Ants and bees are aggressive as all fuck. Honeybees are notable for being docile, and only certain subspecies at that; honeybees, the most successful organism second only to ants, are among the most violent and aggressive motherfuckers in existence, with the Megapsis species able to quickly kill a human if annoyed, and some of the smaller African apsis species prone to violent and fatal attacks in which they chase you forever and sting you until you die. The more docile species have been propagated by human effort.

No, it's stupidity coming from a fool who has no idea what he's talking about. He's a cosmologist and a quantum physicist, not a social scientist.

Sorry, I read "lightweight" literally. The H4n is very mass-efficient; on the other hand all the kewl kids now shop for rigs like an Olympus LS-100, mainly because the H4n only uses AAs and the Olympus recorders just have much better battery life.

LoopPay works by basically cloning the credit card.

Is that even permitted under PCI DSS? I know other projects, like Coin, get hung up on this, for good reason.

Zoom H4N (well regarded by professional audio guys for lightweight field recording)

I'm a "professional audio guy" and an H4n owner, and my regard for it is... adequate. It's mic self-noise is probably far in excess of any SD card noise. I still bring by Sound Devices running at 192k if I have to do anything serious (though I use SD cards for that, too).

Oh man, you should see the bullshit it takes to hook up a YMF262 and YAC512 to an Arduino. It's not just programming the YMF, or even emulating the YAC512 interface (on both ends) so you can pass the audio stream through the ARM core and possibly out to a second Atmel or a DSP for processing or further synthesis (e.g. a SID or YM2612); to hook up any of these chips, you need multiple crystals, piles of capacitors, resistors, and then you need a strategy for matching clock on the interface pins.

I expect a hilarious amount of effort just to plan out how everything gets plugged together and gets its data across; and then a minimal amount of effort to create a SID/2A03/VC6 emulator on a separate hardware chip. I'd use a DSP for effects processing and SID/2A03/VC6 if I could; some of these things run at 1.2GHz with 64K of RAM. I doubt I'd have the IO to get that much data in/out of the main processor.

I've read Tesla's Colorado Springs Notes, he spent years, essentially, inventing magic tricks. Academic citations of his work from this period are non-existent. It was a waste.

Heaviside was a genius and made some of the all-time greatest contributions to mathematical physics. He was also an eccentric loner who went mad in his old age.

Which 'system' are you talking about? The patent system, or the larger military-industrial corporocratic political system which has undermined, perverted, and co-opted the patent system, (along with so many other things), in a manner which probably has its founders spinning in their graves?

That may be necessary in the short term as the only means to counter the massive power they have usurped. Yes, we need corporations - but they need to be society's servants, not its masters as they are now.

No, it's definitely a system problem - unless your definition of 'people' agrees with the law's definition, which extends personhood to corporations.

The patent system no longer serves MY benefit - it primarily serves those who are already rich enough to defend their patents and to use them as weapons in patent wars which stifle innovation and waste tremendous amounts of resources with no net benefit for society. I agree that we need something like what the patent system used to be; however, trumpeting the cause of 'patent reform' is rather like crying out for a Band-Aid as a treatment for disembowelment. The brokenness of the patent system is a symptom of much larger problems, not a root cause. The real work needs to be done much higher in the pyramid - then things like a sane and functional patent system will follow naturally.

Time to permanently disable contactless payment on all your cards.

Apparently the banks and credit card companies in some countries will send you a new card without the RFID on request. But here in Canada at least one company simply refuses to do this. My bank DID disable contactless payment on my new debit card in their records, but of course the RFID is still physically intact so there's no guarantee that it won't suddenly start working as a result of some administrative fuckup. I'm going to call about my new credit card, but I'm pretty sure they'll tell my politely to piss off. At that time I plan to get out my drill, put a hole in the appropriate place, and test. If it disables Tap and Pay, then all of my cards will get the same treatment.

Yes, Tab Mix Plus is essential for me. I use it extensively to do things like manage saving and restoring of sessions, change the font and text colour of tabs for instant identification of state, undoing a Close Tab command, closing a tab by double-clicking the tab, and opening a new tab by double clicking the tab bar. When I'm forced to use a browser that doesn't have it I go a little bit crazy and my efficiency drops enormously.

Aside from the usual security and privacy addons, another one I find indispensable is Flashblock. I tend to have many YouTube tabs open at once, and Flashblock calms my urge to strangle and dismember whatever fuckwit decided that videos should play automatically as soon as the page loads.