I believe this is called "being mechanically minded". If you understand the physical rules and the components, you understand the inner workings. Good mechanics have this. Bad mechanics don't. Sadly being an auto mechanic pays little, but the skills are obvious in good programmers too.

Lots of Intel apologists in this thread. I for one am excited by the idea of healthy competition in the processor market.

So the register says it's a hoax because their chip contacts won't confirm it. However, those chip contacts are probably a little grouchy about the last coordinated boondoggle, so I doubt they would admit to or deny anything at this time.

I'd be more inclined to believe 'hoax' if that's what the chip contacts said. But a 'refuse to confirm'? No telling.

Right, wouldn't an embargo prevent them from disclosing the existence of any such bug to the media?

Ah neopets.... your character limits forced me to ditch frontpage and actually learn how to make html with notepad.

ecommerce retailers would peer with them directly and the entertainment networks would then be left holding nothing.

Facebook is notorious for making those connections impossible when they are truly needed most. It's a marketing tool with aggressive filtering, not a family message board.

Agreed. I wish that I could get my family and close friends to join a Mattermost server I host, but so far, FB has a stranglehold on everyone it seems.

XMPP had federation. Sadly it didn't last long at the big providers.

Unfortunately, it's both. Wal-Mart is a good comparison--their policies are awful and they blight the communities around them, but they provide real value to individual users. It's how they maintain their hold.

It's a very good argument. Behavior that is ok for one group should be ok for another group, and viceversa. That is a truth of equality.

If you turn "I only have sex with women" into "I only have sex with white people", suddenly it sounds pretty offensive. Can we judge those two statements equivalently? It's not a good argument at all.

> It's a very good argument.

In the best case, that argument only has a little utility. However, it's a pretty bad argument now, since political correctness only allows you to make those kinds of swaps in certain cases. Nowadays, it can only be use to amplify the outrage against an already-identified villain.

I think there's a different point -- that we're willing to ignore certain avenues of discussion to maintain a civil society.

Ethnicity and gender are on their job application form.

I did, it asked me. Was I being given a "personalized" application perhaps?