True that. One wonders how the fuck they're still posting at 1... moderators must be taking extra-strength stupid pills today.
Moving the fenceposts, check: several times, ranging from "evidence he would be mistreated" to "who is being detained without charges?" to "nobody wants him" to "but the BBC doesn't dictate our policy" (why the fuck does that matter, when - according to you - the problem is that we don't have any option of where to put this person?)... the blatancy of the bullshit is incredible.
Standard troll tactic of repeating the same line over and over again, check: the whole "GITMO is *bad*... but there's no solutions" refrain while continuously ignoring the solutions people are offering. The failure to read the link is sadly typical, the repeating that little line of bullshit as its arguments are systematically dismantled is just an insult, the kind a five your old losing an argument resorts to.
Then there's the final claim, that "just because the US government is demonstrably mistreating people all the time, constantly, and has been doing so for over a decade... well, that's no reason to believe it would mistreat somebody is has already denied the presumption of innocence to!"
Always have redress in court... unless they assassinate you (by drone or other tool), or throw you in an overseas prison without access to a lawyer (hey, you just admitted that the government doesn't always grant its people their constitutional rights), or any of a number of other ways they have of making you go away. As for presumption of innocence, that's the second most blatant bullshit in your post (after "*always* have redress"); the government has acted from day one under the assumption that he's guilty. How the hell do you expect him to get a fair trial in those circumstances?
Oh, and as for the "way too many people watching" argument, did you miss the part where this whole thing started because of the government "trying something" and telling the only people in a position to catch them at it that it was illegal to say anything? How the hell are we going to know if the government "tries anything" unless somebody else blows the whistle on it? It's not like they'll do it in public... and if I were Snowden, I sure as fuck wouldn't trust somebody else to become a whistleblower on my behalf having just witnessed the way to government is treating whistleblowers these days. Nope, the only thing we know is that a very substantial part of the administration has already said that they consider him guilty, and the NSA has every reason to see him discredited and removed, and they routinely operate without proper oversight and have all the tools they need to see somebody found guilty. Hell, the fact that they were doing that (quite thoroughly without due process) is part of what led to Snowden's whistleblowing in the first place! You really think they'd keep their hands out of it, this time?
What, various politicians calling for his head, literally, isn't enough? Somewhat more commonly, lots of politicians calling for Snowden (as an example) to be charged with capital crimes that literally *cannot* apply as written (treason, mostly) to this situation? Claiming outright that he probably has committed treason (despite the letter of the law unambiguously making this impossible in his case) without even the slightest example of the presumption of innocence that is a core part of our (civilian, as Snowden is) legal process?
Or how about we take the really, really obvious case: Who was hurt worst by Snowden's revelations? The NSA What do we know the NSA has been doing that violates due process? "Parallel construction" for their law enforcement buddies, intercepting client-attorney privileged communications, unconstitutional searches, and more.
Are you seriously suggesting there's even a slightly plausible case that the organization whose unconstitutional acts Snowden has spent the last year exposing, and which has substantial pull with law enforcement, would allow him a fair trial? Whatever the fuck you're smoking, put it down. Nobody with a working brain and even a basic knowledge of the stuff Snowden has been revealing could be that naïve...
Reducto ad absurdum: you believe that prohibiting the populace from private possession of fusion bombs is unreasonable? I mean, it's an "arm", as much covered by "the right to bear arms" as a cavalry sabre. It's pretty hard to justify the ownership of such a thing by any random yahoo "a well-regulated militia" but you seem to be completely ignoring that part of the 2nd anyhow...
As the song says, though, there's a place in the world for the angry young man... and some people never outgrow it. We need more of those people. Yeah, a lot of people's lives don't leave much time for activism, but then, it doesn't take much time either. Hell, as a singer, Billy Joel ought to know that; an awful lot of music, some of it very successful, has been explicitly political in nature. People discuss politics all the time. It's not that much harder to go beyond merely talking about it to taking a stand on it, even if just in those discussions. Hell, a lot of people *do* take stands. Unfortunately, most of them simply seem to stand on some party line and parrot their favorite talking heads' bullet points. Real thought, well informed and independent of partisan viewpoints, apparently *is* hard to come by in the world at large, and (as Joel again hints in Angry Young Man) most people seem to find it "boring as hell".
As for life going on, tell that to the people in Vietnam (residents or American soldiers). Tell that to the people who lived under the Taliban. Tell that to the German Jews circa 1940. Tell that to... you get the idea. Middle-class American life may go on (although it also may not; tell that to the people who lost their jobs, whose homes were foreclosed on, when the recession hit...) but the world is bigger than that. Besides, short of an extinction level event, "life" may go on... but that doesn't mean it'll be good living. Life went on in the Dark Ages too. We need higher standards than "life went on"!
Because those making the leaks need to flee the country and take asylum elsewhere, or end up imprisoned for years.
