mid trip? If that's the case, then you're a fool who jumps to conclusions because I already knew how to get to my destination and the GPS was just a failsafe in the event that I took a wrong turn since it had been a while since I made the trip. Either way, chill out on the internet insults. They may be easy since they're semi-anonymous and it can be fun to pretend you're smarter than your target, but since you don't know your target, you run the risk of insulting someone much smarter than yourself and you could end up being the one looking foolish.

I recently drove a family member's "smart car" and tried to change the GPS destination in mid trip. The voice control kept misinterpreting the address, requiring me to choose from an onscreen menu full of wrong choices. Eventually I gave up on the voice control and tried to have a passenger enter it in manually while I continued to drive in the general direction of our destination. However, the car refused to take manual input while it was in motion despite the fact that the input was coming from a passenger. Even worse, once the car started moving, it erased all of the information that had been entered up until that point! That meant pulling over on a busy road or frantically typing it in at a red light while trying to get the address in before the light turned green. What should have been a simple process that could be done while the car was in motion turned out to a be a very frustrating and distracting experience because the car thought it was smart.

Because at the time, I didn't know about rsync, let alone understand it well enough to feel comfortable using it for backups. Also, sometimes rsync is overkill when I just need to copy a few files but would like to know that the destination files aren't corrupt.

As other people have mentioned, a lot of these errors can occur while you are actually copying the files. I have copied files and immediately executed md5sums on the source and dest files only to find differences. Unfortunately, I didn't start this practice until after I had to restore from backup only to find that some of the backup files were corrupted.

And given that this seems to be a common problem, why in the holiest of hells does the cp command not have a verify option? Yeah, it's easy enough to wrap the copy command with md5sums, but a verify option would be even easier. Throw in an auto-retry function on top of that and you'd be really cooking.

By the way, the submitter did not mention the current method of backup, but if they are using Linux with the cp command, they would be better served by moving over to something like rsync.

Interestingly, iOS users accounted for 18.1% of online sales

That is interesting - how could they see what they were ordering on their tiny screens?

And for the fanbois: relax! It was a light-hearted joke.

From what I can tell, essentially a bubble burst occurs when prices have become so inflated that people are priced out of buying in

Bubbles burst when people finally realize that the constant and dramatic increases in the price of the commodity can't last forever and may be already past their peak. If no one can afford to buy a commodity, then the demand has to fall and the price follows the demand which is an extreme form of correction. However, in some cases all it takes for a crash are a few influential people to realize that the commodity is overpriced, sell their inventory, and the rest of the market starts to follow which keeps driving the price down. Since many actions in the market are overreactions, commodities can likely go from way overvalued to way undervalued before stabilizing somewhere in the center. But the situation you describe is definitely not the sole cause of crashes, just one extreme form of crashes.

Most market crashes are triggered by large sell-offs

And many run-ups are triggered by large buy orders from influential investors - that's how the market works. It's a zero sum game driven by a herd mentality in which everyone tries to guess when the herd will stop moving or start moving in the other direction. The market commonly fulfills it's own prophecies because the few influential people making the prophecies are always one step ahead of the herd.

China is nearly as large as the US, and so it has vast resources - but don't forget that it also has several times the US population, so those resources won't go as far.

Until you realize that labor is one of the biggest and most sustainable resources in a service-oriented economy. And then you realize that, in the long-term, they have a huge advantage.