I do know a thing or two about barcodes. They're not based on absolute measurements of line thickness, they're proportional. Look at any random half dozen different items with barcodes on the packaging, odds are they'll all be the same standard and there'll be at least three different sizes represented. A barcode reader that can only read one specific size of barcode would be fucking useless.

Therefore, as long as the scaling is fairly precise, you can shrink (or grow) just about any given barcode and still reasonably expect it to scan. Allowing for how precise with small print or how wide an area the average barcode reader can handle, of course.

Besides which, if memory serves, the DMCA requires that the host take down the content, and it's up to whoever posted the content to dispute it. But I am not a lawyer, so take with a grain of salt.

Indeed. Barter works if you can easily find someone who has what you want and doesn't want it for himself, wants what you have and you don't want it for yourself, and you both agree that they have more-or-less the same value. Utterly unworkable for sustaining a society of any meaningful size on its own.

Some are, but in my experiences the people who complain about "SJW"s tend to be worse.

You can think that. I suspect the reality is closer to a small amount really agreeing, a small amount really disagreeing, and the majority not much caring one way or the other.

And that would be fine, and the end of the discussion, if all of the advertising world was focused on selling to you and only you. But it's not, and if you view the content in a positive way but ten other people are offended by it and boycott whoever was sponsoring it, they lose more than they gain from you viewing the sponsor positively.

Naturally, it's all a bit more complex than that, but the point is that when the sponsor views something in a negative way, it's usually relating to how much of their target audience they're expecting to view it negatively enough to cost them.

Back in the day, it was the difference between useful and soon to be useless, but these days not very.

It's also not really that vital that all the applications I use are the ones provided by my desktop environment. So Konqueror hasn't really kept up? Big deal, I mostly use a mix of Firefox and Chromium anyway. KMail old and ugly? Doesn't matter, I never use an email client these days. And if I did, it would likely be Thunderbird anyway.

So all I truly need from a desktop environment is that it looks and behaves the way I like. KDE is, and has been for a long time, the best at that for me. Will I some day want some features from my desktop environment that KDE doesn't provide? Possibly. But until that day comes, I don't much care how actively KDE is developed, as long as it continues to work.

How do you figure? Canada is still a part of the British Commonwealth, and it was given the Royal title by King Edward VII. It doesn't really get any more entitled to being called Royal than the fucking King calling it Royal.

Well, it does depend a little on circumstances, and it's not without its consequences. You should generally avoid burning any bridges you don't have to, and it's not just the company's attitude to you that you need to worry about; other employees might remember you as that guy who up and left unexpectedly which made life difficult for everyone. Which can bite you in the arse a year or two down the line when they're a different company you're applying at and might have a say in hiring.

But if the company's treating you badly, or conditions are unnecessarily dangerous? You are justified in just leaving without notice, and such things are a secondary concern. And if things are bad enough, said hypothetical other employee may remember you as the guy who had the sense to just get out ASAP.

No, that is not the worst that can happen by a longshot. The worse things will generally run afoul of workplace bullying laws, but that's small comfort.

Gotta agree there. My nightly routine involves plugging my phone, iPod, iPad and laptop in to charge overnight. If I don't do it nightly, I'll forget about it and one of the above will be out of juice when I'm out and about and need it. And since I'm charging them nightly anyway, I really don't give a damn whether it could theoretically go a week without charging or "only" three days or so.

Tablets were actually like that before - basically laptops with a touchscreen that you could swivel around to use without the keyboard in the way. But they never gained much traction in that form. They cost more than the same laptop sans swivelling touchscreen, and few had that much use for it over and above a standard laptop.

Since the introduction of the current standard format of tablet, there have been a few here and there that try to be a tablet for "real work" from the other direction, by adding a detachable keyboard and things like that. But they've never really taken off either. The reality is that for 95% of people, the tablet is for media consumption and other light tasks, and the PC and/or laptop are for more serious work. One device with the strengths of both but the weaknesses of neither would be nice, but is A) way easier said than done, and B) only considered necessary by a small handful.

There must be other solutions to that particular problem that don't involve setting OS defaults that fuck everyone who has a use case different from "must at all costs keep encrypted home directory secure and inaccessible when not interactively using the computer". There are perfectly good reasons for having that as a priority, but it's not a priority for most.

Also, logging out does not mean "I am no longer using this computer", it means "I am no longer using this computer interactively". As many others have been pointing out, there are many reasons why a user would want processes to continue running while they're not logged in.

The story probably is a fabrication, but it's not implausible. If there's one thing I've learned about humanity in all my years, it's that there is no limit to the stupidity it's capable of.

It's where the principles of Murphy's Law and Schroedinger's Cat intersect - Murphy Schroedinger's Data, if you will.

Data stored in the cloud both exists and doesn't exist simultaneously; if you need the data it got accidentally deleted and there's no way to retrieve it, and if you delete the data because you don't want it seen, it turns out there's another copy and it will be all over the open internet shortly.

That's very good to have, but should not by any means be all you're relying on. Probably wouldn't have helped the guy in this story, given all the other boneheaded things about his setup.

I hear people say that, but I'm not so sure it's true. I've got an 11" MacBook Air, and in spite of the usual light abuse my laptops endure, it shows no signs of warping or deforming and none of the electronics have failed. I've actually had chunkier, more solid laptops fare worse.