It's not about the presence of the leaks, it's about the way that the government has persecuted the leakers, and the members of the press they went to.
Excuse me? A secret that never leaves my computer, at least not in any plaintext form (encrypt your private keys before exporting them, people!), is *way* more secure than a secret I need to provide over the Internet (even in an encrypted channel) and that the host I'm connecting to needs to store (even in a non-reversibly-encrypted form). If you don't think so, then there is something *very* wrong with the security of your box...
The way we do passwords now, even if you don't re-use the password, a single compromised host gives the attacker enough information to begin attempting to determine the login credentials of every single user on the site (and in many cases, those same credentials can be used on other sites too). Additionally, attacks can be made much faster using common password dictionaries and so on. In the case of a public-key system, all that the attacker would get is the public keys of every user on the site, but without the corresponding private keys - which they will never obtain from the compromised server, because the client never exposes them to the network - they can't obtain any user's login credentials. True, in the case of persistent malware on the server an attacker could hijack a user's session after login, but they would be unable to prevent the user from logging out or to log in again afterward, and they would be unable to try re-using credentials on other sites the user may have accounts on.
In fact, using public-key crypto is almost strictly as secure, or more so, than passwords. Sure, an attacker who targets a specific user's machine could potentially steal their secret key when the user unlocks it to log into a site, or steal it in its at-rest form (hopefully, encrypted with a password) and start brute-forcing that encryption. However, such an attacker could also have stolen a user's password database, or keylogged their password as they typed it into a site. If you just want to attack a single user, and you have the ability to compromise one of their hosts, it doesn't matter which system they use. However, if you can only attack a server (as is usually the case), public-key systems are way safer for the users.
The problem, of course, is how the user moves their secret key(s) from client to client. These days, almost everybody uses a number of different clients (your PCs, your workstations, your phone and/or tablet, your friends' phones, the library's PC, whatever) to access secured resources. There are a number of possible ways to transfer the private key(s) between all those things, but each has downsides. Oh, and the little problem of there not being any standard way (other than TLS client certs, which are not widely supported and arguably not the correct tool here) to use public keys to authenticate with a site right now, so something would need to be standardized and then implemented widely before it would be useful.
I mean, yeah, the US system is absurdly litigation-happy, but refusing to participate in it just gets you run over by it, and that seems to be what happened here.
You don't actually need to file the lawsuit, most likely - just point out that you told them this was coming, and they refused to do anything about it, and that you now hold documentation showing that you were terminated for something that was demonstrably not your fault (your boss's fault, in fact, though that's not necessarily something you need to bring up). Consult a lawyer about it beforehand, if you want, but it sure sounds like a cut-and-dried case of wrongful termination. Demand severance, not "for cause", vesting of remaining stock options, etc. in exchange for making their little screw-up go away, then go find a better job while living on the proceeds.
The wonderful thing is, this works even in at-will states. They could let you go with basically no justification at all (just as you could walk out the door at any time), but they can't fire you *for cause* when that cause is demonstrably untrue, or they put themselves on the hook to keep paying your salary for a long, long time.
... why did you sue for wrongful termination? I mean, if you had email evidence (as the AC's post indicates) you'd probably have been fine. Nice big severance, etc.
User "Todd Knarr" posted numbers above. Apparently you're no only too lazy to do your own research, you're also too biased to believe numbers given to you...
To expand on those numbers (there's a bit of a fudge factor because the timelines don't line up. Deal with it): Tesla Model S cars in the USA and Canada: about 17200, as of Sep 2013 (source: http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2...) Tesla Model S fires in the USA and Canada: 4, ever (new enough model that we'll say "per year" if you want). Tesla Model S fires per year (percentage): about 0.023%
I'm not condemning Facebook for offering these options, but remember that gender is one of the things that Facebook's targeted advertising leans on pretty heavily. Well, now they have a *lot* more ability to target certain audiences. Sure, the genderqueer (to use the closest thing to a catch-all term that I'm aware of) community is small compared to the overall population, but that also means that it's probably largely unreached by traditional targeted advertising.
Never forget: you may be Facebook's users, but you are not their customers. You[r eyes] are the content they sell to their real customers, the advertisers. The more info the advertisers have for targeted advertising, the more their ad impressions are worth. To Facebook, that's surely worth adding a few extra terms for gender identity...
Yep! For example, in some Polynesian cultures, it's traditional to sometimes raise children of apparent male anatomy as daughters. As adults, they are often (assuming they don't choose to identify completely male or female, optionally with gender reassignment surgery or so forth) culturally treated not quite the same as either women or men. I'm not sure how they are treated as children; I only met adults and didn't ask.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... (the Tongan version; other Polynesian cultures seem to have different words for it). Even after Christian missionaries largely destroyed the traditional Polynesian cultures, a number of aspects of family and child-raising (many of which the missionaries did *not* approve of) endured.
