Good points... I am not sure, though, that the issues you mentioned necessarily reflect the cultural ideas. They represent issues that ended up changing the culture, but did that represent the culture at the time?

I would argue that because TV has to make a profit based on their viewing audience, they have to cater to said viewing audience, which means they typically have to provide shows that the viewing audience likes and/or identifies with. It's interesting to note when the shows you mentioned went off the air, presumably due to profitability. I don't remember seeing many of the happily-married-couple-with-2.5-kids-and-a-white-picket-fence TV shows after the 60s.

Of course, I'm not any sort of expert on this in the least. It's mostly just from watching and listening to (e.g., music or radio shows) media from those decades and observing how they changed throughout the decades. There WAS a big shift, as you say, in the 60s with regards to sexuality. And that, I think, was pretty clearly portrayed in er, consumer media (TV, music, movies). (Example: not being allowed to show a husband and wife in the same bed in TV shows, hence having separate twin/double beds ... e.g., in the Dick Van Dyke show, Laura and Rob had separate beds).

Just like unpopular speech is still free, Slashdot posts aren't modded up for correctness or popularity. They're modded up for being interesting and well-communicated. Just because someone's wrong doesn't mean they should be modded down. I want to see the comments with which I disagree, so I can argue with them. Which is what happened here. I was actually meta-moderating, and your comment came up. I just had to jump in.

Does using RAID controllers actually provide superior price:performance to using software RAID? Last I checked, the processors on most cheap RAID controllers were slower than dogshit and using md under Linux would give you better performance than basically any of them, at the cost of some CPU. But since CPU is cheaper than RAID, it probably makes sense. For example, going from a Phenom II X3 720 to a Phenom II X6 chip of the same clock rate takes the CPU from $100 to $200. How much would it cost to go from four crappy RAID controllers to four good ones? It would probably cost you at least $400.

The answer is probably to just go ahead and install Debian on a machine with as many CPU cores as you want to blow money on, and to use software raid. Put lots of system RAM in it, which the OS will automatically use for disk buffers. Current versions of grub work fine with USB keys, because they can use UUID for the groot, and the UUID never changes. If you want it to boot quickly, find a motherboard with coreboot support. If you want external disks you can use firewire cheaper than eSATA, if you get the external disks or just some enclosures at a good price. It makes maintenance a lot easier, but involves substantial power waste due to all those inefficient wall warts.

P.S. OpenSolaris is circling the drain, please don't suggest it to anyone for anything.

Actually NTFS is pretty good at keeping files unfragmented.

If a program opens a new file and them immediately seeks to the end of it to fix it's size then NTFS will look for a continuous block of free space to save it in. NTFS caches all writes so it can wait to see what the program actually does with a file before committing it to disk.

It also has a system designed to reduce the fragmenting effects of small files by being able to store their data in the same block as their metadata.

The only major fragmentation problem Windows XP has is when a machine has very little RAM and it allocates a rather small page file. It then ends up needing to expand the page file repeatedly and it gets highly fragmented causing severe slow down. I think they fixed it in Vista/7 by simply specifying a sensible minimum size and expanding it in larger chunks.

What's with the mods today? What exactly is redundant about this? Mark Roth is working about suspended animation using controlled oxygen depletion with H2S and CO, work which has shown quite some promise in various animal models. Interesting stuff that is completely on topic. The main problem with suspended animation, be it of whole organisms or of tissues, is oxygen damage. Mark Roth depletes the oxygen in a controlled manner, the work cited in TFA is based on adding dichloroacetate, which has been shown to prevent ischemic damage in tissue. Not sure how the two would complement each other, as I am not much of a metabolism guy. Anyway, someone mod up the parent, that downmod is undeserved.

There's a difference between using an open Wi-Fi hotspot and doing a man-in-the-middle attack to collect data about what sites other people using the hotspot are visiting.

Your strawman is that there was some regulation, so that proves that regulation doesn't work. Perhaps BP should argue that they had some mechanical safeguards at the well head that were supposed to keep this leak from happening and those safeguards didn't stop this disaster, so obviously the lesson here is that safeguards are not the answer.

If you're arguing that government is inherently so corrupt and incompetent that it's impossible for it ever to regulate effectively and so we should stop trying, that's a slightly more valid argument, but I'm going to have to disagree with you. It's not an easy problem, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

We're talking about giant, ridiculously wealthy multinational corporations. The government is the only hope that people have of making any sort of stand against them. The fact that it's imperfect and requires serious work to function properly is a shame, but I fail to see how doing nothing would be any better.

