I would ask why we still have screen savers. Turning off the monitor automatically after a period of inactivity to save power I understand. Having it still draw power to put pretty images on the screen when you aren't using it is a pointless exercise. Screen burn-in is not a big problem these days, particularly if you have the monitor/tv turn off when not in active use.

My sense is that the MEAN Stack (Mongo, Express, AngularJS, Node) is sort of winning. There's some packaging of it over at mean.io.

Personally, I'm really getting interested in Meteor (www.meteor.com). Watch the videos, and realize I saw a smart non-coder go from zero to *ridiculously* interactive site design in three months.

"Legal limits"? Hah! You've never been anywhere near a war zone have you. You go ahead and try to preach legal niceties to someone with a gun pointed at you. Let me know how that works out for you.

You go ahead an keep believing such naive nonsense. In the real world people go ahead and fight or flee. Nobody gives a shit about what is "authorized" during a war.

If we are going to brag about our tech I own a pocket watch that is older than anyone reading this that still works and keeps good time. I own several wrist watches that are older than 95% of the people reading this too and most of them don't need any batteries. Watches of the mechanical and electromechanical kind are amazing bits of tech. I don't carry any of them with me on a regular basis however because doing so is a pointless exercise 99.9999% of the time. The only time I carry a watch is when I'm hiking far enough away from civilization that my phone no longer makes sense or if I'm doing some very specific fitness activities where size and weight matter greatly.

That doesn't mean it has to come in wristwatch form. I guarantee my smartphone is a lot more useful and keeps more accurate time besides. If you wear a wristwatch it either means you are showing off your money or you have a fetish about knowing what time it is.

I will when you convince me that wearing a wristwatch daily is anything but an anachronism. They're cool in the same way that a steam powered bicycle is cool. Awesome but not practical in today's world.

See I think watches either look anachronistic or make you look like a showoff in most cases. There are a few niche use cases for wearing one but I really don't see the point most of the time. If the watch is expensive enough to be bling (read Rolex) then it isn't really for function - it's jewelry. Whatever function it serves is incidental to its real function of showing off. If the watch is cheap enough to be practical for uses other than showing then there no longer is a point to wearing it most of the time.

Why would I actually need a wristwatch for any of those activities? Competitive running or navigation on a sailboat out of sight of land maybe but fishing? I don't know where you fish but I don't really want to know the time when I go fishing. The whole point is to not worry about it. My philosophy on fishing is that if you need to bait the hook you are missing the point.

The ONLY thing I can think of that a watch makes sense for is if you need to carry some sensors in a compact way ala fitbit or if you are doing some very niche activities where knowing the time immediately is critical. Otherwise they are simply redundant.

As opposed to looking at one of the several clocks that is almost always in view? Hell I have 3 on the dashboard of my truck put there by the manufacturer. As I type this I have 2 on my monitor, one on my smartphone, one on the wall and there is another just around the corner. I cannot fathom why I would bother lugging around yet another redundant device.

Neither are most watches that are actually affordable. Personally I don't really like to brag about the size of my bank account via jewelry but that's just me.

Women maybe. Not most men in this country.

See that's the problem I have with watches generally. 99% of the time they provide me no information that I critically need that I cannot get from my surroundings or my smartphone. I don't need a clock to be available to me at the flip of a wrist except very rarely. My day is not scheduled that tightly and there almost always are at least 2 clocks within eye shot anywhere I usually go. Occasionally they are useful for things like flight navigation or diving where knowing the time immediately is really critical but that's rare for most of us. The most common use is for competitive running where time obviously matters. Furthermore I find wearing one uncomfortable. I don't like them bouncing around on my wrist and if I make it tight enough to avoid that it digs into my skin pretty good which is also uncomfortable.

The only thing I can think of a "smart watch" being useful for in my life would be basically what I could use a fitbit for right now. I really just don't see the point of them.

Yes they do. Probably not very intensely but I don't have any doubt that the NSA handles some amount of SigInt that comes from Canada. We're not very worried about Canada attacking the US. Mostly folks in the US are worried about individuals with ill intent and drug traffickers transiting into the US through Canada.

There is that too... Sigh...

