This is a pretty academic way of looking at it. You have to start some where. When you were learning to add single digit numbers no one said "Learning a little bit about adding numbers is not Calculus." While in a literal sense it is not, you simply can not proceed without the latter.

I watched an episode once of American Greed about Max Butler who had the longest prison sentence for hacking in history (13 years). In my opinion he had no remorse for what he did. He truly believed he didn't really hurt anyone. In his interview he was basically like, "when they raided me, I thought they were just picking up bricks (encrypted hard drives) but apparently the FBI has some really smart guys". He seemed more remorseful with the fact that he lost to the FBI than anything else. This guy probably deserved the sentence and then some. Also as a note, in the program they eluded to the fact that they needed to catch him with his machine running to decrypt everything....I'm sure the keys were in memory.

I have absolutely eaten 50% of my battery in a two hour long meeting because I was constantly paging through documents of notes during the discussion. Most of it is spent with the document just sitting on the display for reference / discussion. I leave the LCD on because I have to keep unlocking the phone with my pin every time someone asks something like "what was that number from March?" This would also make reading more practical, as I often do not do any e-reading during the day because I am worried about battery life over 12hrs.

You've got it, I do this on my motorcycle all the time. I could mount it on the handle bars like a lot of guys, but I find it is just too distracting. If I'm really not sure I just stop and look at the screen. The other piece to this is to review your route before you head out. 2-3 mins of review and there is really no problem.

Darkfall tried this, the mechanics were just abused (their are no "levels"). So instead of grinding, people would macro their guy into doing the basic task to up that skill. On paper Darkfall looked awesome, it may have been implemented poorly, but I'm not sure there is a way to do it otherwise. If you're not grinding...how else do you make it hard to level up?...that is the question....

I've been a satellite internet user for ~10 years, I have used both wildblue and hughesnet. The big problem for regular internet use is not latency, my current hughesnet connection:
Pinging google.com [173.194.33.4] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 173.194.33.4: bytes=32 time=775ms TTL=54
Reply from 173.194.33.4: bytes=32 time=1013ms TTL=54
Reply from 173.194.33.4: bytes=32 time=1108ms TTL=54
Reply from 173.194.33.4: bytes=32 time=1098ms TTL=54
Ping statistics for 173.194.33.4: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 775ms, Maximum = 1108ms, Average = 998ms
While this makes online gaming pretty much impossible, you can reasonably browse the web send emails, etc....though.

The REALLY BIG PROBLEM is bandwidth. I am on the most expensive package hughesnet provides...and that is 450MB a day. Which again is fine for checking email and 'normal' web browsing (according to hughesnet) but any kind of downloading, like for instance my new smartTV with built in YouTube and Netflix, yeah, useless. I switched from Wildblue to hughesnet a few years ago because wildblue uses a 30 day bandwidth total like most cell services, so if you use all 15GB of bandwidth in the first week, you have to wait until the end of the billing cycle to get more bandwidth. Hughesnet is a 24 hour cycle, so after 24hrs you get your 450 mb and are back to normal speed.
The other nice thing about hughesnet is they let you keep your previous days unused bandwidth, so if I do not use the internet for a day, the next day I will have 900mb of bandwidth to use, if I have 100mb left at the end of the day, I get 550mb the next day, etc...of course the "pool" maxes at 2 days worth of bandwidth. Both services also have a 2am to 7am unlimited bandwidth, the problem is it feels like the connection drops to a crawl during this time, and the normal 300 kb/s I would get during the day is more like 20 or 30kb/s. But at least I have my linux servers and windows updates scheduled to run during this time.
By the way, I live in NY, and there is not even cell service at my house. Currently it looks as if I will have satellite internet for the foreseeable future.

I have several customers on long island, and my customers were some of the quickest to recover (they just had to get themselves back online) as all data and POS systems are in the cloud. I keep 3 separate geographic locations of server clusters and a fourth backup at our office. Those IT guys who think data centers / companies are infallible have not been around long enough to see a data center go under financially, or have servers raided because the police don't understand what a virtual server means. Much less an actual natural disaster. IMHO there is very little reason to be 'down' these days, with on demand services from rackspace and S3, it just takes proper planning.

In 2010 there were 114,800,000 U.S. households, 114,800,000 / 70,000 powered homes = 1,640 of these facilities at 3 square miles per facility = 4,900 square miles! Airizona is 114,006 square miles, that is 4.2% of the state covered in panels....or roughly the entire state of Connecticut if you have some room for growth.

If this correlation of phone spending to income holds for the first world, how long before a department like the IRS uses this kind of meta data to flag potential tax evaders.

On 2.0.8 Twoflower: Help -> Check for updates = You have the latest version of VLC media Player :-(

Couldn't a cell be neutrally buoyant in water negating the effects of gravity? I thought it was something like surface tension keeping these things small, it would also make sense that this mesh would counteract surface tension.

passed -> past*

Agreed, I haven't seen anything new that doesn't use AIML in a long time. I think the first time I used AIML was with Alicebot back in 1998 or 1999. It does seem like hobbyist natural language bots are a little stagnant, but it is a really hard problem. All that said, Watson's methods for solving the natural language problem were pretty interesting, but of course most of us don't have a budget to build something like Watson.

I think the idea is to hand a kid this already setup, so it is a very cheap way to get someone into writing web applications.

This is pretty awesome. One of the barriers of learning to code is getting passed the server setup. I remember fiddling with a mandrake installation for days before getting it to actually give me a properly parsed perl page. This should help kids get into it. And for those of you everyone-should-code-webpages-in-vi(m) people, kids who find it interesting, will dig deeper. All of my initial *unix skills came from wanting to do more with a webpage (e.g. how do I install a perl library), but having a functional web / database is what got me started.