As for CDs, they seem to be all over the place to me. Early on there were a lot of bad CDs because of bad engineering. Some were released with their vinyl oriented RIAA equalization intact, which is just plain dumb. People like to argue about technology, but I think recording engineering is an often overlooked factor in what comes out of your speakers. I have an MP3 album of the original cast recording of "Hair", and it sounds great over a good pair of earphones. It's not because of some kind of magical MP3 pixie dust, it's because the original recording was done so competently. If something is missing in the original master tapes, no amount of lossless encoding and copper-free speaker cables will conjure it back.

It's things like that which is probably where the "vinyl sounds better" craze got started - then it comes around again in the 90s because overcompressed (DRC) CDs sound noticably worse than the non-compressed vinyls.

As for tubes, it turns out people get very used to the "tube sound" (or rather, tube distortion) at normal levels, while overdriven tubes do sound harmonically better than clipping transistors (hence their use as guitar amp effects).

The reasoning is that natural gas releases less carbon than coal, so if we switch from coal to natural gas, then we'll reduce climate change. I do not have the information necessary to determine if that is a correct line of reasoning or not.

Well, natural gas/methane is CH4 - there are 4 hydrogens per carbon. As you start going to longer chained hydrocarbons, the ratio between hydrogen to carbon goes from 4:1 to 2:1 because adding another carbon adds only 2 more hydrogens. Octane, in gasoline, comprises of 8 carbon atoms and 18 hydrogen atoms - 2 per carbon plus 2 more at the ends.

I wasn't aware that hydrogen fuel cell cars were already approaching production. Here are the stats for the Toyota Mirai:

[snip]
You have to dump the resulting water

At the moment, most hydrogen is generated using fossil fuels (much like electricity), so it is only one of a two-part process if we wish to stop releasing CO2.

Hyundai is also piloting a project as well - though you lease the vehicle because they're only doing it in a few places where there are stations. I think the lease (which is fairly price at $600/month or so) includes fuel too.

Though - why is there a water dump valve? I mean, since it comes out as steam, why not just have a tailpipe that emits steam? Or just let it drip on the ground like a car A/C.

While getting hydrogen from hydrocarbons still emits CO2, it's sort of like electric vehicles - the carbon emitter is one place instead of many which is far easier to clean up. After all, next time you get stuck behind a truck or car belching smoke...

We do not have a shortage of CS workers in this country, we have a surplus, and with some provinces having over 10% unemployment rates Harper is seemingly doing everything he can to keep Canadians out of Canadian jobs.

Incorrect. Harper is a skilled politician that does things he knows about. Like oil. He knows a lot about oil. He knows oil provides jobs, and good paying ones at that. He knows anything that threatens oil will make it less profitable, and thus, make it less money and hurt Canada.

Of course, Harper's problem is, Canada is NOT just an oil state. Sure we have a bit of oil, and our dollar reflects that, but Canada is also a lot more diverse - we do have a booming high-tech industry with several leading game studios, many indie game developers, booming cultural industries including TV, music and movies, and manufacturing, as well as forestry.

Of course, Harper knows oil. Fuck the rest of 'em - he's ignorant of those sectors and they mean fuck-all to him. Oil is all that matters. And not even refining it in-country (where people might actually benefit from stuff like lower gas prices).

Hell, Keystone XL is like every other pipeline planned in Canada - just ship the oil somewhere else - don't even try to make a value-added product out of it. (Keystone XL was to bring oil to a port to ship it somewhere. Not even to go to US refineries where US consumers might actually benefit...).

Sure, oil may be Canada's biggest money maker right now, but diversification of an economy isn't a bad thing if like now oil is tanking because Saudi Arabia wants to bankrupt US oil companies and pick them up for a song. Alberta's in a lot of trouble because oil is way lower than they budgeted for.

My 500G Archos still refuses to die. It fits a particular niche that Apple will refuse to address and Android hasn't quite caught up yet with (but will eventually).

I stopped at Archoa. I used to like them - they had spec sheets a mile long and did a whole pile of things.

Problem was, they are utter crap, poor quality parts, locked hardware (if the hard drive dies, it's dead. You CANNOT replace the hard drive as it's bootloader locked!).

I've never seen a dead pixel on any screen except on Archos devices, and it usually isn't one, it's usually many.

Nevermind their size since it's a 2.5" hard drive so it's over twice the size of an iPod classic. And the 1.8" drives Apple uses are no longer made by Toshiba (who wants a 160GB drive when 160GB of flash is rapidly falling in price? It's just like the iPod Mini - Apple stopped making them when the 4GB hard drives were outclassed by flash producing the iPod Nano instead).

