Makes the Patriot Act seem kind of quaint, no?

So now we're going to tar and feather the current President over this, right? Since he's far worse?

What's that, no? Just vaguely complain?

History isn't encouraging, though. They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when that involved smearing a crude layer of flayed win95 across winCE and pretending it was a good fit for PDAs.

Now that hardware has advanced they have a much better shot at architectural unification (if memory serves, NT has basically edged out everything else except for whatever CE support they provide for legacy customers); but UI? That won't go well.

... if you were hoping for friends of high paying, non-government, white collar jobs, perhaps Obama/Biden wasn't the smartest choice, my coder bros ...

Most of which is not done by the surgeon. I've worked a lot with surgeons, and can assure you they are used to having other people do almost everything but surgery for them.

Surgeons are the equivalent of the "master programmer" team, which is a now mostly-obsolete team structure where there is one (or a very small number) of expert coders surrounded by a larger group of admin/build/whatever types who make sure the master programmer has nothing to do but code. It works on certain problems, but unlike surgery, the scope of what we expect software developers to do has grown far beyond what one person can handle in almost all interesting cases (I say this as a team of one who does everything from firmware to UI, but it is on a very narrowly defined embedded application that I've worked extremely hard to keep more-or-less within scope for a single very senior person.)

Indeed, the oxygen we breath is another life-form's pollution.

One of the assumptions behind SETI is that aliens want to be heard, we have deliberately broadcast radio messages to nearby stars, SETI are hoping aliens will do the same thing.

The idea of looking for atmospheric signatures of technological life that do not occur in nature (such as CFC's) has been around for a long time. Non technological life can be inferred from an atmosphere rich in both methane and oxygen. People are trying to perform atmospheric spectroscopy on exoplanets but the technology is not quite there yet, I believe someone recently claimed to have detected water vapour on an exoplanet.

Having said that I was taught in 1970's high school that it was theoretically impossible to detect an exoplanet from Earth, but that was before wobble mirrors were invented..

First off, what we can or cannot imagine has absolutely nothing to do with what is or is not real, so it isn't clear why you're bringing this up. Three hundred years of knowing what is real through publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference had demonstrated that the pre-scientific "method" of "imagining what might be the case and then reasoning from it" is a hiding to nowhere, knowledge-wise.

That said, as it happens I can imagine such an alternative history. One simple way of doing it is to have an intelligent species that evolved somewhat more quickly than we did on a planet formed in very short order after the supernova that birthed it exploded. Such a planet would have a good deal more 235U in the mix, making light-water moderated natural uranium nuclear reactors possible (of the kind that existed on Earth in at least one location 2 billion years ago).

An intelligent species on such a planet would likely never go down the hydro-carbon-fuels path, but would be all-nuclear, all-the-time from a very early stage of technological development (one presumes that in such an environment they would be evolved for somewhat higher radiation-tolerance than most terrestrial species.) As such, no hydrocarbon pollution would be evident.

Now, to be clear, I am not saying any of this is true. Merely that I can imagine it. There are quite possibly any number of subtle issues that make such a scenario impossible, and the failure of philosophy (knowing by imaging) tells us that we will be very hard-pressed to find them. But you asked for an imagining, and there one is.

You are of the opinion that nothing bad happens to men and it always happens to women.

Nope. I'm just doubting the OP.

You are doubting the OP solely on the basis that the OP is a male, since that's the only information you have about him. That only makes sense if you're of the opinion that nothing bad ever happens to men.

The author has a point. At one time, there were development tools, which cost money, were relatively static, and which were expected to work correctly. Then there were applications, which relied on the development tools.

We now have a huge proliferation of tools, many of them open source, poorly integrated with each other, and most badly maintained. Worse, because everything has a client side and a server side, there are usually two independent tool chains involved.

Web programming is far too complex for how little most web sites do. (And the code quality is awful. Open a browser console and watch the errors scroll by.)

How long did this go on for? It seems if they were truly throttling based on usage, you would have very quickly dropped out of the high usage group if your turn around time was 8 days.

That is how a man deals with a threat of violence.

If he wants to end up dead or in jail, yes. Smart people simply speed away from the dumbass who's chasing a car on foot, and maybe report him to the police.

Men don't ask for that. We protect ourselves. Up to the point of going to thermonuclear war. Literally.

And you see this as such a desirable result that not only do you not seek to change your ways, but you actively recommend others to embrace them?

Dude, Broforce is fiction.

Toughen up or bow out.

Grow up or die. Next crazy dude you humiliate might come visit you with ten friends. Natural selection only has so much patience for your bullshit.

The CPU and GPU are fine, reports on battery life seem to vary, with excellent results if you turn the 'dynamic perspectives' thing off and don't firefly much, tepid ones if you actually try to use those features; but the screen is genuinely disappointing for a phone in that price range, although the internal storage is better than usual.

There's nothing offensively wrong with it; but the price tag befits a device that is genuinely compelling in some way, which it isn't.

Unfortunately, while stock android is undeniably Google's little fiefdom, 'FireOS' is a pretty much point-for-point a replacement of hegemonic Google with hegemonic Amazon (somewhat more, arguably, given the 'silk' browser's extensive default reliance on server-side processing).

It is pretty stark how lousy de-googled Android is; but Amazon isn't really here to change the dynamic of effectively closed control of the platform, just who controls it. Getting models with a 'clean' AOSP firmware(typically excluding drivers; because it seems to be blobs all the way down on the mobile side) isn't hard; but using them is fairly grim.

It's a trifle surprising given that the usual 'eh, let's just wrap our shit mobile website in a UIWebView and call it a day' school of 'app' development would likely have inherited SSL through sheer laziness, while whatever attempt at app development CNN attempted is apparently so dysfunctional as to be markedly worse than the state of website logins in general, and apparently so incoherent that the phone and tablet versions don't share login behavior...

That seems like the sort of thing that takes effort to screw up.

You realize that there's more difference between your average man and your average woman than between your average NFL linebacker and your average man, right? (seriously, compare the stats some time - height, average bench strength, etc). You do realize how commonly women are raped and abused by men, and how they might happen to be more sensitive to the implicit or explicit threats of violence from someone that they're highly unlikely to be able to fight off?

You know, if you complain about violence against your group yet dismiss violence against another group as inconsequential, you aren't likely to get - or deserve, for that matter - much sympathy, especially from that other group.

This is something many feminists - and other rights groups as well - seem to be unable to comprehend: you can get most people to back equality. You can't get them to back a power grab. No matter how justified you believe yourself, if you dismiss everyone's pain but yours then of course they're going to dismiss yours, and rightly so.

I'm tall, 182 centimeters, and I still once had a guy literally pick me up and carry me back to his apartment when I tried to walk away from him.

And I had a guy pull a knife on me. But that doesn't matter since I'm a man, and thus don't have a woman's sensitivity, right? Testicles make me immune to fear and pain, thus violence and threats against me don't count. Only real human beings like you matter. I can bloody well just "stop being a sissy", since unlike you, I don't have feelings. Someone attacking you is a tragedy, but someone attacking me is of no importance because, after all, I have a penis.

Sexist creep.