The story has two links. One doesn't mention gender, the other one does. Agreed, "gender expression" is totally off.

Curiously, the TOS seems to be confused as well, since it says "You may use the following terms to express your relationship orientation in your profile or Gamertag" and "Other terms regarding relationship orientation are not allowed", which means this is only about orientation, not gender... but then it includes transgender as an orientation.

When it comes to managing important network switches, no, they aren't gone.

When an important switch fails for some reason, how do you contact it to see if it's recoverable remotely? (i.e. when your network admin has to manage switches that are located at remote satellite offices)

Out-of-band management addresses this limitation by employing a management channel that is physically isolated from the data channel.

Or keep the tool, use it with the skill you just gained, and you get cheap custom cables for the rest of your life.

I'm not sure. I guess I have been poking around in mostly older ISOs. There are various tools to see if an ISO is marked as no-emulation or floppy-emulation, if you have some Windows installer ISOs lying around (I don't have any with me at work right now, sorry... I might check when I get home). Bart's BBIE can also extract the floppy boot image if you want to look into a specific boot floppy. (and then WinImage can be used to look inside the files in the floppy .img)

That's incomplete emulation. By floppy emulation, I mean that when a CD starts booting, the BIOS makes something show up on the A: drive, and makes it look (to the software) very very close to what a real floppy would look like (ie. responds to BIOS calls (INT 13h) in the way that a floppy does).

For starters, you can't make a disk partition look like an unpartitioned drive.

There are no silver-bullet solutions for booting ISOs via USB. A silver-bullet solution requires doing "floppy emulation", which is something that can't be easily done in a general-purpose way. For CD booting, each BIOS has this functionality implemented differently. For USB booting, the bootloader has to figure out how to do this. MEMDISK and GRUB4DOS are the only ones I know that do floppy emulation.

But then you have to do CD drive emulation too.

The way almost all ISO=>USB booters work is to pull the pieces apart and make them work without floppy+CD drive emulation. But this requires intimate knowledge of how that ISO normally boots, and thus it can't be a silver-bullet solution.

You can easily modify one of the GPL fonts to use wider punctuation, and call it a programmer's font. The important thing that makes proportional fonts faster to read is that the letters are proportional-width, punctuation width doesn't necessarily have to stay small.

Elastic tabstops solve the alignment problem. "Do what I mean, not what I say" with whitespace is a good thing, particularly when the width of a character can be totally different for every reader. Elastic tabstops aren't implemented in many editors yet (currently available as an optional feature in gedit and Code Browser), but once it becomes more widespread, many more programmers will be free to try out proportional fonts for coding.

and they are much more likely to be monitoring my traffic then someone with a wireless snooper

Are you sure? It's usually not difficult for law enforcement to find out who the owner of an AP is, because they're fixed in place. It's much more difficult to track down random passersby after the fact, because they're mobile and they're usually anonymous.

If you had the ability to sniff traffic, would you rather do it near your house (where the traffic is lower, and the chance of police finding later you is higher)? Or at your nearest coffeeshop (where the traffic is higher, and the chance of police finding you later is almost zero)?

Sure, it's good business sense to get consumer/reviewer reaction before investing all the money required to develop a product. But again, this has been standard practice among corporations and politicians for a while.

"When a guest logs on to Target.com and searches for a particular word, that search includes Amazon.com's millions of books, music and (movie) titles," Target said in its statement. "Target.com is currently working with Amazon.com to suppress certain titles from the Amazon.com catalog from appearing on the Target.com web site."

For a while, Target appeared to be selling marijuana, MDMA, crack, blowjobs, etc. Those have since been removed from Target.com, but Google is apparently still indexing those product searches.

At one point, Target had mirrored Amazon's product pages, which resulted in Target appearing to sell marijuana and an anus constricting book. However, that was FIVE YEARS ago. You'd think that Google would eventually figure out that these products are long-dead, and purge them from their index.

Or does Google keep things around forever? Psychologists have discovered that forgetting old memories is actually useful. Maybe Google should follow suit.

I've used onelook.com for a while, which is another aggregator that (for now) seems to have more links than Google Dictionary does.

But Google Dictionary isn't just an aggregator, they provide their own pronunciations for some words (a really important feature IMHO), and a list of synonyms for some words.

I actually hope that onelook links to Google Dictionary, as strange as an aggregator-linking-to-aggregator might be.

My guess is that Google has been working on computational linguistics for such a long time (stemming has been important for search for a while, and Google lately has started throwing in synonyms to the search results) that it's natural for Google to start exposing some of their internal dataset to the world more directly.

"The Internet is not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it generates more heat and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of boiling water, enormous amounts of boiling water."

From the article:

the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. ... These missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war.

From Wikipedia:

these rockets in turn would broadcast attack orders to missiles, bombers and, via radio relays, submarines at sea. Contrary to some Western beliefs, Dr. Blair says, many of Russia's nuclear-armed missiles in underground silos and on mobile launchers can be fired automatically."

That is, it's clear that there's a human in the loop who decides whether to launch the command missiles. But it's not clear that there has to be a human in the loop to fire individual weapons, if those weapons systems were to erroneously conclude that a command missile has remotely ordered it to attack. The US never did this — nuclear weapons always require a person on-site to make the final decision whether to fire.