Well, they don't include *ultra*-low-end phones. WP7 would run on 1GHz single-core w/ 256MB of RAM, but it's dying. WP8 requires 1GHz dual-core w/ 512MB RAM, which is still damn cheap these days. The Lumia 520 has done well, and can be had for about $50 if you know where to look (though its MSRP is rather higher).
With that said, yeah, you won't find a $35-at-typical-retail-price WP8 device right now.
They already did the first part. The dev tools are free. You can do "developer registration" (enable sideloading on a phone) with any Microsoft (Live/Hotmail/Passport/whatever) account, even one that isn't tied to a Marketplace account. This has been the case since some time in 2013...
They have protections against pirating apps (the downloads from the store are DRM-encrypted and can't be sideloaded) and have also restricted the number of sideloaded apps you can have at a time (actually, that restriction was always there; it's just lower for free accounts than for paid ones) as well.
I suspect their motivation is exactly what you describe. If it's working, though, it is taking some time to do so. Part of the problem is that nobody seems to care. I submitted a story about it to/. back when they made the change, it was rejected. None of the big tech news sites said much about it either...
Because you want a battery that lasts more than a day? Because you like the integration with Microsoft services like Skype (and third parties like Facebook)? Because, hardware-for-hardware, they are cheaper than Android devices (yes, really, as of a few months ago when I checked; AOSP may be free but what most people call "Android" isn't)?
Just like running native Windows code requires an NT kernel? Syscall translation is entirely possible. Heck, even the NT kernel doesn't "natively" run Win32 code; it gets translated into NT syscalls first. It's not only possible to write a "reverse Wine" for Linux programs, it's even been done (or at least started before!
http://lbw.sourceforge.net/ (Effectively dead now, with the POSIX subsystem being discontinued, but it could be revived if MS gave a damn).
Yeah... against a backdrop of 505 million years, 0.1 million years is 0.002% difference in the time scale. That's potentially significant for a handful of species, sure, but it's less time than modern humans have existed... which makes it a nearly-trivial eye-blink in evolutionary history. Not completely trivial, though, especially if the environment at the time was driving fairly rapid adaptation.
Bullshit. There are plenty of species that breed fast enough, in large enough numbers, that we can observe huge numbers of generations of them in a controlled environment. Typically insects are used, simply because they are easier to observe than bacteria, but we actually observe it in bacteria *all the time* in the wild; drug-resistant strains, or new variants of things like bird flu, or so on. It's also been observed in the lab, though; take a colony of insects (like fruit flies), separate them, apply an environmental pressure that selects for different traits, wait, observe adaptations. Eventually the adaptations lead to new, non-interfertile species.
It's those final points - the arising of adaptations and their spread throughout the population, and the speciation - that are the directly testable aspects of evolution by natural selection. There are others, of course; things like the ability to predict the presence of species bearing particular characteristics at certain chronological points in the fossil record (which we have later found), the presence of vestigial organs which are no longer used or needed but were in evolutionary ancestors, the parallel nature of the morphological classification trees (classifying life based on observable characteristics) and genetic classification trees (based on DNA), which was predicted, and found to be true, even when the species would have needed to diverge hundreds of millennia ago... So many things.
I think your problem is that you don't understand what a prediction means in this case. Genetic modifications to produce specific changes has nothing to do with evolution. That's just testing genetic theory in general, which nobody seems to have any problem with. Evolution doesn't predict the specific random mutation that will occur, and nobody who knows anything about it would suggest it does. In fact, the random nature of evolution by natural selection means that two different populations, both subjected to the same environmental stress, may adapt *differently* to it. This is observable even in human populations (which are only a few hundred thousands of years old), where different groups of humans that adapted to high-altitude environments (low oxygen) did so in different ways.
What the "theory of evolution by natural selection" predicts is that there *will* be mutations (directly observable and tested), that a mutation (not *the best mutation" because all it needs to be is good enough to increase the chance of successful reproduction) which better adapts the organism to the environment will become widespread within a population (also directly observed in the lab), that this process will continue over time as environments change and new, superior adaptations occur in the usual course of random mutation (observable from the fossil record, with predictions about what will be found in the "holes" in the fossil record also found to be accurate), and that over time this leads to speciation (also observed in the lab).
It is in every way a scientific theory, and one that has had its predictions tested and verified time and again. Comparing it to an Earth-centric universe model just further shows that you don't understand science at all; there was plenty of evidence which didn't fit that model, and the predictions that would have arisen from it (for example, that "anything which orbits the earth at different speeds, such as the sun and the planet Venus do, must at some point in their orbits come to be on opposite sides of the Earth") are easily observed, even with the instruments of the day, to be false. No scientist actually concerned with accuracy, rather than the importance of appearing to be accurate, would have seriously defended such a theory. In fact, this is much the same situation as concerns creationism today; people want to believe that they're important and special, and they have an old book that tells them so, and they therefore oppose anything which appears to conflict with the aforementioned book for the sake of upholding the appearance that the book is right (and therefore that they are right about their superiority in the other ways the book mentions) rather than concerning themselves with any form of scientific evidence.
