Either your reading or comprehension skills is wrong. "... weakening a key legal justification for the measure" is a key requisite for truly dismantling a regulation. Based on your statement that "...bureaucracy shouldn't govern and that Congress should ultimately put forth all laws", I'm gonna go out on a limb and state that you do not know that Congress does pass laws - that empower those "bureaucrats" (shudder...people who just do their fucking jobs all day) to create a technocratic, science-based set of regs to enforce those laws. Given how stupid Congress is, that's a Good Thing(TM), not a Bad Thing(TM) as you present it to be. Sheesh!! We deserve Trump as President.....

...for a group (Republicans) who only care about life when it's yet to be born. After that, if you're not a member of the lucky sperm club, they could really give a bubbly fart about your life.

*THIS* is the key! For too long, the desert southwest has relied on subsidized, low-cost water that was (expensively!) diverted from its natural area(s) - specifically the Colorado and Sacramento rivers and the Owens Valley and....Kinda like public housing projects divert public dollars, except when the beneficiaries are agri-business vs poor people, it takes longer to come to realization. That is: everything has a cost, but what has value?

"Here! Here's a badly needed security patch for a we browser. Oh - your computer won't boot even to the OS level? Sucks to be you." I've been MS-free for about 15 years now, migrated a bunch of friends and family to Linux and we just couldn't be happier.

I was in a different situation. Mom developed Alzheimers and I became "the responsible adult". Long story short, had I not been making six-figures and had a spare house for her and her live-in caretaker to live and cover all the expenses, her life would have been a thousand times more hellish than it was already. Our society is failing these folks, not least by not universally allowing voluntary euthanasia for those who choose not to subject themselves to the indignities that result from - essentially - losing your mind.

You DO realize that the entire concept of "the desktop" has drastically changed from 10-20 years ago, right? Yeah, "the desktop" used to mean an x86-powered PC running Windows OS and an ecosystem of applications that could ONLY run on said Windows OS (or Mac equivalent). Today "the desktop" means pretty much everything from a tablet to a workstation that may or may not be able to run Windows apps, but does most of its work over a network and can run any web-based application that comprises the majority of apps today. Wintel-only "desktop" is a dinosaur that is dead, just too stupid to lay down.

You can easily disable this patch with a boot command-line argument. Unless you are running a heavily VM-ed data center with shit for security, why would you cripple your system over the most esoteric hacks known to man and that - Oh! By the way! - require that you are running malware on your system already? (And spare me the horseshit about JS - that can ONLY happen in a carefully crafted environment.)

The way that it works in BGP-Land is that once you are designated an "Autonomous System" and assigned a AS number (kinda like having an SS7 ID in telecom land), you can update all of the other BGP routers around the world. It's the only way for the internet to function today. Not that it doesn't need additional security, but....

As someone who spent 9 years working on HMIS systems, I can tell you that doctors hate what everyone hates: poorly designed screens and workflows that do not fit in with the efficient use of their time. One example: a vendor had a system for doing basic Order Entry - where, say, a doctor orders an X-ray. Along with a bunch of other unnecessary data REQUIRED to be entered, the system forced them to manually enter the date and time that the order was entered. No thought of: let's use the actual known current date and time that the order was entered. These types of inefficiencies were rampant and the vendor was truly perplexed why everyone hated the system so much.

Given the additional functionality this thing provides (as you said, the mic disable thing is pretty easy), I would be surprised if it's pure ASIC, though some of the ASICs available now are pretty complex. I was thinking it was some kind of minimalist CPU with embedded RAM, etc. It would be interesting to know the provider...

...someone wanting to have it both ways. 1) We just can't regulate what's posted on our platform because "censorship". 2) If you post about n*ggers, kikes, etc. (like too many comments here on /.) you'll be banned. C'mon, guys - you can't have it both ways. FTR, I come down on the side of any commercial company being able to have their own standards of acceptable speech. Don't like it? TFB. Either adhere to the rules going in or use a different platform for stuff you know will get you kicked off.

If by "gross security flaws" you mean the techniques that require that you are already infected by malware in order to function, then - no, probably not. If, OTOH, you maintain clean systems and do not install said microcode and OS patches, then rock and roll!!
I, for one, think that the whole Meltdown/Spectre nonsense is a hyper over-reaction to a most obscure vulnerability that - again!! - requires that your machine already be infected. The whole JS scripting shit is nonsense also, BTW.

Bzzt! Wrong. The embargo was in place before the nukes were placed there. Also, this was in response to American nukes in Turkey, right on the Russian border. Stir in a few assassination plots by America and attempted overthrows of the Cuban government, I'd welcome some nukes too.

...as an American citizen, I can be arrested for visiting Cuba, 90 miles away. Why? Something, something Communism.....

...this is pretty interesting in that it demonstrates the value of genetic diversity in helping humans evolve survival mechanisms at the genetic level. We've long known that viral imprinting bestows resistance to certain those viruses, but zooming this out to a more macro level is very fascinating.

You may now continue with the school-yard level jokes....