I stopped using Chrome because it's extensions were not up to par with Firefox addons.
And now I feel less inclined to use Chrome at all.

Ditto. What does Google hope to accomplish with this? Switching to Firefox takes less than 5 minutes.

I stopped using Chrome because they kept forcing updates that changed the interface, without asking for permission or providing a reverse-compatibility option.

The last straw for me was when they deleted the ability to purge entries from the suggestion pop-down in the address bar without completely purging the browsing history, shortly before I typoed up a not-safe-for-work URL. I'm now back on Firefox evan at my desk, while the rest of the company is still on Chrome.

I'm with the FOSS people on this point: Reducing a user's control over his own computer - especially in job-threatening ways - is evil.

They're a big business, like Apple. Like coca cola. Once you establish a brand in people's mind, you can do whatever you want as long as you keep being trendy and hip. Congress has called several committees to investigate Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others, and amazingly it was mostly "We love your stuff! Kindof a lot! But, er, you know, uhh.. there's these, uhh... questions... well... more maybe just er, if you want, you know... aww forget it. we love you. take our money.

I mean people actually bought that crap about Google fighting the NSA. And now they're doing evil left and right, maximizing profits... and everyone's like "Oh noes! How could you do this to us?" But next week... they'll be like... oh google, how could I ever have hated you?

You know what's interesting about a good story? It means different things to different people. Millions have looked at the Mona Lisa and every one of them came up with a different reason why she's smiling. Who's to say their interpretation is any less valid than another's?

But whatever. Everyone else's meaning they find in life and art matters less than your own interpretation of it. Because, like the author, you too are an asshole.

No, I just happen to not like bigots. That's not ignorance, that's having standards. And being angry over an injustice isn't "clouding their works", it's refusing to participate in that injustice. In this society we give the artist money in exchange for their work. If the artist chooses to make it available for free, then it can be said it is divorced from the person. But if they ask money, and say they're going to put that money to use oppressing others, then denying them your money isn't an act of ignorance, but an appeal to one's better nature.

Sorry, but he's an asshole and a bigot. He gets zero money, and I will not speak kindly of his work; Not until it's in the public domain, which in this country, will not be during my lifetime.

Well it was, until we found out that the author of this scifi piece was a raging asshole. Now Ender's Game is about a homophobe who wrote a book about war against an alien species... and he's come face-first into a culture war that's been brewing for a long time. Some people have even suggested that the 'aliens' are just stand-in proxies for homosexuals and are subsequently exterminated. A similar parallel was drawn between the cylons in Battlestar Galactica being a reflection on terrorism in contemporary society.

I guess the only thing we can really say about all of it is that scifi can show us at our best... and at our worst. As to which it is, and the author's motives... that's a whole new can of worms.

It's the same in America. The difference is, the art isn't engineering, it's lawyering.

They can probably determine which time zone the user mostly is in from the logs alone.

With drug users working on Doper Substandard Time? That would be a stretch.

Look, the protocol could be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It could have free orgasms built into it. It might even have the cure for cancer.

But it can't overcome latency, or shannon's law regarding just how much data you can shove over a given network link. You can cheat by using lossful compression, you can employ predictive algorithms, but at the end of the day it'll only be as good as the network lets it. That's why there haven't been any big advancements in this area: There's none to make. Remote desktop will be varying degrees of shitty for the forseeable future, because our network links are shit. ISPs purposefully sabotage remote desktop and VPN because it's a threat to their business model. You can't "protocol" that away. Believe me, people have tried.

At best, we'll be able to trade one variety of crap for another, but remote desktop will never come close to the experience of actually using the computer at the same location. Human beings start to notice lag between their own actions and computer responses in as little as 50ms. The network links typically take longer than that to send the data. Especially over wifi.

You know, I'm sure everything you said is right, nevermind the lack of citations or supporting logic for why this would actually be the case, instead of wishful thinking. Let's say it's all true.

The whole point being made here is that bacteria evolve very quickly, and trade genes with each other as a part of that. Bacteria doesn't reproduce sexually like we do; In fact, they happily cannibalize each other for genetic material. It doesn't do this intelligently, but it does do it very, very quickly. So the bacteria in your mythical "animals only" sphere of influence can and are cannibalized by the "humans aren't animals" category of bacteria. They cheat, see... they don't follow your nice little boxes you've built here.

Bottom line is your distinction is arbitrary and does not exist in nature. And antibiotic resistance isn't a 1:1 parity either... if it's even partially effective against, say, penicillin, it probably is effective against others as well. And as more of these genetic markers come together, not only does the bacteria become stronger against antibiotics as a whole, but because more and more of the bacteria has those markers now, there's a greater chance of transcription, mutation, etc., that will create an even greater resistance.

The fact is the biological clock is ticking. Even in the most optimistic case where everything you say is true and then some, it only delays the inevitable. What your post amounts to is basically apologism for the overuse of antibiotics to drive profits in unrelated fields, when they should have been kept strictly for use as humans, and not animals or livestock. The very day the first antibiotic was created, the so-called "miracle drug" of the 20th century, we knew this would happen.

We just didn't give a fuck. We ignored science because it meant prosperity today... but a terrible price later. And if anything defines western civilization today, its short-term gratification at the expense of long-term growth and prosperity.

No, but we do enjoy programming them to put knives in humans we don't like. That's actually been a reason for much of the development of robotics: Programming them to kill for us. Scifi authors of the 50s and 60s imagined robots helping us in our daily lives -- cooking, cleaning, and today even driving us around. But whereas many have viewed the development of robotics as beneficial for mankind, the truth is much of the investment in robotics has been because of its military applications. It's just a happy accident that we've been able to declassify and repurpose much of this for private use. The google car for example, is based on technology first developed for DARPA as a way of creating vehicle that could deliver cargo to soldiers in the field.

So the NSA has been sitting on intelligence reports that people are being sold into slavery... and of course dutifully passed this on to the appropriate government agencies who... proceeded to do nothing. And yet the story here is "teh nsa iz evilz!"

... Soo, Indonesia was previously helping Australia with their human smuggling operation? In either event, what does having your corrupt officials mismanaging things have to do with ceasing humanitarian endeavors? This is like saying "After we got busted doing evil things, we're going to just go all in on that whole evil thing, while insisting that you spying on us doing our evil things is wrong and you should stop."

Dice doesn't have dedicated slashdot editors anymore. They are editors of a dozen or so sites. Really now, what kind of quality do you expect now that they've sold out and now monetize the web synergies to create a new market paradigm of customer-focused informational advertisements?

I'm willing to come out and speak my mind, and more often than not, others agree. Whereas you... all you can do is snipe at someone who's earned their reputation for being insightful and strives to look beyond superficial appearances. Right, wrong, at least I'm putting my name on what I say. You... on the other hand, are so lacking in confidence about your own opinion you won't tell us who you are. Because the truth is, you're a coward. An anonymous coward. And I'm not. I'm the girl on slashdot everybody knows, and whether you agree with me or not, most likely you respect me.

Because I earned it. Now crawl back down your troll hole.

Remember: I-squared-R losses go up with the SQUARE of the current. So running 1.2V across a board to your chips loses 400 TIMES as much power as running 48V to the regulator next to them.

Oops. Make that "loses 1600 times as much power". (Multiplied the 10s but forgot to multiply the 4s.)

When a board has several chips running at 10 or more watts apiece you can easily be dealing at currents where the heating of the board consumes more power than the heating of the chips. With a rack of electronics dissipating several KW you can pay for a LOT of tiny switching regulators to avoid more than doubling that.