I wonder if they have to pay patent royalties to Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson since they invented this app during their Google internship?

The inspiration for that came from the Google Labs thing for GMail that did just that, introduced years before that movie^H^H^H^H^Hrecruitment ad. It literally pops up a math problem for you to solve before GMail will let you send the email out to determine your level of intoxication.

China doesn't produce cheap crap. China just produces. The West places orders for cheap crap and then cry about it when something doesn't go quite right.

Oh? Is that why the great capacitor scandal went down in China?

The fact is that China does produce cheap crap. Anything they make "themselves" is a faithful copy of someone else's product, right down to the flaws. That tendency was noted when they first began manufacturing for the rest of us. They were copying machine tools, including the boneheaded mistakes. Problem is, they also use inferior materials for these cheap copies, so they wear rapidly and fail. The only bright spot is that you can use the replacement parts from the original, which are of much higher quality.

As well, people who attempt to have things made in China often find that they come back under spec. Sometimes this is true even in the demo parts, but the quality often slips at a later date and if you're not continually inspecting parts, the quality can go downhill without warning. This is why only big corporations can afford to sell stuff made in China year after year, they can eat the losses and they have learned which suppliers will try to screw them, and how hard. It's also why you pay twice as much for the same shit made in the same place if you buy it off a shelf instead of off of eBay. The product may well be shit, in fact it is highly likely, and the corporation has to handle the cost of processing the returns and landfilling the garbage product.

Can this happen with parts coming out of any nation? Sure. But China is known for it. It's well-known that you can't simply contract them for parts of any complexity and then wait for them to arrive, they will arrive with obvious spec violations and you will pay for the privilege.

The OP's point is that China produces to the quality you specify. If you're willing to pay for it, they can produce very high quality goods (see Apple). If not, they can produce to your price point.

And that includes crap they copy. Because the copied crap must sell for less and most Chinese (who are VERY well versed in basic economics) know that to maximize profits, you minimize cost, means they will cut every corner possible because a penny saved is a penny more in profit.

So no, they're not going to pay for Apple-level quality, or even the cheapest western brand-name level quality. They want even cheaper than that, and basically pay not a penny more.

Of course, the product does often end up as crap because it's shoddily made and barely has more structural integrity than the box it came in.

I mean, if you're willing to buy an Apple for $2000, and it costs Apple say, $1000 to make, if they can make a copy for $200, that's $1800 in pure profit - 80% more than Apple! Of course, there's a reason why Apple spent so much, so your Chinese Apple clone would be a deathtrap. But it'll be made, somehow because hell, if Apple can do it, so can they.

(And you have to know the value system is based on how hard something is to copy. Software is worthless because it's easily copied (open-source even more so, but try getting the source code from them!)), etc.

It's like that electric car thing where you still need to generate power somewhere, and if you're not using clean energy, you're just moving the location of the pollution.

However, overall efficiency is still higher for electric cars even after repeated transformations. An ICE is like a traditional incandescent lightbulb - it converts energy to heat primarily. Side effect is you get a tiny amount of useful energy emitted as well - either as motion or light. But most of the energy stored ends up dumped as heat.

And honestly, it's far easier to clean up a dirty power plant than it is to clean up a million tailpipes. It did take a long while for catalytic converters to basically be standard, and mostly because old cars without catalytic converters were scrapped. Whereas a power plant can be cleaned up in a few years and even modern coal power plants are far more efficient than an ICE.

Okay the cups are probably greater magnitude of waste but still, unused coffee does have a higher cost than just "pour it down the drain".

You can make smaller pots of coffee quite easily.

The real reason people like Keurig is because it's far more convenient - cup under spout, pod in top, hit two buttons (power and cup) and coffee in 30 seconds. Especially at inconvenient times of the day, say after waking up.

Some 10 years ago I received a warning related to "self-plagiarism" because I had copied the definition of a problem from one of my previous papers (one column, the rest of the paper was completely new). Since then, I know I have to change the text of the problem definition between two papers, even if it is the same.

So why not just quote yourself then? I mean, self-plagiarism is just like plagiarism (except you're presenting existing ideas as new, rather than other's ideas as yours).

Is it too hard to cite oneself? Is it frowned upon? Or does it just not seem like plagiarism when you're the one doing it to yourself?

For instance:

- Are these apps installed via a custom store, or distributed/managed using a internal company server? I'm assuming they don't exist on the Apple store -- or do they?
- Screen shots of the apps?
- Names of the apps?

As it stands it's pretty much a press release that's not really "news for nerds" ... 10 more apps is a rounding error of a rounding error of apps already in the App Store.

Given they're enterprise apps, "custom" app store (actually, Enterprise signing certificate + device provisioning and app-push) would be most likely since that's a way around the App Store.

