Lafferty specialized in science fiction that was more folk-tale like, or as I see Wikipedia puts it "shaggy characters and tall tales". His short stories, in such collections as Lafferty In Orbit or Nine Hundred Grandmothers, are more approachable than his novels, especially for someone new to his style.

Disch wrote both horror and science fiction. If you're literate you owe it to yourself to read Camp Concentration. His first novel, The Genocides is an easier read, if a bit heavy-handed in its message.

If you're deeply religious you might want to avoid Disch, especially The Genocides.

Since the summary didn't say, ECPA is The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, an updated version of the 1968 Federal Wiretap Act.

FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the FISA court (technically the FISC, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) generally rubber stamps wiretapping warrants, even after the fact.

Fuck Mozilla's fucking releases every fucking other fucking week. Want me to pay attention to a new release? then don't bombard me with requests to update, or call versions barely worth an increment to the patch level a fucking release. Buy a clue and stop ruining what was a pretty decent browser. As ColdWetDog already joked, only for real, you're actually making IE look good again. The level of fuckitude necessary to reach that level of fuckedupness is almost unfuckingbeliveable.

Sun Microsystems, in its day. In addition to Java: NFS, ZFS, D-Trace, virtual box, StrongTalk, GlassFish, OpenSolaris, NetBeans; after buying them but keeping them open: MySQL, OpenOffice, BlueQuartz (former Cobalt stack); and in the realm of open hardware, OpenSparc T1. (No question, Sun botched some of the companies it bought.)

At its largest Sun was never as big as Google today, but proportionally Google has done far less.

Oracle is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Sun Microsystems. (For one, they make money.)

TFA says the delay is for hardware in the loop testing, not code tweaking.

One hopes normal end-to-end testing was done long before this, but given the costs and logistics of assembling the actual hardware this final phase of testing pretty much has to wait until shortly before launch.

I'm a developer and am pretty much in the camp of "if it complies and boots, ship it", but I appreciate the need for QA. When you're shooting a missile at a fragile target keeping a crew alive 200 miles above earth just maybe before you sign off on the launch you want to finish testing. It's the low delta-v docking code they're testing apparently, but docking coupling damage has happened in the past, and that or just a failure to dock would be kind of a big deal.

Did you read even the summary or just Wikipedia? 12kWh/kg, the projected max energy density of these batteries, and what they were calling "comparable", is about 43 MJ/kg (1 kWh = 3.6 MJ). That's only10% less than gasoline and "comparable" seems apt. Open question how close actual batteries ever get to that max, but that's not what you were complaining about.

And then there is effective density, when you consider the amount of energy that can be used for productive work. A gas engine typically wastes 70% to 80% of it's energy while electric motors over 100hp waste less than 8%. So lets see, using the best efficiency for gas, .3 * 47 = 14MJ/kg and for electric the NEMA minimum, .92 * 43 = 40MJ/kg, and we have electric motors with li-air batteries at 3 times the effective density of ICE with gasoline. There are other real-world considerations for true effective density, but it seems you were right after all, "comparable" isn't fair -- to a li-air car, which you seemingly would be willing to pay $60,000 for.

Pah, kids these days. Try TECO

"It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse - introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine."
    -- Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL

The first versions of emacs were written in TECO, inspired in part by tmacs -- TECO macros.

Or try APL. Uses a special character set, permits composed characters, assumes you know linear algebra, and reads right to left -- the epitome of a write-only language.

Now get off my lawn.

I don't really game much anymore and so don't follow gaming news., but Deus Ex was an old favorite and I've thought about getting the new iteration. Good job Gamestop, your tactics made it made it to slashdot and my radar, introducing me to OnLive, something I hadn't heard of (or had and mistook it for a branding of Microsoft Live). Although I wonder how well it will actually work for me it seemed worthwhile enough to at least download the free client and watch some games in progress -- on a Mac where Deus Ex sn't otherwise available at that.

Not quite the Streisand Effect, but mostly because few here are as clueless about OnLive as I was. Gamestop, you don't yet seem to understand that every company memo is a public document these days.

If only they had bid Tau they would have won.

Is that you, Eric Schmidt?

Well, excuse me.

There, a non-Monty Python reference! That should be worth a few non-nerd points.

I guess you could say that makes this post "MP incomplete." (doh!).

For those that don't know, David Cutler, who designed VMS while at DEC, went on to Microsoft where he designed Windows NT. Now, although Mr. Cutler attributes it to coincidence, W N T = V+1 M+1 S+1

Not unlike how it happens that HAL of HAL 9000 fame happens to be I-1 B-1 M-1.

I'm not employee #0, many of my past contacts know me as Patient 0.

You left out one significant scenario:

4. You have a choice of buying an i7, that acts like an i7, for $200.

Choice (4) is clearly best for me as a customer.

For Intel, (4) isn't any worse than (2), as clearly they think they can make a profit selling i7s at $200. For (3) it's only worse to the extent of their conversion rate, probably well under 10%, minus the cost to lock the chip, or less than $10. For (1), they are apparently just overcharging by $90 - $100.