Cite?

I'm not disputing your point, but AFAICT while this is theoretically an issue, I haven't seen any evidence that it's actually being done.

Example, there's a troll (who I won't name for fear she'll find her way here and see *my* real name) who has harassed me in the past. She didn't know my real name (Slashdot is one of the few places I use it) so her power over me was limited. One of her targets, though, used his real name and mentioned where he worked. She called up his job, reporting him for child abuse (he's a teacher), found and contacted all of his family on Facebook, and contacted his local police department to report him for child pornography. None of those charges were true, and luckily he had warned enough people about her that the damage was minimal, but he's still had to endure years of not knowing who she would contact next to spread lies.

The problem here isn't that she spread lies about him. The problem is that people believed an anonymous individual spreading lies. We're so used to face-to-face communication that we give the word of an anonymous phone tipster or anonymous Internet post as much weight as a someone telling us something face-to-face (a non-anonymous meeting).

For the job/police aspect in particular, the problem is the current procedure is to get the report of child abuse, place the accused on administrative leave while the charges are investigated, then reinstate him when they're found to be false. The correct procedure is to get the report of child abuse, investigate the reporter to validate their credibility, then place the accused on administrative leave while the charges are investigated. The threshold at which an individual should be placed on administrative leave (even for something as serious as child abuse) has to be much higher than can be triggered by an anonymous accusation. With a non-anonymous accusation, the accuser has "skin in the game" so it may reach that threshold. And the mistake is giving the anonymous accuser the same credibility as the non-anonymous accuser.

Anyone who sets himself up as a dictator? As I understand BF4, it's not about painting some race or culture as evil, but about the notion that warmongering dictators are a bad thing and often cause wars. That's certainly not specific to any country.

True. One of the first things I ask with any piece of hardware is "can I put Linux on it?". However, Mac OSX machines come with a very Unix preinstalled, one tailored to the hardware. OSX can run all my favorite free software that I run on Linux, so I don't see any reason to put Linux on a Mac. It already HAS Unix.

I'm guessing the NSA had some juicy details about this judges private life. Guess we'll find out how many of the SCOTUS Justices have secrets they'd sell their souls to keep private.

It's sad that the people who should most value privacy will rule against it, but that's why pervasive spying is so corrosive - the power just builds and builds.

Wow, what sort of imaginary Chinese history have you been reading. How do you think China gained such a large empire, if not through conquest? They've been ruthless, both historically and present day, in using whatever violence necessary to suppress any sort of cultural dissent. We take some shit in the US because we still have the death penalty, but China has purpose-built mobile execution vans, because there are just too many executions to perform from a few central locations.

Yes the British did some nasty things over a hundred years ago. That's a pathetic excuse to justify China's modern brutal oppression.

This particular judge disallowed Samsung from showing the jury its prior art (phones that it had in the design pipeline before the iPhone was announced) because the Samsung lawyers missed a filing deadline. She let the letter of the law (a filing deadline) override the intent of the law (to get to the truth of the matter).

Apple's tablet infringement claims were thrown out because of the copious amounts of prior art which the jury saw. The $1 billion judgement likely would've been thrown out too if they'd seen Samsung was working on iPhone-like designs before anyone outside Apple even knew what an iPhone was. In this particular case, the prejudice is in the jury, not the general public which got to see the documents the judge disallowed because of a technicality.

This is a $10,000 workstation, not the Acer your kid uses for their homework. Your data is on the Netapp or at least the Western Digital NAS.

The point was comparing it to an F150. The F150 sells for $25000 - $50000 depending on trim. It's a good comparison to Land Rover. People do use Mercedes for rural work, too, I'm sure. Remember, they may be luxury brands in the US, because they don't sell the cheap models here and cultivate an air of exotic foreign imports, but in Europe they're just cars. Police cars, taxis, whatever.

