Why do journalists get assigned to cover topics they know absolutely nothing about?

That Adele’s album was not streamed has nothing to do with why it is or is not on the top of the charts at Pirate Bay. Not streaming it was never likely to drive that many people to pirate it. This is a false dichotomy anyway (or a double-false dichotomy), and is verging into the territory of “not even wrong.”

First, Adele is not interesting to most of the users of sites like The Pirate Bay. That site and file-sharing sites in general are dominated by 90% fairly misogynist men. Adele is a woman — and a woman who sings emotion-laden songs — so therefore icky.

In other words, her album was never as likely to be pirated as others more interesting to that demographic.

Second, Pirate Bay only shows information from trackers. Nearly all clients these days use DHT, which would not show up on Pirate Bay or any other site. Tracking it by going to Pirate Bay and looking at their charts is like sampling how many fish are in the Pacific Ocean by looking in your bathtub.

Hey, journalistic organizations, I know a lot about a lot of things. Send me money and I’ll make you less stupid.

The reason large-scale resettlement in Europe is a mistake is not that Syrian refugees are dangerous. Rather, it is a mistake because large-scale resettlement will require an equally large-scale commitment of resources that European governments, and European voters, are unwilling to make.

And soon will be completely unable to make, with climate change, declining populations of productive members of society and automation leading to homegrown crises, a decreasing tax base and lowered incomes, respectively.

But that destabilization might be the whole point.

Angela Merkel sure isn’t agreeing to accept a million Syrians for humanitarian reasons and for the good of her country; politicians of her ilk just do not think that way, stupid-ass liberal fairy tales aside.

Hint for the dim: it’s part of the ongoing neoliberal project of eviscerating the welfare state, and for the annihilation of the state talis qualis both as an ideal and an actuality.

What comes around once, comes around again.

Admittedly, it is funny — but it’s been going around on BBSes since the 1980s. I suspect it passed around university labs before that in the 1970s.

I first saw a variant of it around 1986, for reference….

Ben Carson is a good illustration of how extremely intelligent people are often even more clueless and more worthless in areas outside their expertise than the hoi polloi, as they overestimate their competence and knowledge greatly.

I call this “engineeritis” because it is most common in fields like engineering and physics, but is present in every arena where overly-intelligent people cluster.

I think the only way I’d vote for Clinton is if the changed her name to Chillary Clinton, collaborated with Taylor Swift and started dropping some really hot EDM singles.

Better and more constructive than what she’s going to give the world: more war, more right-wing fear and safety-net slashing, more avoiding dealing with climate change.

Come on Chillary, get in the studio. Give the world something worth a damn.

Someone needs to do way more research.

1. The first IBM PC was released in 1981, not 1983.
2. Windows 95 was not (originally) bundled with Internet Explorer.
3. USB was not a replacement for SCSI. It was a replacement for serial and other slow buses. It later evolved.
4. There were really no consumer PCs with built-in or pre-installed NICs in 1995, as back then a NIC was $200+. And he calls them “Ethernet jacks” for some reason, which is something totally different.
5. The article shows a PSone, released in 2000, not 1995.
6. The PlayStation didn’t pioneer disc-based gaming. I think the Sega CD and several others had been out for a few years by that point. Certainly it helped to popularize it more but “pioneer” is completely wrong.

I am sure there are many, many other inaccuracies but those are the ones I noticed right away.

If you’re going to get some clueless fucking millennial intern to research your tech history, make sure they actually do the research.

Or just get someone who lived it. That’ll be easier.

Bridget Malcolm on Instagram.

Can we STOP with the skinny shaming please? I am extremely fit and healthy and am not in the slightest way anorexic. I have worked hard to look like this and am proud of my body.

Yep. Other than some extremes of the (gay male dominated*) fashion industry, most models are healthy, work out a lot and spend a great deal of effort on eating healthily and properly.

Yes, Bridget Malcolm certainly had good genes to look the way she does. But you don’t get a body like that just by good genes. It’s barely a start. Nope, what you do is you spend an assload of time in the gym and also (even more importantly) not stuffing your maw with whatever strikes your fancy.

Like me, she also has naturally long arms and legs for her size which make her look skinnier than she is.**

For all the fat shaming supposedly out there, I (and my girlfriend) often hear and see more skinny shaming in the real world.

Of course, most of the FA movement is just the incoherent spewing of laziness and jealousy. Envy is never pretty, and is especially vitriolic when the envious know that they could do the work to at least approximate a body like Malcolm’s.

*Why gay men prefer starving models is an open question.

**I’m a bit less than two inches taller than my partner, but I have over 5 inches of reach on her.

After Mozilla and Firefox completely dies, I will use it as a case study if I start a business on how to have the best of intentions and plenty of funding and still fail completely.

I can’t think of a better one that is contemporary and where they so deftly seized defeat from the jaws of victory time and time again.

Why are so many liberals endlessly supportive of and accepting of Obamacare’s failures?

It’s designed to funnel money to insurance companies and it’s not even doing that very well, much less helping Americans. It has basically failed at everything it set out to do, other than giving some people pseudo-insurance — i.e., insurance that they can’t afford if they actually have the gall to try and use it.

Is it just that Obama is on their team and they can’t criticize him for anything therefore? Can premiums that rise at twice or three times the rate of inflation and where you must change plans every single year to get a good deal seem like a great end result to anyone?

I just simply do not get it.

I’ve been trying to convince my workplace (slowly and subtly) to adopt a strategy like this.

Cheap and easy to replace. Getting away from enterprise-class hardware that is only such in name and price.

In my experience, “enterprise” hardware means that you just pay much more for much less.