Yeah, there are some websites you might want to go to that still need Flash or some equally ugly support to get video to work. Right now I've been trying to get SliTaz Linux to let me watch YouTube as well as finding the right operating system and VMware settings to make the display resizeable, but I'm also trying out DragonFly BSD (still at the "installing Xorg" stage.)

If you really need computational horsepower, get yourself some kind of PC with a fast graphics card and run CUDA or one of the other GPU-based computation packages. (In my case, I went with a Raspberry Pi :-)

I hope they at least let you mount disk drives using Samba or NFS or whatever from your own file server at home, in addition to whatever walled-garden functionality they may be selling. Much of their target market is going to include people who have those, either purpose-built servers or terabyte-disk USB/Ethernet external drives or their old Windows box with file sharing turned on.

Ok, some jerk actually managed to steal enough Dogecoins a few months ago to be worth actual money, which is so not the point of Dogecoin. I mine them partly because they're worth basically zero while still being cryptographically interesting; six months of one CPU on my old lab PC might have added up to 25 cents, but it's still in the "Reddit tip jar" range, not the "So wow! Many money!" range even though I have much coins.

Once you get the rocket safely out past Earth's orbit, most of us hippies aren't too worried about it.

The problem is getting it there - what percentage of space launches fail? Way more than zero, and we don't want plutonium-powered reactors on an exploding rocket, even if ETGs really are about as safe as you can get for nuclear power generation.

Mostly Manhattan, with a few in the outer boroughs? Mostly not in poor neighborhoods, where they may not have been as widespread, and they got taken out earliest because of the War On Politically Incorrect Drugs?

Are you kidding? They couldn't even figure out how to get female characters to work.

XKCD 606

Candidate Obama gave great, inspiring speeches, but wasn't that good at real-time conversation. (President Obama not so much.) Dubya Bush always looked like a deer in the headlights, amazed that he was getting away with what he said and hoping nobody would ask questions about it.

But the guy who was really good? Bill Clinton. He was always on, always quick thinking, always had a good comeback for anything, lots of fun to listen to. Sure, he was lying through his teeth half the time, but he knew which half it was, and he did it with a smile that said that he knew that you knew he was lying, and that he'd make the game worth playing, and he usually did.

If he's 50, he was born in 1964, so he might have gone to college before Apple II's became widespread. But when I was in high school from 1972-1974, we had time-sharing access to a PDP-11 at the nearby state university (with one teletype shared for the entire school), so by 8 years later it's likely he had something a lot fancier. My wife's high school didn't have that - they used punch cards, which got batch-processed weekly.

I first encountered PLATO in college, and it had Notesfiles (which contributed significantly to the evolution of Usenet, as well as Lotus Notes), and the coolest-ever Star Trek game.

In the US, the Pi was $25 for the A (now $20 for A+), and $35 for the B (which is what I actually bought, but this discussion is mainly about the A/A+.) The Beaglebone currently runs $52-55 online, and has 4GB memory instead of 2GB (it was getting hard for them to find 2GB parts), and the processor's been updated a bit since last fall when I looked at it (it's also a newer ARM core than the Pi uses.) The catch is that if you want to do 1920x1280 video, you only get 24Hz, vs. 60 for the Pi, which affects using it as a media platform. (But if you don't care about that, yeah, it's a great deal, especially now that it has more RAM.)

The Model A boards have 256MB, the Model B have 512MB. They could have put 512MB in the Model A, but it would have cost them a bit more and they were trying to make it cheaper. (I still wish they'd done it.)

But one reason the board is so cheap is that it's using a System On A Chip that's designed for other applications, not custom for them, so making it faster, or using a newer ARM instruction set, or (apparently) putting more than 512MB on the board would be hard, requiring a major redesign and increasing costs. For instance, the BeagleBone Black costs about twice as much, and while it uses a faster CPU with a newer instruction set, the video processing part is slower, so it's not a total win.

City council elections here in Mountain View California had a bunch of candidates running, including a guy named Neal, who has posters of himself wearing a cowboy hat. I didn't actually vote for him, but maybe my wife did. (It's a non-partisan "pick 3 of N" election, there were two we liked, one we disliked, and a few in the middle that we picked randomly.)

Oh, it's much messier than that, though that's usually how I vote. But consider an open-primary system where the Democrat incumbent is running for re-election and you have the option to choose which party's primary to vote in - you know the Democrat incumbent is going to win her party's primary (if there aren't any serious opponents), so the best strategy for the primary is to vote in the Republican primary instead, for the least electable candidate, whether that's a far-right Tea Party challenger or at least the second-tier candidate who doesn't have GOP machine money. That means that in the general election, your favorite candidate is running against a weaker opponent.

Gaming top-two is much trickier; there are more unstable ways to go wrong, but a lot of it has to do with the candidates' supporters spending money on various people from all parties in the primary.

I didn't know they'd done that, but I can't say I'm surprised. Another thing that's going to hit all the third parties is maintaining ballot access, since the main thing that's kept them on the ballot is vote count in the governor's or other state-wide races, and none of us are getting them this year. It's also possible to get party status by getting enough registered voters, but I don't know if any of California's third parties meet that threshold.