It shouldn't be, but statistically speaking, you're wrong. Don't confuse stereotyping individuals (which may or may not be a factually correct assessment of someone, depending on the individual) with aggregate data collection (which can be proven to be statistically valid). Most people who actively associate themselves with gay rights are gay. That is in no way saying that no straight person does so, or that most straight people aren't for gay rights (which has become the case in only the last decade). It's only saying that those people marching in gay rights parades? They are predominantly gay. If you pull someone out of the parade, they might or might not be gay. But if you want to advertise, for example, a heterosexual dating service, you'd probably be better off targeting a different event demographically.

Don't worry, we can bring that stuff back, too!

People used to ask why desktops would need multiple processors. Most software now takes advantage of multithreading capability, and trying to use a single core process is downright painful.

It may not need to multitask many phone calls at once, but it most certainly may need to multitask a whole bunch of apps at once, especially on a phone that can do things like instantly translate written or spoken text, record and composite two video sources at once and audio in real time, receive notifications such as texts, keep track of calendars, locations, temperatures (?), heart rates (!), etc. while you go about whatever it is you're doing, running a pretty sophisticated operating system with a pretty sophisticated user interface, and oh yeah, take and process telephone calls. And don't forget that it might have to do some of these tasks twice, given that the phone can be configured to be running an entirely separate virtual OS for your work stuff.

Never ask why any electronics device would need more resources, whether it's CPU cores, memory, storage capacity, network bandwidth, or anything else. It's a sure recipe for looking back in five years and say, "Wow, I sure was dumb back then. I never dreamed that devices today would be able to [insert amazing capability due directly to advancement in hardware specifications]!"

With all due respect, this is one of the dumbest things I've ever read on Slashdot. It really doesn't take a lot of thinking to realize how nonsensical what you've stated is. Yes, some poor and middle-class people have investments, but I can't imagine anyone who doesn't know that the rich have disproportionately much more in investments than any poor or middle class person does. In fact, most of the poor don't have any investments at all, or so little as to be negligible, more than offset by debts they carry, and a lot of the working lower-middle class don't either. Sales taxes (or VATs or consumption taxes or whatever snake oil term you want to use for it now) disproportionately hit the poor and middle class, the people who don't have the luxury of choosing whether to spend or save their money because they're living paycheck-to-paycheck. Your warped logic seems to be that because the poor and middle class would have to pay a little bit extra on investments if the capital gains tax is raised, let's instead endorse a plan in which they'd get the shit smacked out of them with, depending on who you ask, an extra 20%-40% in taxes at the time of purchase. Oh, and the rich, who pay the lions share of capital gains taxes, might have to pay a minuscule bit more on their foie gras, but if you're listening to who I think you're listening to, they'll get a huge windfall in paying little or no taxes on money made by their money sitting in a bank or corporation's slush fund!

I hope you're not seriously advocating the so-called "Fair Tax," because the people who cooked that up have one goal and one goal only in mind: To shift the nation's already skewed tax burden even more onto the poor and middle class. It is to get people who currently pay little to no taxes due to their low incomes to pay even more in a national sales tax. Yes, I've read up on the so-called "Fair Tax". Yes, I've heard all of the arguments for it. Yes, I know about the proposed refund to people in poverty. I've looked at the numbers, evaluated their arguments, and come to the conclusion that they are goddamned liars with a slick marketing campaign trying to twist the concept of "fairness" into getting people to lobby against their own economic self-interest.

What really needs to happen is that they need to do away with the capital gains tax and tax all income as income, period, end of story. If you make $50,000 from wages and $5,000 from capital gains, then you'll pay a marginal income tax rate of 25% on that $5,000. If, on the other hand, you make $5,000 from wages and $50,000 from capital gains, you'll pay a marginal income tax rate of 25% on the last $5,000 of that $50,000. No matter how you slice it or dice it, you pay the same taxes.