A custom built machine may be fine. A custom built mmachine is one data point - it may be fine or may have a lot of problems. Half of the servers in my rack have been custom built, half are top brands. The custom builds cost less to build. The top brands have engineered cooling, designed by thermal engineers, perfectly routed cables, and other niceties. The manufacturer lists certain hard drives and RAM that are thoroughly tested for compatibility and other drives that while they SHOULD be compatible, don't actually get along with the controller very well.

In my experience, the top brands are a little more reliable. For home use, the low cost of a custom build makes sense. If downtime is expensive, such as for a workstation or server, the extra 10% reliability of a professionally engineered system makes more sense. A $10,000 maxed-out Mac Pro is a workstation. You buy that for an employee who costs $3,000 / day in salary and benefits. You don't want that employee idle for a day because something overheated.

Slashdot has fallen a ways, but is still a place where you should assume that people have a basic high school education and know what fractional reserve banking is.

The difference is enormous. Having only one place that controls the money supply, and one that's vaguely answerable to democracy, is a vastly superior plan to every bank creating money at a whim. No bank can loan out more than its deposits, while the Fed is a whole different beast.

I'm sure it's not risky at all from an engineering perspective. Metal is predictable, and if you can predict it you can design to maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses for the intended application. And if it's just not possible to make it work, the math will tell you so.

What's risky is the marketing side of it, because people are much harder to predict. If people like it, this may be a huge leg up on the competition for Ford, putting them in the driver's seat for several years while Chevy and GM play catch up, particularly if they can then lobby successfully for turning the regulatory screws on the competition. It could leave the competition having to artificially limit their sales. If people don't like it, Ford could be in a world of hurt for a few years.

Either that or OEMs like Apple don't pay retail prices for parts.

Not only that, but it also serves a very valuable purpose: It allows people to have "unpopular" opinions, only to realize that they may be more popular than they thought.

I don't know if anyone here ever played the RPG "Paranoia". It stopped being fun when it became too close to home for comfort. It was a world under total surveillance where mutants and members of secret societies were hunted. The fun part now was that EVERYONE was a mutant and EVERYONE was member of some secret society. And everyone thought they're a tiny minority and everyone else is out there to hunt them down, because that was the generally accepted dogma and everyone was happy when someone else was being hunted because it means that, at least for now, they're not on the hunt list.

Sounds familiar? It should.

What anonymity allows in the context is that you can find out that you're not alone. That you're not the "odd man out" if you don't think the generally accepted dogma and creed is the all encompassing truth but that basically everyone thinks like that. Only the ones that hold power and media do not.

Of course, this is a threat to those that have power and media outlets in their hands. If you can convince everyone that they are alone in their "resistance" against the official opinion, they will conform. If you can threaten them with indirect or direct repercussions if they disagree, they will fall in line, even if they could in theory voice their opinion. Just lock up everyone who dares to speak out and people will think that that guy and they are the only 2 in the world who thought like that.

If people can voice their concern anonymously, they will soon find out that they're not alone. Not by a long shot. Actually, they will find out that the official opinion is backed by nobody but a tiny minority.

The community is not. People who are concerned about privacy simply avoid commenting on pages that outlaw having a private moment in life.

I stopped commenting on YouTube. I stopped commenting on various news pages. I guess given time they will find out what drives even more people away than vitriolic comments is no comments worth reading at all. Because for some odd reason, when I peruse the various pages I used to frequent before they became part of the 1984 set, the quality of comments in general dropped, it didn't improve. Now you have mostly self-absorbed showoffs that would dance naked in the street if it only meant 5 seconds of YouTube fame.

People who commented because they wanted to give people a piece of their mind, more often than not inspiring or insightful rather than destructive (and the destructive ones were easily blended out, given the omnipresent ability to simply ignore people you don't want to hear from), are moving away from these sites. There is now very little reason to read YouTube comments. Or, given the fact that it has become virtually impossible to watch YouTube videos without stuttering or loading problems anyway, to use that page altogether.