It's also already been falsified; artificially created environmental pressure on fast-breeding insect populations created divergent species that could no longer interbreed. To the extent that you can claim "alternatives" to evolution make testable predictions, those predictions have been tested and found false.
This is the standard hypocritical bullshit that the copyright cartels try to push. They want copyrighted materials to be treated as a purchase, when it comes to their own obligations, but they want it to be treated as a license contract when it comes to your rights. So they get to "sell" you "products" (after which they have minimal responsibility for ensuring that the product continues to work, etc.), but they can revoke or modify your "license" and they restrict how you use it (including prohibition on resale/gifting, which is normally allowed under the doctrine of first sale). They're trying to take the must consumer-unfriendly (not "customer-unfriendly" because customers actually get to *buy* things) of both property law and contract law, while ignoring the obligations or limitations of either.
Except no, you're full of shit, compromise doesn't have to happen. Humble Bundle games are sold DRM-free. Good Old Games sells all their games DRM-free, including ones that had DRM at initial release and even ones that are brand new, concurrently under sale through other vendors, and are DRMed there. Both of them allow unlimited re-downloading. There are other
Friends lists and audio chat and such have nothing to do with Steam. There's nothing very special about Steam's implementation of those features, either; I've been using online game services, with friends lists that tell me who is in what game and server lists and all that jazz, since the mid-90s. None of them required any DRM, either...
Steam doesn't allow re-sale, and it doesn't allow gifting. It doesn't allow sharing games (sharing *accounts* is not the same thing; even other DRM systems let me play X while my roommate plays Y even if we only have one copy of each between us). When (not if; it has happened multiple times) Steam servers go down, the games stop working. Steam can, at any time, modify or prohibit your access to their service and to the games you have "purchased". Steam can (and has before) modify their "license agreement" for the service - which of course means for all games running on it, as well - and there's fuck-all you can do about it except walk away and lose all your "investment".
There are a *few* interface changes I'd like to see. The way that accidental moderations can't be corrected is stupid. The current default (AJAX) mode forces you to preview your post before submitting (which is great!) but applies moderation immediately on the "onmodified' event of the drop-down, without any ability to change it if the wrong thing got selected (which is stupid). A way to require that people confirm a moderation, or a way to change or undo a moderation (hell, even if it costs an extra mod point, though then you're just being silly) immediately after making it... those would be REALLY GOOD interface changes.
Another one I'd like to see is, if I post in a thread, remove all the moderation drop-downs immediately (don't force me to manually refresh the page to get rid of them). Similarly, replace all "Reply"-type links/buttons with something like "Reply to this (will undo <N> moderations in this thread)" or similar, so I don't spend a bunch of time writing a response on a thread I'd forgotten I moderated on, only to discover *afterward* that I have a decision to make. These changes would not only be handy, they're *really* simple. As in, I could probably write a bookmarklet to implement that. It's not a complicated piece of JavaScript that I'm asking for.
With that said, I completely agree that Unicode support is long-overdue.
Not in Finland! Beers seem to run about 7-9 Euro here, which is to say you might get about 12 beers out of it... that's more than I drink in a month but some than less of my colleagues drink in a weekend.
Neither is an "emulator" in any proper sense either, of course, but yes, NT (since NT 3.1 back in the 90s) has implemented Win32 as a "subsystem" on top of the NT system call API that is used by the kernel. NT actually has a number of such subsystems, including NTVDM (DOS/Win16), OS/2 (discontinued), and even POSIX (discontinued as of Win8.1 but still usable on XP/Vista/Win7/Win8 and related server versions). Unfortunately, the POSIX subsystem was not ABI compatible with Linux (nor fully API compatible, for that matter, as Linux has expanded considerably beyond the POSIX specification that the subsystem was written to) so you had to re-compile your programs (build tools, along with shells and utilities, are available as a free download from MS).
Very, very few programs ever try to make a system call directly in Windows. They call through a couple different layers first. You *can* invoke system calls directly, if you reference the kernel header files and link against the right libraries (or load them at runtime), but it's discouraged for a number of reasons, including forward compatibility (unlike the Win32 API, the NT API frequently contains breaking changes between versions). Nonetheless, it's interesting to compare (for example) the NtCreateFile (NT syscall) and CreateFile (Win32 "syscall") APIs. The NT ones are often far more complex, because they are intended to support the behavior of system calls from other platforms as well. The Win32 subsystem transparently wraps the NT APIs for user-mode programs.
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True that. One wonders how the fuck they're still posting at 1... moderators must be taking extra-strength stupid pills today.
Moving the fenceposts, check: several times, ranging from "evidence he would be mistreated" to "who is being detained without charges?" to "nobody wants him" to "but the BBC doesn't dictate our policy" (why the fuck does that matter, when - according to you - the problem is that we don't have any option of where to put this person?)... the blatancy of the bullshit is incredible.
