they're not making this some sort of Ender's game scenario with 8 year old kids flying drones

No, but they can use what they learn about 8-year-old kids to best adapt methods for 18-year-old kids.

Just ask any insurance actuary when humans mature mentally - for men it's about 25 (women earlier but one cannot have "sexist" policies in the US, damn the data).

Raise the age of majority and enlistment to 25 and they'd have to reinstitute a draft to fight wars like Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. Kids sign up eagerly - mature men not so much unless there's an actual threat to the country.

Politicians could never allow such a thing to happen in a warfare/welfare state, but let's at least be honest about what the status quo actually looks like. If Somali warlords are criminals for conscripting 15 year olds and handing them an AK and putting them out to get shot in wars they don't understand, the morality does not change just because a piece of paper says "18" is a magic number and tricking them into enlisting with future promises of riches ("we'll see what we can do about getting you assigned to a helicopter unit with technician training so you get a good-paying job when you get out") and then handing them an M16 and putting them out to get shot in wars they do not understand. Replace magic with science and the balance changes quite dramatically.

Having a well-thought-out, consistent, orthogonal, and to-the-extent-possible obvioius UI ...
DON'T rely on your own intuition about what's common or difficult for users, ask them or collect the data.

You have it exactly right, but notice the AskSlashdot talked about UX, not UI.

UI is a science, there are methods, data, studies and books. UI people are rare and valuable.

UX people tend to add more whitespace, transparency and animations, making the product look more fashionable (" n++.0" ) for whichever n your developers are currently building.

If there's no UI person in sight, documentation is probably his best choice.

Most days I'm working in bases: 2,8,10,12,16 and 60 for one reason or another. For construction I've tried decimal but have returned to dozenal for the ease of working with prime factors and mental math - I was always on the calculator in my decimal phase.

Y'know, my eleven year old daughter understands base and place value and can do math in arbitrary bases (it took me maybe four hours to teach her) - why do some Europeans feel so smug about being ignorant of non-decimal systems?

if you only have one computer you're not the kind of person who will be helpful in diagnosing a kernel driver bug (sorry if that stings).

so funny ... if you were competent enough to review all the patches and keep your server secure enough to be a good Internet citizen, unchecking 'automatic ' would not be a hurdle.

Alerting you to login attempts from new locations or devices, and offer two-factor authentication, will slow down the hackers for a time.

But the answer, for most service providers, is to tell the user that it's their problem now.

You can turn off all alerts except for these so called Presidential alerts.

This is what I've done. Not because I don't like the idea, in theory. But I was getting "emergency" alerts for an approaching thunderstorm. Guess what? It's summer. Thunderstorms are normal, not an emergency.

The trouble with the system, as deployed, is there's a monopoly on discrimination. And the retards placed in charge of that monopoly have ruined its potential and left me without a competitive choice in intellect. The only two options are "on" and "off", and "on" was removed from consideration.

Let this be a learning opportunity for the next kid who wants to design a safety system.

only the trendy crap sold at best buy. I bought an otterbox commuter for $19 online. you can get china cases for as little as $4.00 with free shipping.

Got my daughter one of those China cases for her Moto G because it had to be neon green and had to have a kickstand, and the options were limited. But it's actually quite good.

I've got an Incipio Dual Pro on my S4 and it's definitely better. But only somewhat better, not dramatically. The Incipio is "really good" while the China Special is "quite good".

My phone is also way more expensive and the margin is worth it, but I would not steer people away from the no-name cases if they have good reviews.

Sounds CPU intensive and slow.

No, it's CPU-intensive and fast. If you control the whole network (see Google, et. al.). CPU is not the bottleneck in 2014.

But the very last thing we want is central control of the Internet. We may wish to have SDN's outside each peering point, but that's the ISP's business, not the Internet's architecture's.

See, we can want one thing in one place and something else entirely in a different place. One-size-fits-all solutions don't attempt to address the requirements of each situation.

We changed all our systems over time to handle this great IPv6 change, and haven't used IPv6 yet

You might have, but many of those systems still set to default to 512K routes also don't have IPv6 in ASIC, only in software on the anemic CPU. This will improve, but today shows us that not everybody is running the latest gear.

(not that IPv6 fixes this problem, but to the larger question)

At that point, does the world finally point to China and say enough is enough, or will the far left still insist on giving them a MASSIVE out?

That 'out' is the best thing that we can do. If you look carefully, China is moving as fast as it can towards fast breeder reactors, hydro, etc. They're cheaper in the long-run than carbon-based energy sources and much better for their air (and ours) but the capital expense is really high. Look, nobody in Beijing is happy about breathing diesel soup for breakfast.

If you want to reduce China's available capital, you're just going to delay their cleaning up their act. Even the IPCC models count on economic development as a major source of reduction. All the "Scare Numbers" that politicians quote are based on IPCC's worst estimates based on a throttling of economic development.

Economies are dynamic, not static (sorry, Mr. Keynes, your fantasy failed). China has learned the foibles of central-planning - we should not do worse than they did.

Or does corporate America avoid this entire opportunity/entanglement/briar patch?

Yes, to a large degree, and they're stuck in the last century. IP has always been an imaginary government monopoly meant to enhance the business interests of a certain caste; originally that was the author/inventor, but that ship has long sailed - now it's corporate profits almost exclusively (and you may find exceptions that prove the rule).

The next century will be on the Internet and artificial scarcity will be seen as a quixotic relic. Understand this and move forward - businesses that do will outcompete businesses that don't because they're going with nature, not against it. You do still need to keep yourself out of courts, because the death throes of the old corporations will be violent, but use your legal team as protection from other corporations, not protection from customers.

If your company cannot embrace the future and *you* get it, then that's a great signal to move on to a place with a positive slope. These are, of course, long-term trends, but fighting the brushfires of a losing battle is no way to spend one's life.

No good reason? Really?

Look on the bright side - with Type-D they'll figure out how to go reversible and genderless and then we'll be done for good.

Intel offered to replace any P5 with the FDIV bug upon request.

Fortunately most of the P5's were socketed with a trivial heatsink. People with i7 48xx and 49xx laptops are going to be caught up in this - those could have been a really nice portable KVM machine with TSX.

Then again, Intel chips are so expensive they must have the cost of a possible recall built into each one.

Natural monopolies should never be for profit.

Wireline services aren't natural monopolies. Anybody watching TV on FiOS or making a phone call on Cable can attest to that.

But ... they are very frequently granted cartel or hegemony status, benefit from all sorts of incumbent protection regulations, and almost certainly feature regulatory capture. These are features of fascism, not monopolies, which is arguably much worse.

Depending on geography, roads may be natural monopolies. Dams on rivers, extraction of resources on a given land, that sort of thing. Water, gas, and electric services are usually granted monopolies, but if they abuse prices enough there's nothing that explicitly prevents a competing water or gas line, other than government interference. In the presence of such regulations, you'll see rainwater collection, solar panels, propane tanks, etc.

There can also be a high barrier to entry that makes competition a poor finance decison. If your whole town is wired for cable it takes a lot of money to go after that market because you have a large investment with a slow initial pay-off. But again, FTTH has been done in competitive markets - there just needs to be billions to back it.