TrueCrypt full disk encryption (but be prepared for Customs to ask for access). Automated online backup (or at least github and backups of that repository).

Dual displays? Tablet and appropriate software (e.g. iDisplay) , and if stored separately you may not even be fully down if/when your laptop goes on its own travels. With good backups, laptops can be a commodity so be prepared for a possible loss of one to *not* ruin your travels /week /month /year.

When Sears purchased Kmart, some discussion related to the fact that Kmart holdings wasn't a retail company - it was a real estate investment company that happened to have stores on its investment property. This is the same - Sears owns a lot of property and this lets them pay for taxes and upkeep until they unload it.

This may actually improve battery life on some devices - those big bright displays are serious battery hogs.

Is it that he doesn't understand concurrent code, or is it that his knowledge of it is different from yours? If he's my age or even 5-10 years younger he didn't cover much with asynchronous web apps in school (I graduated just before Berners-Lee announced), but he may well be aware of concurrent processing in other contexts.

First off, anyone who did any GUI development even in completely-unthreaded 16-bit VB3 should be able to understand the basic concepts. DoEvents anyone? Throw a timer control on a form AND handle GUI interaction? Congratulations, concurrency if only at a minor level. Hell, anyone who's written GUI apps that trigger long database queries without hanging the app has dealt with concurrency.

Second, anyone who's done much with *nix command-line processing uses concurrency even if they don't know it. Piping anything through multiple stages? Each of those processes is running concurrently, either waiting for input or processing input possibly while the preceding stage is still chugging along providing more.

Finally, has he done any multi-threaded apps (or passed on that approach for scaling reasons)? At this stage I'd expect him to know what you're talking about, but there's still a noticeable difference between multiple threads and thinking the same way about web apps.

I know that you're all young whippersnappers who should get off my damn lawn, but does nobody remember the RSA Perl T-Shirts from Joel Furr from back in 1995? Yeah, yeah, most of you weren't out of kindergarten, whatever.

Basically, the shirts had RSA as implemented in 3 lines of unreadable-even-for-perl code, which at the time was illegal to export in machine-readable format (Thanks, ITAR!). I believe there were multiple variations, including barcode versions for extra-crunchy machine-readability and at least one person who attempted to turn himself into a munition by getting it tattooed on. Later on there was a similar movement around DeCSS (not "munitions" related); I still have at least one of the shirts from that.

Seems to me that this is pretty clearly in the same general category.

Oh, and "damn kids"

Interesting, so they figure if they go cable-only they can try to get more money than they otherwise might via retransmission fees.

I'm not so sure that the cable carriers would be heartbroken to see this happen. Right now I suspect they're mostly having to pay Fox for the "privilege" of carrying the over-the-air content, but a change like this might well mean that the network was paying to be carried instead.

Having their battery supplier fold didn't help matters either.

I've seen a bit of mention of this, but not much.

Anyone remember a furor not too long ago about assorted "creepershot" forums on Reddit? Google Glass will make creepershots trivial - at least now it's (generally) obvious if you're following people around photographing them.

The only verified way to get useful information on a tech community site (or Usenet) is to post something wrong or at least incomplete. The geek drive to correct someone wrong on the internet is much stronger than the drive to just share information.

Hacker News had a great example of that the other day when someone posted "[things I do in my first 5 minutes on a server]". 300+ posts later and that's a pretty informative discussion.

Offhand I can't think of a better example of doing it right than the online version of the PHP manual. The user contributed notes make a huge difference in dealing with real-world usage.

Established US legal doctrine says that drones in US airspace are perfectly legal as long as they're being operated by foreign militaries.

Interesting. Does this mean that before too long there's going to be a nice glut of Samsung laptops being sold as refurbs? Replace, reflash, resell?

They did pretty much the only thing they could.

One of the choices people are saying would've been better is removing the requirement that it be for California businesses only, but by doing that they would have had a huge number of California residents who sold a business anywhere filing amended returns as far back as possible to get the no-longer-limited credits.

Next, marketing to alcohol manufacturers.

If it has a decent dual-mode color/b&w screen readable in direct light without backlighting, I'll shop at Wal-Mart for the first time in years, because this will immediately become an eInk killer.