Standard troll tactic of repeating the same line over and over again, check: the whole "GITMO is *bad* ... but there's no solutions" refrain while continuously ignoring the solutions people are offering. The failure to read the link is sadly typical, the repeating that little line of bullshit as its arguments are systematically dismantled is just an insult, the kind a five your old losing an argument resorts to.
Then there's the final claim, that "just because the US government is demonstrably mistreating people all the time, constantly, and has been doing so for over a decade... well, that's no reason to believe it would mistreat somebody is has already denied the presumption of innocence to!"
Always have redress in court... unless they assassinate you (by drone or other tool), or throw you in an overseas prison without access to a lawyer (hey, you just admitted that the government doesn't always grant its people their constitutional rights), or any of a number of other ways they have of making you go away. As for presumption of innocence, that's the second most blatant bullshit in your post (after "*always* have redress"); the government has acted from day one under the assumption that he's guilty. How the hell do you expect him to get a fair trial in those circumstances?
Oh, and as for the "way too many people watching" argument, did you miss the part where this whole thing started because of the government "trying something" and telling the only people in a position to catch them at it that it was illegal to say anything? How the hell are we going to know if the government "tries anything" unless somebody else blows the whistle on it? It's not like they'll do it in public... and if I were Snowden, I sure as fuck wouldn't trust somebody else to become a whistleblower on my behalf having just witnessed the way to government is treating whistleblowers these days. Nope, the only thing we know is that a very substantial part of the administration has already said that they consider him guilty, and the NSA has every reason to see him discredited and removed, and they routinely operate without proper oversight and have all the tools they need to see somebody found guilty. Hell, the fact that they were doing that (quite thoroughly without due process) is part of what led to Snowden's whistleblowing in the first place! You really think they'd keep their hands out of it, this time?
What, various politicians calling for his head, literally, isn't enough? Somewhat more commonly, lots of politicians calling for Snowden (as an example) to be charged with capital crimes that literally *cannot* apply as written (treason, mostly) to this situation? Claiming outright that he probably has committed treason (despite the letter of the law unambiguously making this impossible in his case) without even the slightest example of the presumption of innocence that is a core part of our (civilian, as Snowden is) legal process?
Or how about we take the really, really obvious case:
Who was hurt worst by Snowden's revelations? The NSA
What do we know the NSA has been doing that violates due process? "Parallel construction" for their law enforcement buddies, intercepting client-attorney privileged communications, unconstitutional searches, and more.
Are you seriously suggesting there's even a slightly plausible case that the organization whose unconstitutional acts Snowden has spent the last year exposing, and which has substantial pull with law enforcement, would allow him a fair trial? Whatever the fuck you're smoking, put it down. Nobody with a working brain and even a basic knowledge of the stuff Snowden has been revealing could be that naïve...
Reducto ad absurdum: you believe that prohibiting the populace from private possession of fusion bombs is unreasonable? I mean, it's an "arm", as much covered by "the right to bear arms" as a cavalry sabre. It's pretty hard to justify the ownership of such a thing by any random yahoo "a well-regulated militia" but you seem to be completely ignoring that part of the 2nd anyhow...
As the song says, though, there's a place in the world for the angry young man... and some people never outgrow it. We need more of those people. Yeah, a lot of people's lives don't leave much time for activism, but then, it doesn't take much time either. Hell, as a singer, Billy Joel ought to know that; an awful lot of music, some of it very successful, has been explicitly political in nature. People discuss politics all the time. It's not that much harder to go beyond merely talking about it to taking a stand on it, even if just in those discussions. Hell, a lot of people *do* take stands. Unfortunately, most of them simply seem to stand on some party line and parrot their favorite talking heads' bullet points. Real thought, well informed and independent of partisan viewpoints, apparently *is* hard to come by in the world at large, and (as Joel again hints in Angry Young Man) most people seem to find it "boring as hell".
As for life going on, tell that to the people in Vietnam (residents or American soldiers). Tell that to the people who lived under the Taliban. Tell that to the German Jews circa 1940. Tell that to... you get the idea. Middle-class American life may go on (although it also may not; tell that to the people who lost their jobs, whose homes were foreclosed on, when the recession hit...) but the world is bigger than that. Besides, short of an extinction level event, "life" may go on... but that doesn't mean it'll be good living. Life went on in the Dark Ages too. We need higher standards than "life went on"!
Because those making the leaks need to flee the country and take asylum elsewhere, or end up imprisoned for years.
It's not about the presence of the leaks, it's about the way that the government has persecuted the leakers, and the members of the press they went to.
Excuse me? A secret that never leaves my computer, at least not in any plaintext form (encrypt your private keys before exporting them, people!), is *way* more secure than a secret I need to provide over the Internet (even in an encrypted channel) and that the host I'm connecting to needs to store (even in a non-reversibly-encrypted form). If you don't think so, then there is something *very* wrong with the security of your box...
