You appear to be upset about something. Sorry you're having a bad day.

I'd chip in too.

I've actually been wondering how much it would cost. Probably not as much as we might think.

I'm with you.

RIP RobLimo. Thanks for the memories. Obsessively reloading Slashdot was once a huge part of my life.

If we survive (and I think we have a decent chance), we might actually look on this as a positive turning point.

Europeans have, for various historical reasons, been unwilling to stand up the United States for the past 70 years. Sometimes they've tut-tutted loudly, but in general they've let the US get away with whatever they wanted. Now it's become abundantly clear that you can't give anybody a free pass that way.

During the Bush II years there was already rumbling, mostly centered around Iraq. Then Obama came, and he made the US seem sane again. Now the world's only superpower has gone completely insane.

Democracy is a great thing, but it means you can't trust any country to be consistently sane, and you need to structure your institutions and foreign policy accordingly.

Wish I could vote this up.

I'm seeing a lot of commentary in various places about how small the ad by is, and half these things don't seem political, etc. Most people are missing the overall strategy entirely.

I don't know if it would work, but I would try it for random articles and see.

In the good old days there were fewer trolls, and for a long time the moderation system worked well enough to keep them under control. This might be enough to thin the troll ranks, and tip the balance back towards informed discussion.

True. I'm not suggesting that the solution would be easy. Just that the problem is legit.

Keep in mind, though, that the building blocks for such an algorithm are there. YouTube does automatic closed-captioning, for example, so they could easily do deeper analysis of the video transcript.

The thing is, it doesn't need to take you to more extreme content in order to give you more info. The "autoplay" after a conspiracy theory video could just as easily be another video debunking it.

However, the algorithm has determined that people are more interested in (in other words, more likely to watch) something more extreme than what you've just watch.

The intent isn't nefarious, but the overall effect is that you emerge knowing less about the topic than when you started.

A containment failure doesn't need to implode - it can just leak. Depends on the materials and the details of the design. And if it leaks, then everything slows down and stops.

I can't imagine they'd build this thing without any sort of safe failure mode.

Business logic !== logic.

You put logic into the data model that's tightly-coupled with the model. If this is code that must change when the data model changes, then it should live with the data model. It can then be re-used by different applications, and it helps isolate those applications from changes to the data model.

The "re-use" bit is really key. If you have multiple applications, with different teams of developers, all accessing the same database, then you can assume that none of the application teams really understands the data model as well as the DBA does, and really they shouldn't need to. Stored procedures provide a higher-level abstraction, and protect the database from developers who might not know exactly what's going on with the data.

Bad assumption.

We bought cable as part of a bundle with Internet access when we moved two years ago. We've never used it - not even once. Next house we won't bother, no matter how cheap it is. Lifestyles change.

Broadcast TV was always annoying, and gradually better forms of entertainment have emerged.

I used to work on one of these systems.

The flight planning system takes inputs from several sources - weather forecasts, notices about airspace closures, etc. (NOTAMs), and booking info - and creates an optimal flight plan for the aircraft.

A modern airline doesn't have enough flight planning staff to take over manually if the system fails, so if your flight planning goes out, your fleet is gradually grounded.

The large number of servers is due to the optimization problem. You need to take into account the flight conditions and fuel costs in different locations in order to decide your route, altitude, and fuel loading. Since fuel is a huge percent of the operating cost of the airline, it pays to invest a little extra computing power into optimizing these and save a bit fuel on each flight.

Our system had lots of redundancy but, with all the data feeds, there are lots of moving parts. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where, for example, you get everything transferred over to your disaster recovery site, but for some reason the weather feed isn't coming in and you can't make flight plans.

That's not hard to answer. Nobody wants to spend hours on the phone with somebody who:

• Can't say anything that isn't on their script.
• Has no authority to fix the problem even if they could understand it.

Modern call centres appear to be designed specifically to infuriate people by politely wasting their time without solving any problems.

The violation of privacy requires some reasonable counterbalancing objective. Inspecting physical goods has the reasonable objective of preventing smuggling. And it's reasonable that if you have something you really want to keep private (say you're a transvestite and don't want to come out), you'll leave the embarrassing material at home.

A phone or other electronic device, on the other hand, can contain all manner of private information. It's a much deeper invasion of privacy than just searching somebody's luggage. Deleting all that information just to be able to travel would constitute a considerable burden for most people.

The counterbalancing objective (I guess preventing the smuggling of child porn or something like that?) is much weaker. There are so many other ways of smuggling data that these inspections aren't likely to lead to any positive results.

So you have a much greater invasion of privacy vs. and a much weaker reasonable objective for needing to perform the search. I don't think the crown will win this, or at least I hope they won't.