....what they're watching on TV in those amateur porn movies.

Honestly, I don't know how they can go at it like that with the TV droning on in the background. It makes me nuts that I can't tell what they're watching, too.

Whaddya bet that the variation in video formats got left in as some kind of poor DRM to act as a last-chance method to stop people from viewing videos from other regions?

He is right though, "boxen" is idiot-speak.

"Reasonable discussion" usually just means "my ideas are reasonable, and yours aren't, and as long as you're disagreeing with my ideas, you're being unreasonable."

You answered your own question in two sentences

At a shotgun range I've been to, they have a duck tower about 150 yards behind the clubhouse. It's surrounded by a fairly thick stand of tall trees, but a couple of the stations result in shooters shot trajectory going through the "hole" in the trees and raining down on the front porch of the clubhouse.

I've been standing there and gotten "hit" -- it actually feels no different than if you through a handful of coarse sand into the air and let it fall on you, actually less since you really only feel a small number of pellets because of dispersion.

Shooters are restricted to target loads of #7.5 shot or smaller, so its very light shot. So light that on their "hard" sporting clays course it's very difficult to hit the distant crossing and away clays in any wind. The #7.5 shot has so little inertia that it just gets blown off target.

Many pheasant hunters I've known have stories about getting hit with shot from people on the other side of a field or road hunting on roads adjacent to the field they were hunting on. It's like coarse sand, and pheasant hunting uses much heavier shot than target shot.

The "N" versions are for the EU and they don't feature Windows Media Player. The EU forced this for anticompetitive reasons.

The "KN" versions are for Korea and they don't have Windows Media Player or Windows Messenger (the IM client) to appease the Korean government (not sure if North or South)

However, since MSN Messenger has been discontinued I'm not sure what the point of the KN edition is any more.

Just skip N or KN.

I might expect some cost reductions because the increased durability will lessen the amount of excess memories needed for remapping when cells go bad. And don't larger drives use NAND chips in parallel for speed? If you can simplify packaging by using a single chip you might cut costs there, too.

If its as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as they say it is, you might also expect enterprise adoption to increase, lowering the cost of NAND by cutting demand or resulting in more reliable NAND.

It's also hard to know what kind of process improvements may take place over time.

Either way, I think cheap, durable and fast-or-faster-than-flash storage is pretty exciting, so I guess I'm willing to be optimistic. Storage is so expensive and so relatively slow that something that pushes the envelope on speed and cost just seems to have a lot of potential.

One huge trend in work over the last century or so has been towards automation. We need fewer people, or can do more with the same number of people, by automating some or all of peoples' jobs.

We don't need everyone to "build software" as you may think of it. However, we do need a substantial part of the workforce to automate their own jobs. Think about it. For most typical jobs, the ability to automate your work makes you more productive, more valuable, and can make you feel better about your life.

Automation, of course, means instructing machines.

It sure sounds like the outcome could be cheaper, faster, more reliable and possibly even denser storage. How about a 10 TB drive that can saturate a SAS link for the price of a consumer 1 TB SSD now? It sounds appealing to have 40 TB of home storage at performance levels that would make a $200k enterprise storage buyer jealous.

Or that makes for 240 TB enterprise san shelf for the price of an existing 10 TB flash/rust hybrid shelf at speeds that will melt 16 gig fiber channel?

And who knows what value fast/cheap storage would have in terms of software applications. Maybe it would enable machine learning in more of a real-time basis by enabling analysis of vast datasets on demand.

Unless something new has happened in the last decade, the only source leaks I'm aware of are NT4 and Win2k. So if you were willing to do without x86-64, most of ACPI, UEFI, IPv6, and pretty much every piece of hardware on your motherboard, I guess you could use that.

You can probably live without Metro, so there is that.

It's a radio transmitter feeding a closed waveguide. One has to ask: why haven't we seen evidence of radio transmission providing thrust before, when it's been feeding an open waveguide?

Extreme claims require extreme evidence. People who have made extreme claims before without much evidence at all are rightly categorized with the boy who cried wolf.

Let's assume that the general education requirements of most college educations (ie, some smattering of English literature & composition, arts, bit of a foreign language, social studies, etc) actually does result in those students coming out slightly more knowledgeable than if they would have had even an "advanced" kind of technical education.

It's a reach, I know, but let's say they are overall a little smarter (ie, learned some new analytical skills & strategies) and are better informed.

I wonder if we're actually better off from this. Not because people aren't smarter or better informed, but because they're only a little smarter and a little better informed and they overestimate how well they informed they are and how good their analytical skills are.

On a mass scale, I wonder how much our political divisiveness and partisanship is driven by a whole bunch of people, who think they're smarter and better informed than they really are, taking sides -- often quite stridently -- on issues they don't really know about and reaching conclusions they don't really have the analytical tools to reach.

Add in the fact that everyone is an Internet Expert on everything they can read in Wikipedia and you have this recipe for high-quality mass ignorance and confirmation bias trying to portray itself as an educated populace.

If we moved the overwhelming majority of these people into a more advanced and focused vocational education that left out the "well rounded" part, would our *actual* ignorance as opposed to overestimated wisdom make us less partisan? Or would we just be even more gullible, swayed by propaganda, etc?

It's too many laws. One doesn't fit, they'll find another.

And once they find one that fits well enough, than anything goes because resistance to enforcement of a law usually brings the full force of the law with it.