The way we do passwords now, even if you don't re-use the password, a single compromised host gives the attacker enough information to begin attempting to determine the login credentials of every single user on the site (and in many cases, those same credentials can be used on other sites too). Additionally, attacks can be made much faster using common password dictionaries and so on. In the case of a public-key system, all that the attacker would get is the public keys of every user on the site, but without the corresponding private keys - which they will never obtain from the compromised server, because the client never exposes them to the network - they can't obtain any user's login credentials. True, in the case of persistent malware on the server an attacker could hijack a user's session after login, but they would be unable to prevent the user from logging out or to log in again afterward, and they would be unable to try re-using credentials on other sites the user may have accounts on.
In fact, using public-key crypto is almost strictly as secure, or more so, than passwords. Sure, an attacker who targets a specific user's machine could potentially steal their secret key when the user unlocks it to log into a site, or steal it in its at-rest form (hopefully, encrypted with a password) and start brute-forcing that encryption. However, such an attacker could also have stolen a user's password database, or keylogged their password as they typed it into a site. If you just want to attack a single user, and you have the ability to compromise one of their hosts, it doesn't matter which system they use. However, if you can only attack a server (as is usually the case), public-key systems are way safer for the users.
The problem, of course, is how the user moves their secret key(s) from client to client. These days, almost everybody uses a number of different clients (your PCs, your workstations, your phone and/or tablet, your friends' phones, the library's PC, whatever) to access secured resources. There are a number of possible ways to transfer the private key(s) between all those things, but each has downsides. Oh, and the little problem of there not being any standard way (other than TLS client certs, which are not widely supported and arguably not the correct tool here) to use public keys to authenticate with a site right now, so something would need to be standardized and then implemented widely before it would be useful.
Bleh... *why didn't you sue*
I mean, yeah, the US system is absurdly litigation-happy, but refusing to participate in it just gets you run over by it, and that seems to be what happened here.
You don't actually need to file the lawsuit, most likely - just point out that you told them this was coming, and they refused to do anything about it, and that you now hold documentation showing that you were terminated for something that was demonstrably not your fault (your boss's fault, in fact, though that's not necessarily something you need to bring up). Consult a lawyer about it beforehand, if you want, but it sure sounds like a cut-and-dried case of wrongful termination. Demand severance, not "for cause", vesting of remaining stock options, etc. in exchange for making their little screw-up go away, then go find a better job while living on the proceeds.
The wonderful thing is, this works even in at-will states. They could let you go with basically no justification at all (just as you could walk out the door at any time), but they can't fire you *for cause* when that cause is demonstrably untrue, or they put themselves on the hook to keep paying your salary for a long, long time.
... why did you sue for wrongful termination? I mean, if you had email evidence (as the AC's post indicates) you'd probably have been fine. Nice big severance, etc.
User "Todd Knarr" posted numbers above. Apparently you're no only too lazy to do your own research, you're also too biased to believe numbers given to you...
To expand on those numbers (there's a bit of a fudge factor because the timelines don't line up. Deal with it):
Tesla Model S cars in the USA and Canada: about 17200, as of Sep 2013 (source: http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2...)
Tesla Model S fires in the USA and Canada: 4, ever (new enough model that we'll say "per year" if you want).
Tesla Model S fires per year (percentage): about 0.023%
Personal cars in the USA in 2007: about 254,400,000 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... citing http://www.bts.gov/publication...)
Vehicle fires in the USA in 2007: about 258,000 (sources: http://www.chandlerlawgroup.co..., http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downl...)
Total car fires per year (percentage): about 0.101%
Ratio of Tesla Model S fires per Model S to all car fires per total cars: about 4.4 to 1
Have yourself a nice big helping of crow, you intellectually dishonest piece of shit.
I'm not condemning Facebook for offering these options, but remember that gender is one of the things that Facebook's targeted advertising leans on pretty heavily. Well, now they have a *lot* more ability to target certain audiences. Sure, the genderqueer (to use the closest thing to a catch-all term that I'm aware of) community is small compared to the overall population, but that also means that it's probably largely unreached by traditional targeted advertising.
Never forget: you may be Facebook's users, but you are not their customers. You[r eyes] are the content they sell to their real customers, the advertisers. The more info the advertisers have for targeted advertising, the more their ad impressions are worth. To Facebook, that's surely worth adding a few extra terms for gender identity...
Yep! For example, in some Polynesian cultures, it's traditional to sometimes raise children of apparent male anatomy as daughters. As adults, they are often (assuming they don't choose to identify completely male or female, optionally with gender reassignment surgery or so forth) culturally treated not quite the same as either women or men. I'm not sure how they are treated as children; I only met adults and didn't ask.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... (the Tongan version; other Polynesian cultures seem to have different words for it). Even after Christian missionaries largely destroyed the traditional Polynesian cultures, a number of aspects of family and child-raising (many of which the missionaries did *not* approve of) endured.