I don't think there are names for them or screenshots since they're frameworks at best - every client of those apps will request customizations from IBM prior to deploying.

While the partnership is IBM+Apple, you have to remember Apple is doing fine by themselves, and IBM is the one looking at the enterprise market. IBM's experience may help shape the MDM side of Apple to be more enterprise-friendly, but for the most part, IBM will be the one doing enterprise support. So Big Blue will be the go-to folks for the apps customized for htem.

It's just a PR so folks who are in those industries may start inquiring more about it.

They both get entry into a new market they traditionally haven't been strong at - IBM gets into mobile devices (again - they did have Simon but that was a flop), Apple into enterprise (traditionally weak) and do so with a strong partner in those areas (IBM knows enterprise, Apple knows mobile).

Perhaps advertisers should finally move away from the current revenue system that pays per-click and should instead move towards a profit sharing system where the referring website receives a commission based on any sales or executed transactions.

Which would result in the ad-supported websites dying because very little people actually purchase based on a click through. Instead they'll probably click it, then browse around a bit then come back later and do the transaction.

I'm sure advertisers probably already thought about that, and advertising is less about selling and more about mindshare. Just getting word out that your product is there is often what is needed moreso than sales. Especially in B2B because the sales may come long after the ad - the only reason is the person buying remembered seeing the collateral.

You say that as though Sony's security practices are not normal for all Fortune 500 companies. There are probably a few shining examples of good behavior, but I haven't worked for a company in the last 15 years that cared to do more than the bare minimum. Even then it was only if they HAD to do it.

One of the more famous hacks happened a few years ago, where hacks broke into one Sony website, then used the same vulnerability the next day to break into other Sony websites in another country. And repeated the same for several days.. Each day slurping up more data.

It's one thing to have a vulnerability. It's another to not have it patched on all vulnerable sites.

Looks like it would be about $9.50 on average in CA. However this is also assuming the router is being used a max power 24/7 when it's sharing and would be completely idle 24/7 if it wasn't. It's more likely people would be using their own router so it wouldn't be idle in which case it would use a negligible amount for sharing.

So it's ok to steal as long as you're stealing a little bit from lots of people?

Sure it's only up to $10 a month. But that doesn't make it right, and in fact, the amount stolen is small enough that mots people would eat the electricity bill because going to court is much more expensive. Hence a class-action lawsuit because stealing $1M from one person is just as bad as stealing $1 from 1M people. Just that those 1M people have far less recourse because the amount stolen is far lower. Do it right and a company can make billions by doing this.

Businesses often get rates cut if they set up a public hotspot using their Comcast account, which is why a lot of hotspots are in front of businesses. Why shouldn't home users get the same?

I am all for poisoning that well. For those of us who use adblock it won't affect what we see and will cost the advertisers money as they will have to pay the site we visited for those clicks. So really no down side from my perspective.

You aren't that naive, are you?

You think if you're poisoning the well that advertisers don't notice? Or rather, Google since Google's the one doing all the advertising these days.

Face it, sites aren't paid by the click anymore. They're paid by the legit click. Google's already done it by detecting fraudulent clicks and reducing their payment to websites as a result.

The end result is that websites will simply get less money, so either you'll see more ads on your favourite sites, or you'll see more and more stuff go behind paywalls that were formerly free.

And no, just because it's a fraudulent click doesn't mean it's not counted. It's counted against the website so not only does the website not get the money from that click, they are paid less per click overall.

Requires windows..

Which is about as much of a selling point for people who don't use windows as saying that something requires an iphone for people only use Android. In other words, it's an anti-selling point.

Or it depends. Perhaps someone writing Android apps uses Linux right now but uses Windows on a regular basis. They could easily switch.

Not everyone using Linux or Android is doing so as an "Anti-Microsoft" or "Anti-Apple" reason. They may be doing it because that's what their company provides. I know we have a Windows infrastructure, and do Android development, so every developer has a Windows PC and a Linux PC. I do all my work on Windows using Samba and everything (because I find Linux GUIs fairly sluggish and to be honest, ugly as sin). So for me, my Linux PC is remoted into for building and accessing project files. If I rarely need to, I even have an X server on Windows for the few GUI tools I have.

If the Windows Android emulator is faster, that makes my life a lot easier (and one less X app to manage).

People don't always choose alternatives to "be different". There are (way too) many people who balked at buying an iPhone due to cost, then their cellular dealers simply said "here's Android. It's like iPhone" except it's either free or half the price. (Yeah, you're not getting flagship phone here. You can tell who's the hardcore Android users because those will actually use GOOD Android phones).