"Somewhere along the line, a CS degree became a way of ensuring yourself a job in much the same way a degree in accounting did, and CS began to get people who didn't really give a shit. "I'll pay the money, go to the classes, get the degree, and get a job. Then I'll be safe and happy until I die."

That was never entirely true and it certainly isn't true now. Besides today programming languages aren't that big a factor in hiring. You need to have experience in the 10 frameworks, libraries, or technologies that a company has selected out of the hundreds available. You could try learning about those items, but it won't help - because the other companies have selected a different subset.

I'm glad I started my career before integration and "glue" code replaced real programming.

There's more than one way to skin the OOP cat. Message-passing, like Smalltalk, is not the only way.

Simula, the first OO language, that predates Smalltalk, and predates the term OO, uses a model that's very similar the one used in Java/C++/.NET. To say that C++ is not "object-oriented" is absurd.

or they could answer their own question. Three reasons:

1) Government already writes much of its own code. I see gigs posted all the time. Thing is, each office/department/etc tends to be a silo, so there is no "central" coding department. Can you imagine the bureaucracy around change processes then? Sheesh...

2) On average, public sector pays less. The idea here is to improve the quality of code, right? Not really possible if you can't attract the best and brightest.

3) Using external (this can be commercial or open source) products is key. Who makes the computers? Who makes the IDE's? How can we guarantee compiled code is fully secure if you aren't controlling every step of the process? Not possible. Even the government's most important asset, the President, is transported around in products made by commercial interests (albeit, with some customizations after the fact).

For certain values of "forever", but long enough that the human race will be long gone from the Earth before it's a problem.

But what never ceases to amaze me is the mentality that an energy source that is only good for 200 years (of which about 150 we've already used) is somehow better than an energy source that is good for 1 billion years or so.

Chrome can be as fast as a fly, and firefox can be slow as a turtle - as long as firefox has adblock, and chrome doesn't, I'll use firefox.

I've been a programmer at the same company for 18 years now. I'm a full time employee, but work with a lot of contractors. Here's my advice: - Find out what time you're expected to be at work, then show up on time, every day. Don't arrive late and work late thinking that you'll make up for it. Your teammates might need your expertise early in the day. It's incredibly frustrating when you're in at 7:00am and need something from a coworker who "might" show up around 10:00am. If you want to work late that's fine, but do it in addition to starting early and you'll go far. And don't make a big deal about how late you worked last night. We'll all notice how late you worked from the timestamps on your emails. - Be honest about your progress. If your code is 20% complete, don't tell your boss it's 40% done. If extra help is needed, it's best to get someone else involved early. - Dress appropriately. An untucked shirt may be fine at home, but it's not going to work in the corporate world. - Act like a professional. Throwing curse words around in meetings or even in your cube really doesn't get you very far. - Own the problems that you cause. If a program abends in production due to a change I made, I'm quick to acknowledge and own the mistake. Don't throw blame somewhere else. A buddy and I once took down the entire ATM network for a large bank because we forgot about the referential integrity on one of the main tables in the database. We went straight to our boss and told him what happened. He thanked us and asked us if we'd be making that mistake again. We said no, and we never heard about the issue again. There's lots more, of course, but most of these things are common sense. The corporate world doesn't care how 'cool' you are, or how far you've gotten in whatever the latest game is, or how much beer you can drink and still write functional code.

I think it would be hard to do something completely open sourced that also had very strong privacy built in. Some sort of distributed Shamir Sharing coming to mind... As for Facebook people will vote with their feet or not..

You are effectively denying all science by grouping AGW sceptics with "useful idiots".

There is one huge problem with AGW: we cannot measure it. So how can you claim it is a scientific fact? If Earth is warming we certainly should be able to measure it, right? Why cannot we?

See, last decade "warming" could be, according to statistics, due to just random fluctuations. This is a mathematical fact and there is no way to deny it. Yet you never hear that fact, you only hear "last decade was warmest ever measured". Why should I trust AGW proponents when they do bad math while knowing it is bad math? Similarly for purposefully claiming Himalayas will dry off in 30 years while knowing it is 100% bogus. What else have they done, cherry picked "scientific" papers perhaps? Who know as they will not tell.

Then there is another, even bigger, problem in the news. Everything "could be caused by global warming", everything, even the Icelandic volcano eruption! But no matter what happens (last winter was exceptionally cold in many, many places) it does not show anything, it is "just weather". This, although true, does not make good science and is very sickening.

I do not claim CO2 emissions are not bad, I do not claim we are not raping the Earth in many ways, I am not even claiming AGW is not true. All I am saying: stick to the science, please, don't deny it.