Well, they don't include *ultra*-low-end phones. WP7 would run on 1GHz single-core w/ 256MB of RAM, but it's dying. WP8 requires 1GHz dual-core w/ 512MB RAM, which is still damn cheap these days. The Lumia 520 has done well, and can be had for about $50 if you know where to look (though its MSRP is rather higher).
With that said, yeah, you won't find a $35-at-typical-retail-price WP8 device right now.
They already did the first part. The dev tools are free. You can do "developer registration" (enable sideloading on a phone) with any Microsoft (Live/Hotmail/Passport/whatever) account, even one that isn't tied to a Marketplace account. This has been the case since some time in 2013...
They have protections against pirating apps (the downloads from the store are DRM-encrypted and can't be sideloaded) and have also restricted the number of sideloaded apps you can have at a time (actually, that restriction was always there; it's just lower for free accounts than for paid ones) as well.
I suspect their motivation is exactly what you describe. If it's working, though, it is taking some time to do so. Part of the problem is that nobody seems to care. I submitted a story about it to /. back when they made the change, it was rejected. None of the big tech news sites said much about it either...
Because you want a battery that lasts more than a day? Because you like the integration with Microsoft services like Skype (and third parties like Facebook)? Because, hardware-for-hardware, they are cheaper than Android devices (yes, really, as of a few months ago when I checked; AOSP may be free but what most people call "Android" isn't)?
Just like running native Windows code requires an NT kernel? Syscall translation is entirely possible. Heck, even the NT kernel doesn't "natively" run Win32 code; it gets translated into NT syscalls first. It's not only possible to write a "reverse Wine" for Linux programs, it's even been done (or at least started before!
http://lbw.sourceforge.net/ (Effectively dead now, with the POSIX subsystem being discontinued, but it could be revived if MS gave a damn).
Yeah... against a backdrop of 505 million years, 0.1 million years is 0.002% difference in the time scale. That's potentially significant for a handful of species, sure, but it's less time than modern humans have existed... which makes it a nearly-trivial eye-blink in evolutionary history. Not completely trivial, though, especially if the environment at the time was driving fairly rapid adaptation.
Bullshit. There are plenty of species that breed fast enough, in large enough numbers, that we can observe huge numbers of generations of them in a controlled environment. Typically insects are used, simply because they are easier to observe than bacteria, but we actually observe it in bacteria *all the time* in the wild; drug-resistant strains, or new variants of things like bird flu, or so on. It's also been observed in the lab, though; take a colony of insects (like fruit flies), separate them, apply an environmental pressure that selects for different traits, wait, observe adaptations. Eventually the adaptations lead to new, non-interfertile species.
It's those final points - the arising of adaptations and their spread throughout the population, and the speciation - that are the directly testable aspects of evolution by natural selection. There are others, of course; things like the ability to predict the presence of species bearing particular characteristics at certain chronological points in the fossil record (which we have later found), the presence of vestigial organs which are no longer used or needed but were in evolutionary ancestors, the parallel nature of the morphological classification trees (classifying life based on observable characteristics) and genetic classification trees (based on DNA), which was predicted, and found to be true, even when the species would have needed to diverge hundreds of millennia ago... So many things.
I think your problem is that you don't understand what a prediction means in this case. Genetic modifications to produce specific changes has nothing to do with evolution. That's just testing genetic theory in general, which nobody seems to have any problem with. Evolution doesn't predict the specific random mutation that will occur, and nobody who knows anything about it would suggest it does. In fact, the random nature of evolution by natural selection means that two different populations, both subjected to the same environmental stress, may adapt *differently* to it. This is observable even in human populations (which are only a few hundred thousands of years old), where different groups of humans that adapted to high-altitude environments (low oxygen) did so in different ways.
What the "theory of evolution by natural selection" predicts is that there *will* be mutations (directly observable and tested), that a mutation (not *the best mutation" because all it needs to be is good enough to increase the chance of successful reproduction) which better adapts the organism to the environment will become widespread within a population (also directly observed in the lab), that this process will continue over time as environments change and new, superior adaptations occur in the usual course of random mutation (observable from the fossil record, with predictions about what will be found in the "holes" in the fossil record also found to be accurate), and that over time this leads to speciation (also observed in the lab).
It is in every way a scientific theory, and one that has had its predictions tested and verified time and again. Comparing it to an Earth-centric universe model just further shows that you don't understand science at all; there was plenty of evidence which didn't fit that model, and the predictions that would have arisen from it (for example, that "anything which orbits the earth at different speeds, such as the sun and the planet Venus do, must at some point in their orbits come to be on opposite sides of the Earth") are easily observed, even with the instruments of the day, to be false. No scientist actually concerned with accuracy, rather than the importance of appearing to be accurate, would have seriously defended such a theory. In fact, this is much the same situation as concerns creationism today; people want to believe that they're important and special, and they have an old book that tells them so, and they therefore oppose anything which appears to conflict with the aforementioned book for the sake of upholding the appearance that the book is right (and therefore that they are right about their superiority in the other ways the book mentions) rather than concerning themselves with any form of scientific evidence.
