Now they just have an XBox.

Speaking of explosions that wipe out cities ... I'm surprised summary nor posts I've seen so far have noted the potential for a weapon. Anything that stores energy in a compact form has the potential to release a lot of energy all at once. (Or if it was somehow impossible for the energy to get out so fast, this could be a useful military power source, for powering lasers or other high-energy destructive applications)

I don't know ... I do believe that good books have exceedingly clean plots, but there are some writers (think Philip K Dick) whose masterworks are engineered to lead to hanging questions. Was Deckard a replicant? Or in Total Recall, was he a big hero or just stuck in a cascading delusion?

I enjoyed GP's explanation. It makes as much sense as anything I've seen so far, though it could be the result of mental gymnastics.

Shell shortcuts work, and the sandwich joke is in there, too...

guest@xkcd:/$ make me a sandwich

What? Make it yourself.

guest@xkcd:/$ sudo !!

sudo make me a sandwich

Okay.

You know, this isn't really a response to you, but while reading your post it occurred to me that any company *can* make a network that sits on top of the internet, to which all those rules apply. If Microsoft wants to create a Microsoft network of some kind, they can implement any restriction they want ... maybe the licensed, approved-user-only model will be compelling. With the XBox, MS already controls a platform pretty well, and ... well, to tell the truth, XBoxLive or whatever the network is that you play games on is a MS only network that MS controls the hardware and the access to. So if MS really believes in it, why not require a license to access the MS Xbox internet?

Man, a license for the internet ... the stupidity, it burns.

Children are not property, but they are a responsibility, and there's a law so old and deep that it isn't explicitly written in law books (that I know of ... IANAL): If you are responsible to provide for something, you control it.

• This is why, in the office, some people are greedy to take on more responsibility -- more responsibility means more power.
• It's why a case can be made for even late-term abortion of otherwise viable fetuses -- if it's inside your body and totally dependent on you, you have a right to make even the most extreme choices about it.
• It's why "taxation without representation" is a big enough deal to revolt over -- if you're responsible for paying for something, you have a right to have a say in what is done with that.
• It's why the old-fashioned single-income family where the husband is the provider and the wife "doesn't have to work" while it appears to be the woman "winning" and making the man her servant, is not something feminists aspire to -- because if the husband is financally responsible for the wife, he has a lot more power in the relationship than she.
• And it's why people are wary of government healthcare, or schooling, or ... heck, there are some people wary of anything the government is responsible for -- it's because if the government is responsible for it, the government controls it.

And when you're raising a kid, you are responsible for that child. If it doesn't get fed, you're legally liable. If the child doesn't get disciplined, you could face penalties yourself because you're responsible. If your child doesn't get a quality education, you may not have any judicial penalty, but the blame does fall to you, because if you're responsible for a kid, you control it.

As the kid grows up, he'll take on more responsibilities for himself -- if he reaches the point that he's fully responsible for himself (working to earn his own keep, paying his own bills) then guess what? You may still be his parent, but you are de facto not in control of your child. If he's responsible for himself, he's in control and can make his own choices. He may choose to follow your rules and respect you, but unless he depends on you for something, he can also choose not to.

This is the main reason I am strongly peeved when I hear a government official claiming responsibility for something, saying we, the government, need to fix education, or need to fix healthcare, or to create jobs. If the government is responsible for whether or not I have a job, then the government gains a lot more control over my life -- what type of job is available to me, what type of salary I can expect... if it's unrealistic to think the government can control that, then it's equally unrealistic to think the government can or should be responsible for it. (Maybe if I was unemployed I would feel differently.)

I know a lot of people use the term "evolutionary" as a synonym for "gradual" or "slow" but when I think of evolution, I think of the specific process of mutations and reproduction by which a population changes over time. Unless there's something new about galaxies I've never heard of, I don't understand why the term "evolutionary" is the best word to describe the development of the early universe. (Or anything at astronomical scales that I can think of.)

Competing? This is where I find a problem with the simple "greed" answer ... there are a lot of companies that make laptops and laptop batteries. If they could all sell batteries cheaper, then greed should incite one to do that, making his product more competitive and gaining him more sales. If they "can" get away with every company over charging, then the only reason is that laptop purchasers, as a market, really don't care about that much of a price difference.

And if that is the case, then who cares? Why is the seller guilty of greed for charging a price we are willing to pay, but we're not guilty of the same greed for wanting to keep that price difference to ourselves when it's worth more than that to us?

It's just because our brains are first and foremost pattern-matching machines. I mean ... what's the current best way to quickly tell a human from a computer? Show them a distorted pattern, and the human can recognize it insantly.

So, as pattern-matching machines, we literally think in patterns. We have "software" on top of that to run logic and analysis, but even those are influenced by the pattern-matching hardware, such that analysis is optimized by matching patterns first.

So when someone has a stupid prejudice, it may be stupid, but it's human and it's easy enough to see ... this pattern exists, and this part of the pattern is true, therefore the whole pattern match.

The media latches onto this ... and I want to give them some credit, too. Rather than crassly cashing-in, I think it's more likely that viewers find it easier to process simplistic, stereotyped patterns than the more complex layers of patterns that better map to the real world. (Same thing happens in message boards, especially community-moderated ones. Think about it.) Media organizations recognize this pattern -- of simplistic patterns being more mass-consumable and therefore more popular, and bam! You have the media perpetuating simplistic patterns. Which of course creates a feedback loop.

How to beat this? Start by not playing the simple-pattern game. Recognize and internalize the layers, and bring attention to the anti-patterns that break the simplistic views. Do the hard thinking -- someone has to -- and teach it to others. Even if -- especially if -- it pushes outside of your comfort zone. Complex understanding of the world is uncomfortable, but it is important.

The difference is, if someone took it apart and reset the BIOS password, it would take a lot more time than just the 1-minute boot from USB stick, and more importantly, the next time you boot the machine, you'd see the password was reset, know it had been tampered, and not enter your decryption key. Unless there's a more sophisticated BIOS password attack that I'm unaware of, this would keep your data private.

A bigger issue, though, is if you have information sensitive enough to require a BIOS password and full disk encryption, it's probably also sensitive enough to physically secure the machine and/or keep it on your person at all time.

I had the same thought. It's like those waving-wand displays that use a 1-dimensional array of LED's to make a 2-dimensional image, only apparently adapted dimensions++

The really interesting table on that site is this one:
http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt_database.php?PT_id=35
Which is labeled "Wikipedia table" and dated 2006 ... Did Mohd rip off Wikipedia?

Fortunately for him, wikipedia's history traces back to this revision which was apparently made by Mohd Abubuakr himself, back in August 2006. He was in school at the time, at Jawaharlal Nehru Tech. According to his LinkedIn profile, he's not so much a green field researcher as he is a techie ... Performance and Security consulting. The article is a little misleading ... makes it sound like MS research has a skunk works in Hyderabad trying to invent a new periodic table.

His blog is cute too. A little emo, a little egotistical, but seems like a nice guy. I wonder what his /. handle is.

War?