No reason? Really?

In their early careers, both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had many meetings (with investors, prospective clients, and other companies) that where key to their success at the time. In many of those meetings they didn't have much of a product or results to show, relying mostly on selling themselves as "someone who can get the job done" (e.g. Gates initial deal with IBM, selling them an OS that he didn't have yet). So you are saying that none of those meetings would have a different outcome if the young entrepreneur was a woman instead? That none of the investors or clients would trust the entrepreneur's abilities a little less because of some deep bias, and consequently decline a key deal?

In certain niches Java Applets are still very common, online banking being one very important example. So for many people the options are simply: a) enable Java plugin; or b) have no access to your money.

Generally speaking you are right about car frames, wrong about phone frames and technically wrong about golf balls.

Car frames are made to absorb energy deforming because the internal component it is trying to save (the people inside) are very fragile to high G forces. The internal components of a phone on the other hand, are extremely resistant to high Gs, what dose components can't withstand are forces applied irregularly to just part of it. So yes, current phones always break because of deforming cases, that is, in the instant a phone hits a hard surface the case bends a tiny tiny bit, causing the components to "feel" the forces of the impact being applied only to one of its sides, causing them to break. If the case was 100% unbendable, the force would be applied uniformly across the whole body of the components, and in this case they can take much stronger forces without damage.

On an unrelated note, a golf ball in its intended function (being hit by a club) is very deformable, not returning the kinetic energy immediately but instead first using it to compress into a pancake and later (as in later into the swing, when the club is applying less force to the ball) releasing that energy like a very tough compressed spring.

It is easy, just assume the website visitor have the simplest type of "wheelchair" and all other ones will not have problems. That means, just disable css/javascript/flash/java on your browser and try to use your own site, if you can than any blind person will also be able to.

Actually, there is a hard-and-fast rules for what an ADA-compliant website is, you just have to answer "yes" do a simple question: "Will a blind person be able to navigate, read, and use your web site to its full extent?".

Your whole comment is just an ignorant rant, the equivalent of an architect designing a public building with stairs at every door for no reason at all, and then ranting that "evil ADA" is forcing him to put ramps. Yes, modifying an existing building or website to comply with ADA is difficult, but not because complying with ADA is inherently difficult, but instead because you chose to ignore the needs of a whole class of people when making your original design.

That is a huge step in the right direction from Twitter, but unfortunately it won't help much people from Central and South America, since all traffic out of the Americas is routed trough the USA anyway (and consequently trough the NSA).

For those unaware, this is not hyperbole on my part, the whole Central and South American sub-continents are served by not much more than a handful of Atlantic underwater cables and Pacific underwater cables, all of them terminating in Miami,USA (if the exception of one or two of the pacific ones terminating in California, USA). The connectivity in South America is so dependent on the USA that many times a packet from Chile to Argentina (neighbor countries in the far south of the continent) have to travel thousands of kilometers north to be routed trough the USA and come back south.

This connectivity dependence on the USA was reveled to be more of a problem after the the Snowden leaks. The leaks showed that the facilities in Miami responsible for routing the cables from South America, also house secret NSA rooms capable of intercepting any and all communication from those cables. Also, the leaks showed that the NSA had already intercepted many communications, among those emails and calls from top Brazilian government officials including the president Dilma Rousseff. And the intercepts where not limited to political motives, the NSA also intercepted emails and calls from South American companies in order to help USA competitors in large bids, for example helping Boeing in two different occasions, one in a dispute against the Brazilian Embraer, and another in Boeing's bid to sell the F18 to the Brazilian Air Force (this last one was a shoot in the foot, since the revelations in the leaks de facto removed the F18 from consideration and solidified the Brazilian choice of the Swedish Saab Gripen as Brazil's next fighter plane).

Fortunately there is hope for the near future here in South America as the Snowden leaks lead to a new push, spearheaded by Brazilian government, to install more inland fibers interconnecting neighbor countries, and to install new South Atlantic fiber cables connecting South America directly to Africa and Europe.

Capitalism allows business owners and leaders to CHOOSE unilaterally for all the employees under their purview. Socialism forces them to extend the power of choice a little bit to all involved. Conservatives don't really understand the importance of this distinction.

People paint all socialism like some kind of communist dictatorship, but in reality socialism can be very similar to capitalism, but with one small but very important change:

A capitalist company is owned by its financial capital and "borrows" its human capital at a fixed rate (wages). Then, on its balance sheet it lists any returns to the human capital (wages) as costs while listing returns to the financial capital as profit.

A socialist company is owned by its human capital and borrows its financial capital at a fixed rate (loan). Then, on its balance sheet it lists any returns to the financial capital (repayments and interest) as costs while listing returns to the human capital as profit.

Your comment is a testament to why EHR software are so bad. Because engineers with no knowledge or experience in the field of health care think they can simply decide to automate or standardize stuff, because of "things called computers", without knowing if said things should be automated or standardized. (also, four other engineers without knowledge in the field mod it insightful just like your comment here on slashdot, and consequently bad projects go ahead).

So let me give you just one small reason (among the many) why your comment is not insightful: Data entry during a doctor's visit is meant to be redundant as a safety measure. Everyone knows that the system could calculate the age from the birth date, but simply forcing the doctors to enter the age every visit is a form of multiple data entry that can help to identify many errors that could otherwise have bad consequences.

No excuse for piracy? What world do you live in? Here in the real world the official offerings are distributed on broken unreliable systems that give you terrible image and sound quality, and frequently stop working in the middle of your watching.

