"What's racist is the "black identifying names" in TFA. Now that's racist. What? Because I'm a Caucasoid I can't be named a "black" name? Dark skinned folk can't be named "white" names? Fuck that."

Again, not racist, just numbers, statistics. A person named "Lakisha" is far far more likely to be black than white. Why are people getting angry at numbers? Is an expert or heuristic system "racist" when it determines this to be the case?

This seems to be the expected result of SSD technology spreading and becoming cheaper. Your everyday user can now buy a reasonably-sized PC with only an SSD for storage. Additional storage needs can be easily addressed with memory sticks, external drives, and cheap and easy to configure and use network storage.

Optical is a bit of an odd one, but not totally unexpected. Online software delivery (no need for CDs/DVDs), downloadable music and movies, online and networked data storage, pretty much eliminate the need to burn a disc, and the lack of an out-of-the-box Blu Ray player in Windows probably puts the final nail in that coffin.

This study says A, that study says B.

Seriously, there are literally hundreds of climate models littering the back issues of science journals. Coming up with data and a model that fits some historical context is one thing, but we're still no closer to knowing what 10, 50 or 100 years from now will look like. When was the last time someone showed you the famous Al Gore hockey stick graph, without hastily and profusely making excuses about it?

Fortunately for humankind, this is not how we do science. It's not a democracy or a popularity contest.

The promotion of an idea is very single-minded: just stay on message. (Although even here warmists have shifted from "global warming" to the more ambiguous and all-encompassing "climate change".) While the disproving or discrediting of an idea is by its very nature multi-faceted. There are dozens of ways to approach it. Like with any movement or -ism, there are always the poseurs, hangers on, extremists, and assorted other rif raf who keep confusing things. To say (or imply like you have) that there hasn't been "progression" and dissension in the ideas and theories in the anthropogenic CO2 global warming movement is rather disingenuous.

Except they almost certainly log the access information (URL, date, etc), and cache the rendered images, at least _sometimes_, you know, for debugging purposes.

This is tailor made for a man in the middle attack. An insider can spy on any user at will, and most likely without leaving a trace.

You are just a number. A face in the crowd. The company knows nothing about you, and has no previous relationship. One qualified person is as good as another. There is usually more than one qualified person applying for a position. As long as their system does not weed out ALL of them, they still have a few qualified people filter down to the next stage. That's all they care about.

It's a lot like love. Because we all know /. is the home of analogies. There is more than one person that is a fitting partner for you. Most of us will stop at the first one, which may not necessarily even be the best one (and rarely is), but we stop looking all the same. The effort (and more importantly the time) to find a better one, or the ideal one, is not worth it.

That's not how insurance works. It's all about segmentation. People with similar risk profiles go into the same bucket and are charged the same rates. The more buckets you have, the more flexibility in pricing (and consequently marketing and customer acquisition) you have. Customers demand it (I want to lower my insurance premiums) and eventually insurance companies respond (create a more stringent profile that allows them to charge smaller premiums).

To Facebook, it's about profits. FB privacy settings are purposely complicated, obscure and obtuse.

The solution is *obvious* (duh), but the problem is not. You can't be putting an exception handler around every function call.

What most likely happened, is by the time the string got to the strlen function, it was either assumed to have been security checked and data validated, or, the set of validations run was not complete.

Shit happens.

Ridiculous. When someone makes a phone call to you, or sends you a letter, and it costs them money, you do not get a cut.

This is simply not true. In which market do you have lasting monopolies? Only in those where the barrier to entry is very high, either naturally (high up-front capital investment) or due to regulations (which large companies love, because they keep out new entrants). So there will always be naturally forming monopolies in almost all areas, but persistent monopolies only in those areas where barriers are high. There is nothing government can do about those barriers, except raise new ones themselves. Look at any highly regulated industry. How much competition do you see there?

Assuming you have enough memory to not swap to disk under normal usage, replacing a spinning disk drive with an SSD is by far, hands down, the best all around performance improvement ever in the history of computing.

I don't see a problem with this.

If you want to be paid for your pictures, host them with a stock photography site that will pay you money when they sell your picture. Or if you want your valued pictures private, and they are actually valued, stop using shitty free services, and pay a couple bucks for real hosting.

Don't be an idiot. Every major city in Canada has at least 1 university, and several colleges/technical institutes. It's not the frikkin 3rd world out here.

Eastern Canada would work as well, but there is a somewhat higher risk of earthquakes there, whereas the prairies are very stable from geologic and weather perspective.