I've always been used to big refunds because I've done a lot of contracting work, and that means employment gaps and an overall yearly income that's lower than the estimated taxes taken out of each paycheck. Settled down fulltime...don't think that'll happen anymore.

I've been hearing a lot on NPR about students boycotting the test (with support of their families, and in some cases, teachers)...any of that happening where you are?

In the house I bought last year, the cheapest Comcast business tier is just a smidgen more expensive than the home tier I would have wanted...and it's by far the best option around, way better than DSL.

Apparently having a business account means that you get dedicated cable (= your neighbors don't slow you down), super fast responses in tech support, and even your own salesman...which is a little weird. But in any case, it's never given me lower than advertised, even when people with non-business accounts are getting screwed left and right.

Yeah, new version doesn't let you search in Smoots anymore, but I'm having trouble being bothered by that, I can convert stuff anyway.

Maybe it's just Stockholm syndrome though. I stopped using the new version at first because it had no distance tool, and said as much in the feedback; I came back once they re-added it and emailed me saying so.

I guess I could always say that the real mistake is using nautical miles when you should be using SI...

I don't see how that's misleading. So what if the program has all kinds of fancy algorithms--they're not waving around "look how smart we are!!". They're saying "Hey if you want to write image processing code, you can do it this easy". ...man, I miss my image processing class.

Sounds like someone's never heard of iterated prisoner's dilemma. Even beyond that, there's plenty of real-world reward grids where player 1's reward for (C,C) is even higher than (D,C). "But that's not interesting in game theory at all!" So what?

You and your partner commit a crime and nobody knows a crime was committed. Do you really think that ratting out your partner will always be a better result than high-fiving and both keeping it quiet? That's silly.

"Hey we've got some upcoming technical challenges for future missions that need us to deal with pressurizing and heating liquids"
"Okay, what are the parameters?"
"A lot like coffee actually"
"Well then...let's trial our technology by building an espresso machine."

Today's attempt, they expected a 60% chance of clear enough weather. Tomorrow they expect 50% chance, so...fingers crossed?

I don't see anything wrong with one country being focused on one thing for a decade or two. It's efficient.

Mars takes ~260 days to reach, with a payload that could theoretically bring humans...maybe 130 if we do some pretty crazy stuff. Europa takes three years minimum for a much smaller payload. Actually getting humans to Mars is already a big technical challenge, let alone living once we get there...it's going to take a heck of a lot more practical experience before we can get them to Europa.

Say what you want about the pointlessness of living off-world, but Mars is great practice. It's closer, it has more solar power available, and we can send bigger things with our current technology. Same with the Moon...great practice, but even less practical reasons to be there than Mars.

That experiment is already running in many work environments, where developers can choose between a Windows machine or a Mac for their workstation. It's not coming out of the dev's pocket, so it's as free of a choice as you're going to get. Where I work there's about 10-20% Windows usage, and I'm one of them...just can't get the hang of that awful, awful Mac wrapper around the supposedly Linux core.

When I used my Mac, my documents had a file actually named ~/foo.txt because I tried to save something to a path in Chrome. Ugh. I miss working somewhere that ran Ubuntu natively.

You want a dead language that's also amendable...sounds like you'll need a central authority that decides what concepts are worthy of becoming words, and we all read that book in school. Concepts have emotional baggage, and there's some interesting research showing that words for an apparently identical concept in multiple languages has very different emotions attached to it, and that's probably true across different regional dialects as well.

Consider the word "marriage", and legal battles all over the place about whether it's defined as one man-one woman or not. Either you can force that precise interpretation on all users of the language, which is only possible if you alter the way people think, or your language is not static and the meaning will shift over time for different people, so...failure.

I guess it might be possible to version a language, so you can label a document or sentence or a single object as being the 2000-2009 interpretation. That could work for historical legal documents, but for a living language, people aren't going to keep up with new definitions all the time...and again, some people will disagree whether should have a changed meaning or not, so when you're in the pacific northwest when people say "marriage" it's locally assumed they mean the 2010 build, and when people in North Carolina say it, it's locally assumed that they mean the 1980 build. That, and you still have the problem where one central authority defines words. Maybe if you allow language forks that anyone can publish as an authority, as long as they are precisely defined, and all legal documents need to be tagged with what fork and build they're using?

And yet despite all those other options being available, people still use plain old cell phones to do it in other countries, which is one big reason why sandy places with a much higher rate of terror attacks already have these plans in place. I used to see news stories about them shutting down cell service to stop attacks every once in a while, and I suppose it probably worked sometimes, in that weird confluence of intel that's good enough to know an attack is coming and how, but not where.

Yeah, anyone doing an attack here would have much better resources available. Cell phones are still the most desirable option though because those radio options, unless you programmed them to detect a specific signal, could get set off by random noise pretty easy. (Remember hearing about that attack somewhere in east europe I think, a few years back where a guy was prepping a bomb and got blown up by a telemarketer?) Cell phones are dead simple to use, much like alarm clocks or other things where you don't care what the signal is, just that there is now voltage / a closed circuit / whatever.

People keep making the mistake that someone who's going to go through the trouble to do this, has technical knowledge or the support of someone who does. Just because YOU could rig up a raspberry pi to set something off when it gets an email, doesn't mean a terrorist is going to go through the trouble to learn. He'd probably prefer to spend his time learning to make things go boom larger, not smarter.

That's (Windows) (Express Settings), not (Windows Express) (Settings). I'm pretty sure it applies to the small number of settings you're forced to click through when you first configure your machine, and the presence of a setting in that set doesn't mean they're hiding other settings in the system.

It also means that the content sites they visit make a hell of a lot more money. 10x as much is not an unreasonable estimate, and is sometimes low. Generally means that the sites are higher quality. But that's more tragedy-of-the-commons, and less of a direct effect.