If you can't copy it to a Linux box and play it with something other than iTunes then you don't really own it.

Apple sells a lot of that kind of stuff. If you're not aware, then perhaps you're stuck in 2003 and aren't aware of the newer things they are doing these days.

Even with the lastest and best supported Apple brand software and hardware, it can glitch while trying to phone home. DRM fail equals playback fail.

> Just so you know, nothing lasts forever.

Why not? Parts of my media hoard date back to 1994.

Bits don't wear out. There's no reason for them not to last forever.

My last iteration of "building from a collection of parts" was buying a QNAP from Amazon and a laptop from System76.

Ripping the content may require a little bit of upfront legwork but I never have to worry about some gatekeeper going out of business or deciding to just give me the middle finger.

Most of my MP3s are older than any sanctioned MP3 vendor. Now the older parts of my video collection have seen iTunes rise up as a video monger and then go offline.

This article is an advertisement for XBMC.

That's a distinction without a difference.

When people buy stuff from you that requires "phoning home", no one should let you off the hook for dropping "legacy support". People whine about things like "support" but this isn't a computing frame of reference here. This is consumer media.

The idea that your copy of the White Album suddenly stops working should not be tolerated.

A lot of our problems today are the result of people in power fundamentally misunderstanding what Big Data is good for.

We used to assume it was impractical for the Government to keep records of everything we do in the public sphere. Those things have gone from possible to practical to inevitable, mostly due to Moore's Law.

Just because you have everything recorded, doesn't mean it's useful, though. Technologists who should know better talk about searching these records to find the "needle in the haystack", selling the vision of complete records + powerful search tools = Total Awareness.

What they conveniently skip over is:

* All records have inaccuracies
* If the inaccuracy rate is higher than the occurrence rate of what you're searching for, the search is not useful

Consider medical screening tests. If you have a test with a false positive rate of 1 in 1000, it is useless to use such a test to search for a condition that happens to 1 in 1000000 - 999 times out of a thousand, the test will say you're sick when you're fine.

Now, consider:

* The error rate of address OCR

versus

* The rate of secrets being exchanged via US Mail

Anyone in the Government who can't produce an estimate of those two numbers shouldn't be allowed anywhere near those records - it would be like giving a child a loaded gun, or a politician a Twitter account.

No. You clueless blithering idiots don't get it.

No one whines in the news media "but think of the stupid kid with an egg allergy". It's always the kid that shouldn't even been anywhere near a school.

Some people are just in danger just by being exposed to lots of children and their germs. This kind of "medical excuse" is bogus. They shouldn't be in school to begin with. It doesn't matter if the whole rest of the school tries to cater to their condition or not.

As far as "allergies" go, that's a real judgement call. However, most alergies even aren't nearly as severe as diseases we vaccinate children for.

This is really one of those many situations where our own wealth puts us at a disadvantage. We're so used to not seeing some of these diseases that we are really out of touch with how bad they really are. The whole lot of us are terribly sheltered.

"establishment" and "restriction" are actually both very real issues with a good amount of caselaw behind them. The situation is neither simple nor trivial.

ANY ONE that needs an excuse of any sort to avoid a vaccination should not be in a public school. People spend a lot of time trying to eviscerate anti-vaxxers over this but this is an issue that impacts anyone that is immonosuppressed.

If you can't handle a Measles vaccine, you don't belong in school period. Just the other kids with normal things will be a deadly threat to you.

It sucks but that's the way it is. Doesn't matter if you are a kid recovering from blood cancer or a teacher also recovering from blood cancer.

Thank you for your correction. I'll post an apology for my English misuse on every light post in the area, from Seltjarnes to Mosfellsbær.

The first patent (which had no attempt to commercialize) was in 1979. Most early research, with largely failed attempts to come up with a commercially viable product, were in the mid 1980s. The tech has slowly advanced since then, and nowadays is becoming rather mature.

I don't know why this is seen as a way to diss 3d printing. Some people's hatred of makerbots and their ilk is so great that they can't accept that 3d printing broadly has developed into actually useful production processes in some fields. Rocketry is a great example. It's just silly to have to make (and warehouse) moulds or stamps for parts that you only need a couple dozen of and which you may revise after just a couple launches. Now that 3d printing technologies have advanced enough to produce high quality metal parts, it's properly taking of. It even pairs nicely with CNC, there's now hybrid 3d printing / CNC machines out there. CNC gets you the coarse, primary shape and 3d printing adds in the intricate and/or jutting out components.

3d printing is a very useful technology for low volume or rapidly evolving part runs. No need to play it down just because Makerbots exist.

Agreed. XKCD covered it concerning apps, but it's usually not much better with mobile versions.

What happened with Google? It's like every change they make these days is to make things worse. And I say this as a person who's generally a big Google fan.

It's just another situation with diminishing returns. Going from the spinning rust to an SSD achieves considerable and noticable gains whereas going to the next step does not. The transition to SSD probably already got rid of most of the perceptable bottleneck.

That's actually the point. Warm temperatures and near constant sunlight = high productivity - if you import water. Ag in California takes up 80% of the water, but ag + mining together is only 2% of the economy. It's fine when water is abundant, but when it's in short supply, ag has to give.

Wait until they find the body of the Windows Phone fanboy.

I don't think the Mandelbrot Set itself persay is all that useful, but its 3d relatives like Mandelbox, Mandelbulb, etc sure generates some amazing landscapes... I could totally picture that used in games or movies. It's amazing the diversity it can do with some parameter changes - steampunk machinery and evolving spacescapes, reactors / futuristic computers, art deco, extradimensional beings, alien cities, floating viny landscapes, transforming robotics, things hard to describe, etc.

I'd love to have a house / secret supervillain lair that looks like this one ;)