It's also already been falsified; artificially created environmental pressure on fast-breeding insect populations created divergent species that could no longer interbreed. To the extent that you can claim "alternatives" to evolution make testable predictions, those predictions have been tested and found false.
This is the standard hypocritical bullshit that the copyright cartels try to push. They want copyrighted materials to be treated as a purchase, when it comes to their own obligations, but they want it to be treated as a license contract when it comes to your rights. So they get to "sell" you "products" (after which they have minimal responsibility for ensuring that the product continues to work, etc.), but they can revoke or modify your "license" and they restrict how you use it (including prohibition on resale/gifting, which is normally allowed under the doctrine of first sale). They're trying to take the must consumer-unfriendly (not "customer-unfriendly" because customers actually get to *buy* things) of both property law and contract law, while ignoring the obligations or limitations of either.
Except no, you're full of shit, compromise doesn't have to happen. Humble Bundle games are sold DRM-free. Good Old Games sells all their games DRM-free, including ones that had DRM at initial release and even ones that are brand new, concurrently under sale through other vendors, and are DRMed there. Both of them allow unlimited re-downloading. There are other
Friends lists and audio chat and such have nothing to do with Steam. There's nothing very special about Steam's implementation of those features, either; I've been using online game services, with friends lists that tell me who is in what game and server lists and all that jazz, since the mid-90s. None of them required any DRM, either...
Steam doesn't allow re-sale, and it doesn't allow gifting. It doesn't allow sharing games (sharing *accounts* is not the same thing; even other DRM systems let me play X while my roommate plays Y even if we only have one copy of each between us). When (not if; it has happened multiple times) Steam servers go down, the games stop working. Steam can, at any time, modify or prohibit your access to their service and to the games you have "purchased". Steam can (and has before) modify their "license agreement" for the service - which of course means for all games running on it, as well - and there's fuck-all you can do about it except walk away and lose all your "investment".
SRM is shit. Steam is DRM. Steam is shit. QED.
There are a *few* interface changes I'd like to see. The way that accidental moderations can't be corrected is stupid. The current default (AJAX) mode forces you to preview your post before submitting (which is great!) but applies moderation immediately on the "onmodified' event of the drop-down, without any ability to change it if the wrong thing got selected (which is stupid). A way to require that people confirm a moderation, or a way to change or undo a moderation (hell, even if it costs an extra mod point, though then you're just being silly) immediately after making it... those would be REALLY GOOD interface changes.
Another one I'd like to see is, if I post in a thread, remove all the moderation drop-downs immediately (don't force me to manually refresh the page to get rid of them). Similarly, replace all "Reply"-type links/buttons with something like "Reply to this (will undo <N> moderations in this thread)" or similar, so I don't spend a bunch of time writing a response on a thread I'd forgotten I moderated on, only to discover *afterward* that I have a decision to make. These changes would not only be handy, they're *really* simple. As in, I could probably write a bookmarklet to implement that. It's not a complicated piece of JavaScript that I'm asking for.
With that said, I completely agree that Unicode support is long-overdue.
Not in Finland! Beers seem to run about 7-9 Euro here, which is to say you might get about 12 beers out of it... that's more than I drink in a month but some than less of my colleagues drink in a weekend.
Eh? FreeBSD has official (binary) NVidia drivers, at the very least...
Neither is an "emulator" in any proper sense either, of course, but yes, NT (since NT 3.1 back in the 90s) has implemented Win32 as a "subsystem" on top of the NT system call API that is used by the kernel. NT actually has a number of such subsystems, including NTVDM (DOS/Win16), OS/2 (discontinued), and even POSIX (discontinued as of Win8.1 but still usable on XP/Vista/Win7/Win8 and related server versions). Unfortunately, the POSIX subsystem was not ABI compatible with Linux (nor fully API compatible, for that matter, as Linux has expanded considerably beyond the POSIX specification that the subsystem was written to) so you had to re-compile your programs (build tools, along with shells and utilities, are available as a free download from MS).
Very, very few programs ever try to make a system call directly in Windows. They call through a couple different layers first. You *can* invoke system calls directly, if you reference the kernel header files and link against the right libraries (or load them at runtime), but it's discouraged for a number of reasons, including forward compatibility (unlike the Win32 API, the NT API frequently contains breaking changes between versions). Nonetheless, it's interesting to compare (for example) the NtCreateFile (NT syscall) and CreateFile (Win32 "syscall") APIs. The NT ones are often far more complex, because they are intended to support the behavior of system calls from other platforms as well. The Win32 subsystem transparently wraps the NT APIs for user-mode programs.