Yesterday I just had great reminder that there are yet excuses for piracy, when I watched Game of Thrones legally on HBO's own streaming service and had to wait because it was one hour late, and the image quality could be resumed to questions like "that blob is a tree, a dog, or a main character?" and the sound quality as: "what he(she) said?".

You are terribly misinformed about what the "no tracking" flag means. It is not a setting meant to change how the browser stores information or behaves, and it is definitely not some equivalent of a "disable cookies" setting. Instead the no tracking flag is meant to be sent on a HTTP header as a way to inform the server that the user doesn't wan't to be tracked, it is a way for users inform the server that they are actively opting-out of any and all tracking.

So there was no bug in Safari, browsers with no tracking enabled are still supposed to keep accepting and returning cookies (unless that was specifically disabled elsewhere), after all there are more uses for cookies than only tracking. The real "bug" (more like crime) was Google ignoring the user's explicit wishes and keeping tracking users even after said users explicitly opted-out, informing Google trough the proper channel (the no tracking flag).

The success of Netflix contradicts you.

People (including myself) want their crap bundled, and their expensive premium stuff ala carte. Bundling cheap crapy stuff doesn't make it more expensive, instead it makes it cheaper, the problem is when content providers create bundles with the expensive stuff, then customers pay premiun for something they don't want.

Basicaly, bundling cheap things by cost is a good practice. What is bad for the consummers is bundling by theme while mixing the premium stuff with the crap, this way the customers can't "shop arround" for the cheapest content (E.G. a sports fan have to buy the expensive package with ESPN, there is no option to buy only a crappy sports channel).

I agree 100% that uber should not be able to just start a taxi service without any regulation and safety standards. But we could simply have all those regulations and standards you mentioned, without the absurd undue burden onto society that are the "limited licenses".

Many industries have government requirements and quality standards without the need of limited licenses, and those industries always trived, wihout anyone saying "I won't open a business because there are no limited licences". Restaurants and hotels for example, don't have limited licenses and yet they are required to follow as many regulations (if not more) than taxis, even hairdressers have as much regulation and safety standards as a taxi but withtout a magical monopoly.

The limited licenses system have absolutely no benefit, none of the "benefits" mentioned by its proponents stand to the slitly scrutiny:

- Revenue would otherwise be spread over too many people so drivers wouldn't earn a living wage: well, with the limited licenses drivers don't earn a living wage, instead the taxi companies (which hold the monopoly tokens) keep most of the profit and pay very little to the drivers. In this situation the drivers have no bargaining power because, unlike any other industries, the worker is not allowed to leave the company and work on their own when the wages are not proportional to the income. The limited licenses artificialy forces a feudal system of serfdom onto the drivers who are then forced to work for peanuts.

- There would be no guarantee there will be drivers available to all times: news flash, taxi drivers are not dumb, if they can earn more by working on odd times with less competition then they will. And if none of the current drivers is willing, then other people will see the oportunity and become drivers specificaly to work those times. This is one of the few cases where "free" market actually works and the market would self balance. Also, no one argues that we need limited corner-shop licences otherwise we can't guarantie there will be corner-shop in all neigbourhoods, instead entrepenorial people naturaly find neigbourhoods that lack a corner-shop and open one there.

So, instead of a sistem of "limited licenses" cities could have simply a sistem of "unlimited licenses" where anyone who fills the required regulations could have their own taxi and work, where taxi drivers unhapy with the distribution of profits have the oportunity to go on their own. That has all the benefits of the current broken system and none of its many disadvantages.

It works for me too. I know that the concept of which format is "good enought" is a very subjective matter, but in my opinion 720p is in a very good sweet spot and there is not much extra benefit in going 1080p. I mean that the jump from non-hd to 720p is a huge jump, it is the differense between a "insufferable blurry mess" and "very sharp", but the difference between 720p and 1080p is more like "very sharp" to "a tiny bit sharper". I'm not saying that 1080p is not nice, just that it is not indipensable.

But then, my disdaing for 1080p may be just result of the fact that I'm not used to it. After all, up until a month ago my internet was way too slow for any kind of HD video. Lets see how I feel about it after 6 months with an OK internet.

Here it goes just a quick list:

1. This one doesn't make any sense. Systemd is a collection of daemons and binaries, and each of those "do one thing and do it well,". By the same standard he would have to say that the whole GNU project "flies in the face of the Unix philosophy" because it is "a complex collection of dozens of tightly coupled binaries".

2. The said "disadvantage" (that it is logs can be corrupted) is also a disadvantege of all other systems (with text logs), no change here.

3. Really? So any and all software which is not cross-platform is "noticeably chauvinistic and anti-Unix"? Many (if not all) of those non-Linux systems also have subsystems tightly welded to their respective kernels.

4. That is called building in the sholders of giants.

6. Yes, PID 1 is a single point of failure. It has always been. Again not something brought by systemd.

I got tired, apparently all arguments on that site follow into two categories:

A. Systemd does something diferently, I don't have any data showing that is is worse but because I liked the way it was before I'll call it worse.

B. Systemd is vulnerable to a problem/attack/etc which was already present in previous init systems, but for no reason this bothers me in sytemd.

It is modular.

Systemd is made of dozens of modules and you "can just use the pieces we want" (obviousely respecting the dependencies between them). And they are defining formal APIs for all that, some of the APIs are already stable, the ones which are unstable are still young and evolving.