Let me preface what I'm about to say by stating that the NSA has shown itself to be clumsy and irresponsible in their surveillance tactics especially towards our allies. I seriously doubt that much of their actions in cases like spying on Angela Merkel etc have any tangible value to our nation. That said:

You think that there is no one in any of those countries that wishes to do the US harm? Remember that prior to 9/11 the biggest terrorist incident on US soil was planned and executed by a US citizen. You do have a valid point to some extent but pretending that just because someone is a citizen of those counties that they are friendly to us is very naive. Ostensibly we are allies with Saudi Arabia and yet all of the hijackers on 9/11 were from that country. Just because the citizens are decent people doesn't mean the government is trustworthy and vice-versa. Nation states don't ever completely trust other nation states or their citizens and given human nature they would be foolish to do so. I don't think our intelligence services worry much about Great Britain causing problems but that doesn't mean they trust them or everyone that lives there completely either.

Furthermore sometimes those you think are your friends turn out not to be as close as you thought. The US and Canada have the largest (mostly) unguarded border in the world but I guarantee you that both countries have military plans for invasion/defense just in case. I also guarantee you that both countries have intelligence services that keep at least a casual eye out for worrisome activity.

They do that all the time. Some of it isn't even a secret. It's not just the NSA either. We have a huge intelligence system with many players and our foreign policy depends heavily on what it reports.

Here we agree though I think that most other countries would do the same if given the opportunity. Power corrupts and all that.

Only because they can not, not because they would not. I have no faith that most of the 95% of the world's population outside the US is really any different when handed such powerful tools. I would find it very surprising if other major economic powers were not heavily investing in activities similar to what the NSA does. Not saying I think that is a good or right thing, just that I think it is inevitable.

Japan does have a military and a rather capable one at that. They just pretend that they can't/won't attack anyone due to the constitution they put in place after WWII.

There are a few insignificant countries that don't have armed forces but every country with a substantial population has one.

So it is OK for Iraqi members of terrorist groups to kill US soldiers because we invaded Iraq? Just want to be sure you aren't being a hypocrite here.

Incorrect. Many models, including many that have justifiably won Nobel prizes, are extremely useful with the caveat that you need to know and understand the underlying assumptions and limits to the model. You get into trouble when you start using models to predict things that do not fit the underlying conditions of the model. It's ok to presume rational actors and perfect information for a model so long as you don't use that model in conditions where those things don't apply.

Unfortunately sometimes the best models we currently have aren't robust enough to account for all the real world conditions so we necessarily use them in ways that might not be ideal. For instance most stock options are priced using the Black-Scholes equation which won a Nobel prize in 1997. It's brilliant and hugely insightful but it has a large number of assumptions which do not apply to many of the securities that are priced with the model. This doesn't make it useless but it does mean that anyone who uses it for securities that do not fit the assumption profile are taking on additional risk - sometimes substantial amounts of risk.

Most of physics doesn't involve chaotic systems and human behavior. You're comparing apples to oranges here. I've got a masters degree in finance but my undergraduate degree is in engineering with a minor in applied physics. I've worked as a researcher and as someone who builds financial models. Building and testing models in physics is in a lot of ways hugely more straightforward. I don't think many people here really appreciate how sophisticated a lot of financial models are. But the systems being modeled aren't so easy (for lack of a better word) to tease apart. Predicting economic outcomes is rather like predicting the weather if human emotions could cause hurricanes. It's a chaotic system with imperfect information and irrational actors.

You could say the same about almost any profession involving predictive models, particularly those involving human behavior or chaotic systems. (economics involves both) I used to make statistical models of factory operations. I had a manager once ask me to list the assumptions in my model. He asked me to stop when I got to the third page of (single spaced) assumptions built into the model. As the saying goes, "All models are wrong. Some models are useful". Plenty of economic models are useful as long as you understand and respect the assumptions in the model.

I can introduce you to people who were publicly predicting it as far back as 2003. People I know personally, some of whom are economics professors and some others who are investment managers. They couldn't tell you when the bubble would burst or precisely how bad the fallout would be but they could tell you it was VERY likely and they could give you a pretty good overview of the range of possible outcomes.

Not true. Quite a few people including plenty of economists suspected some sort of bubble burst was coming and they could tell you the possible range of outcomes. The problem was that it was damn near impossible to predict WHEN it would burst and as a result it was impossible to predict the collateral damage and fallout. It's also impossible to predict specific decisions. The government could have chosen to bail out Lehman Brothers but for various reasons that seemed good at the time chose not to. (mostly due to wanting to avoid moral hazard) It's difficult, bordering on impossible, to predict specific actions with that level of specificity. Most economic models are statistical and tend to break down when you get to specific decisions. Events like the crash in 2008-9 are chaotic events and thus are very hard to predict with great specificity ahead of time since you don't know the starting conditions even if everything afterwards behaves rationally (which never happens).

No, you're confusing email with the US Mail spam delivery system. The whole thing is subsidized by spam you can actually throw in the trash can.