I was really hoping that he would call himself Pope Awesome. A little marketing never hurt. If I were Pope, I'd have to go with either taking the name Mobile, or possibly Oree.

Funny, but it does make me wonder. While I'm not gay, I do tend to like statuses and pages that have to do with gay rights, and several of my friends on Facebook are gay, yet I still see ads all the time for single ladies in my area. It makes me wonder: 1) Has Facebook accurately pegged me as straight (or bisexual) even though I haven't given it any direct indication of what I am, 2) has Facebook not made the connection and/or advertisers don't care, just spamming their ads to all males, or 3) is Facebook using some other algorithm that happens to be accurate for me, but generally less accurate for the population as a whole? Personally, I think #2 is correct.

I'd like to see a page about me that says, "Here's the information you've provided, and here's the information we're inferring from what we know about you." I suppose they'd never do that because it might very well creep people out too much, but then, it might get people whose inferences are wrong to directly supply the information to them.

Maybe, but if you're a nude man and see someone attractive, it could be a bit embarrassing. You just can't hide that. And if you spend much time in an airport, you'll know that there are some VERY attractive people who go through there. While I'm not so low on self-control that I'd rape someone, sometimes just thinking about that girl I saw in the theater last night is enough that I'm glad I wear pants everywhere I go about my daily business.

True story: A few years ago I got sick as a dog, running fever, having chills, and relevantly to this story, I had a nasty case of laryngitis. I wasn't just hoarse, I just plain couldn't talk. I called my insurance company to get some information I needed to go to the doctor, and I had one of those damn voice menus. "Please say your social security number!"...

I tried entering it in using touch tones, but it wouldn't work. The damn thing insisted that I say my social security number, and it wouldn't let me talk to anyone until I did. And I tried, too. Oh lord, I did try. I could get enough weird sounds out that a human could probably understand what I was saying, but my voice was breaking up so badly that the IVR couldn't decipher it.

I ended up going to the doctor anyway, and they had someone from the receptionist desk help me out with the insurance stuff because according to that insurance company, if you can't talk, you don't get help.

To this day, I think that any company worth its salt should give you the option of dropping to a human operator to help you. There are just too many things that can go wrong with an IVR, and too many problems that are simply unsolvable via automated response systems.

I'd go even further, and say that most of even the best documentation doesn't provide use cases and best practices. Picking on MSDN as an example, there are some really good articles out there about various topics, but there aren't a lot of articles on addressing a specific question or need. If you need to know how to use, for example, a treeview control, MSDN is probably the best place to go. But it doesn't answer the question, should I be using a treeview control to begin with, or are there other solutions that might be better? Or, I'm having a specific problem with a treeview control, such as getting it to work right in a multithreaded application. How do I fix this? For those kinds of issues, you don't particularly need documentation, you need a community that is ready and willing to help you.

Having said that, one problem with StackOverflow is that it's not maintained that well. I've frequently found answers there that were just plain wrong, and answers that might have been applicable in 2005 when the software I'm working with was six versions behind what I'm using now. It would be nice if they had some sort of cleanup mechanism to maintain a bit of freshness to the answers and encourage people to re-answer questions when underlying technologies or software changes.

I didn't say that scientific discoveries can't be serendipitous. I said that counting on serendipity instead of active research for discoveries is foolish. One needs only look at how many discoveries were sought versus simply found for proof.

Gee, if only there were some way to convert one to the other, maybe even have a fuel source as a byproduct, wouldn't that be a wonderful dream?

Seriously? "Stumble upon" science? Man, I'm glad you had no authority in the Apollo program.

The idea is that you don't wait for these technologies to serendipitously come along, you go research and find them. Maybe your success will be limited, but in the process, you will probably stumble upon things that will be useful in other fields. In this day and age when we're approaching ecological disasters and energy crises, I think that a lot of the technology researched in working on a manned mission to Mars would be very useful in other fields.