On iOS you can't put unsigned code on any device, not even your own, without the signing cert so to do serious development, you need to pay $100 ...

Until today.

That actually doesn't sound too horrible, but then again, I enjoy writing parsers, so take that with a grain of salt... or an entire salt truck.

Same here, though for me, it was ATA and USB HID devices. As a programmer, nothing annoys me more than running into bugs and thinking, "I could fix this in two minutes if I had the source," and not being able to fix it because I don't. I've fixed bugs in many other people's code on many occasions simply because they annoyed me.

With that said, I've never seriously entertained touching a GPU driver; I think that might very well be the special hell that Captain Reynolds was talking about. :-)

Steve's speech may not have gotten us off of Flash, but it did light a fire under Adobe's backside. At the time, Flash was by far the biggest cause of browser crashes. I think it was well into the double-digit percentages, at a frequency that made the next most frequent crasher bugs seem like noise by comparison. Between the public pressure it put on Adobe to clean up their terrible, buggy, hopelessly insecure code and the effort that various browser teams made to sandbox plug-ins in separate processes, browsers are a lot more stable with Flash installed now than they were back then.

In practice, you're much, much more likely to have cells become nearly dead shorted because of dendritic growth caused by cell reversal in a pack. Such dendrites dramatically reduce the pack's overall capacity and increase its self-discharge rate. This is why discharging packs to nothing is a very bad idea unless you either do it one cell at a time or do it extremely slowly.

You cannot damage a single NiMH (or NiCd, for that matter) cell by simply draining it down to 0v. Well, you will have to use a "stupid" charger to wake it up afterwards, but the cell will be otherwise ok.

If the charger is too dumb (lacking thermal sensors), I'd be concerned with overheating the cells and starting a fire (though not nearly as spectacularly as with lithium ion chemistry). You do, of course, have to use a charger that won't cowardly refuse to charge a cell that is fully depleted.

And damage rechargeable batteries by draining them below their safe discharge threshold.

Also why would anyone make a bluetooth keyboard without a proper boost converter that can run down to the alkalines minimum voltage!!!

Because the device can't tell whether you're using an alkaline battery or not, and if you run a rechargeable battery down to an alkaline battery's minimal voltage, you'll permanently damage the battery.

Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 1, Sentence 1.

The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Executive power, by definition, means overseeing the day-to-day administrative activities of the government. Executive orders whose sole purpose is to manage those day-to-day administrative activities fall very clearly within the President's authority.

About twice as many Democrats voted for it. Only 1 Democrat voted against it compared to 30 republicans. That's a very significant difference.

It was poorly ordered. I think the intended meaning was "slightly more against it than for it", but because of it being right after the post about the Democrats, most folks read it as "slightly more against it than the Democrats".

The biggest problem, IMO, is why the Republicans were against it. Most of them seemed to vote against it not because it gave the government too much power, but because it gave the government too little. For example, they bring us folks like Mitch McConnell claiming that the lack of the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. (sic) Act is going to cause terrorism-related deaths in the U.S., rather than recognizing that the colossal resources and manpower that are going into data collection would be much more effectively spent in a more targeted way that didn't catch so many innocent people in the dragnet, and that the mere existence of the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. (sic) Act that he so staunchly supports makes us more likely to miss a real terrorist threat rather than less.

See that's the thing, you chose to live in London. You could have taken a job somewhere with cheaper housing, but for you, being in London was more important than having more space. It's a tradeoff. For me, having more space is more important, because many of the things I do (both for fun and to make money) require a lot of space on an ongoing basis. This is why I don't live in a city that's so big that a postage-stamp-sized piece of land costs ten thousand bucks. :-)

Either way, you kind of missed my point, which is that it isn't necessarily true that a family of 5 can't derive significant usability benefits from having 5,000 square feet. Whether the extra space is wasted or not depends highly on what sorts of activities the family wants to do when they aren't at work/school, and whether they can readily achieve those goals in less space.

The industrial printer because I have a side business doing book publishing. I've found no print shops in the area that can handle one-off large-format printing for doing proofs of hardcover dust jackets, hence the only way to usefully get books out the door was to buy a giant beast.

As for the exercise equipment, most days of the week, I work until the early evening, then have musical rehearsals that keep me up for several more hours. Having that equipment in my house is the only way I have a prayer of getting any exercise at all.

This is California. All the garages in the region have long since been converted into bedrooms, and very few houses have basements. :-)

I'm not complaining. I'm simply saying that you shouldn't assume that everyone's space needs are the same. Could I survive without the drum kit? Sure. The piano? Probably not for very long. For me, music is a crucial emotional outlet that I do, in fact, very much need. I'd probably sell one of my legs before I'd sell my piano. I've owned it for two decades, and it is very much a part of me.

But the more important question is whether that space could somehow be converted to another use that would fulfill one of my other desires. The answer, of course, is no. There's no practical way to turn my living room into a wood shop, because that pretty much requires a dust-proof floor, which carpeting is not. And it is highly incompatible with any other use of the room because of the dust involved.

I try to do the dustiest work outside, but with me being at work all day, I have very limited daylight hours in which to do so. As a result, the lack of a dedicated wood shop triples or quadruples the number of days that any given project requires, because I basically get to a point where I can't go any further without making some major wood cut, and then I'm stuck waiting until the next day that I get home before dark, which may be two or three days away.

What makes me uncomfortable is when those projects cause me to either lose the use of my main bathroom or kitchen for weeks at a time. Yes, it is, strictly speaking, a want, in that I want to be able to do woodworking projects, and that my survival is not dependent upon my ability to do them. However, because I am unable to do these things usably in the space available, I do need more space if I hope to do these things in any non-insane manner. And that was my point—that one should not assume that other people don't have valid reasons for wanting more space merely because you don't. :-)

When I first heard the story on KCBS this morning, that was my first thought as well.