And live in one of the worse educated, most polluted, and more sick people than almost any states in the nation.

I don't know where you get your info from but I went to school in Houston, and drove all over Texas - none of what you say is true. Texas is a much cleaner state overall than California (which I have also spent a lot of time in and driven though many areas of).

But hey, it's all about money, fuck everything else, emirate?

No, it's about quality of life. Thus, Texas > California > Washington

As a personal addendum, one other thing Texas has going over California and Washington is that it's not as crowded. WAY too many people in California.

It does, actually. As a member of the press operating under the jurisdiction of UK libel law, I'm not going to say he committed any crime until he's convicted.

The poster to whom you responded said "SSDs have a property called "write endurance" - their data cells are rated to a specific number of writes. Every time you write, you consume some of the remaining write capacity of the drive. It works like a salt shaker: works find until you run out of salt.", which suggests he's talking about SSDs here, not HDDs. SSDs don't have spinning parts (well, other than the electrons, protons, and neutrons of which they're made :-)), and don't have bearings.

Yes, it's all the Democrats fault. The republicans are pure and never do anything wrong.

Incorrect. There are plenty of bastards in both wings.

It's just that often when you have a bad apple on the Democrat side, you are told it's really applesauce.

While with Republicans you are told it's pure cyanide.

Both are wrong, but one presents Democrats in a favorable light.

As if we needed yet another reminder, this shows us in all sorts of ways how bad big government really is. Either they abused the list to keep a witness out, or they really COULDN'T tell she was on the list which means the list is an utter unmanageable clusterfuck.

Either way this is the result when government is allowed to grow too large and too powerful, abuse and mismanagement grow exponentially. Remember this come any election, always vote for the guy that wants to give you less, not more.

Journalists have for years been censoring information - roughly 90% of them are Democrats (really statists), and many are loathe to present any Democratic official in a negative light. Stories negative to Democrats or the expansion of federal government are usually buried, any chance to pillory a Republican (or non-statist like many libertarians) is sized with glee.

So it's not hard to imagine that people already heavily censoring work would expand what they decided to censor. It's also hard to be sorry for them.

On the other hand, over thousands of people and many years the overall theft adds up to a lot if left unchecked. So perhaps a correctly proportionate response to deter all future theft is exactly what happened, punish one guy a bit harshly while telling everyone else this is wrong.

I don't know what is is but much of Slashdot seems morally challenged today.

Yes - there's no such thing as "the C calling convention", there are just conventions for particular instruction sets and, as indicated, most of the conventions involve passing some parameters in registers.

Yes, if programming in assembler, or developing a compiler, you have to make sure you know whether a register gets overwritten, but that's not specific to passing parameters in registers.

It's an x86 calling convention (as the article says), not a generic calling convention for C for all architectures, as "blah blah blah is not a standard C parameter passing method" would speak of. There's no generic convention for passing parameters in C, there are only specific conventions for passing them on particular architectures, and most of those conventions do pass parameters in registers, although not all do (somewhat to my surprise, S/390 also passes parameters in registers), so x86, along with some rather old ISAs such as PDP-11, VAX, 68k, etc., may be the only ones that never pass parameters in registers, so "Passing in registers is not a standard C parameter passing method" is complete bullshit.

If they visit your website because they want to see what is there, you cannot charge them.

If they know that visiting your site will cause it to crash and thereby do you harm, then yes un theory you could charge them (although probably not taking reasonable precautions would get that thrown out).

Just as you have to replace a window, and possibly install a security system with a brick through a window - after a DDOS they had to pay to fix the web server and also to improve security in case they were attacked again.

The enhanced security was not needed until someone decided to DDOS them, so begin the first to do so means they are the ones who bear the extra costs of security of the business.

First of all, you'll note I am mainly referring to the comment that the 'worst part" is that he only participated for a minute. You seem to be arguing the worst part is the fine.

I partly agree, however I would also say that computers allow us to magnify actions beyond what we can do physically - just as we can send a message to millions via computer, we can also easily do millions of dollars in damage via computer to. I can't say what the right fine would be but it's probably not proportional to what someone would think one persons fine should be...

These people need to learn what actual violence against them and their property is

Then you get to learn what ACTUAL violence is, either buy police officer or prison inmate.

Let me know when you want off the not-so-merry-go-round.

If your entire life is going to be ruined for any sort of protest, the natural incentive is to go...

Except that property damage is not protest.

Actions that will ruin my entire life do not "incent" me to act worse, they in fact very much incent me not to ruin my life. It is possible to protest without damaging anyone or anything, a fact that seems lost on many groups these days.

Knowingly trying to bring down web sites is a crime. Should we also not arrest people if they only throw one brick through a store window but do not take anything? Should we also not arrest people who kick someone only once when lying on the ground?

A crime is a crime, and the act of committing a crime takes only the moment you decide you are going to commit it. The duration of the actual crime hardly matters when compared to intent.

Also, consider the fact that the minute is only the point they could prove what he did, if he was willing to aid in DDOS attacks who knows how many other people he helped attack in the past?

Smart Watches are meant to fill the same function, and some (like the Pebble) use e-Ink.

Myself, I don't find the battery drain for turning on the screen a moment significant enough to matter.