If you want to university back in the 80s and you STILL haven't repaid your loans, well you are the one who is failing. Not only was university cheaper, and loan terms better, then but you've had like THREE DECADES to pay it back. Student loans are a bitch, and take a long time to pay back for sure. However unless you really fucked up, you can manage it in 30 years.

A good way to tell is with nickle metal hydride rechargables. They have a 1.2v cell voltage. So does a device work with them? Then it'll work on less than 1.3v. Of the things in my house that take batteries, all but one have worked with them. That device, a swifer wetjet, specifically says no rechargables so I haven't tried.

NiMH batters work well in devices including, but not limited to, remotes, wireless microphones, EOTech sights, laser pointers, cordless phones, headphone amplifiers, and wireless mice.

There likely are specific laws, likely related to holocaust and Armenian genocide denial and such, that would allow a group like the Sikhs to sue a US firm that aids and abets such calumnies.

Considering the 1980s attack on the Sikh ethnic group by Hindis was a well organized and deliberate attempt at genocide, I would suggest that they have a good case.

More personally - Zuckerberg you goddamn moral coward, if Facebook doesn't support groups like this, it serves no useful purpose other than data mining and privacy undermining.

They are different for sure, but that doesn't make them bad. I enjoyed Fallout 3 and I loved New Vegas. Are they the same kind of game as 1 and 2? No, not at all, but they are enjoyable all the same. Not everything needs to be the same all the time, you can have different things in the same universe and it can be fun.

By the same "things can never change" logic, Fallout 1 and 2 were no good because they were different from Wasteland, which was their predecessor (the universe was made because Interplay couldn't get the rights to Wasteland from EA).

Evaluate a game on its own merits. Don't demand that it be just like its predecessors.

I mean you need things like computers, cellphones, beverages, etc in a show. I'm not bothered if those have logos, or if they don't. In fact, it can look more natural and realistic if they do. A Good example is Dell in V for Vendetta. Nothing in your face, the logos on the cop's monitors just aren't covered up. They are just part of the set. When it is done like that, I'm quite happy.

An example of it being done poorly that bothered me was in I Robot, when Will Smith puts on some brand new Converse shoes released in sync with the movie and talks about them. It was very clearly something shoehorned in there, not a fluid part of the script.

Being right isn't enough. You have to be popular to effect change.

It is a good balance between getting a good 3rd, 4th and 5th and not getting too complex. You have to go to 29-TET before you get a better perfect 5th and 41-TET to get a better major 3rd. Gets a little complex musically to represent and deal with all that, not to mention design instruments that can play it back.

So remember that ultimately music is all math, and as such some things do end up being "better" than others musically. I'm not saying we shouldn't have the capabilities to use other scales, I mean computers are more or less unbounded in their capabilities and samplers can microtune to any required setup, but 12-TET has a reason for its prevalence.

If you compose music on a computer, you almost certainly still do it with MIDI. All the new highly advanced synths and samplers still use MIDI as their input for data. Everything from big dollar stuff like Native Instruments Komplete down to freeware. MIDI goes in, sound comes out.

In some ways it surprises me since you'd think they would get around to improving it (there are some things MIDI leaves to be desired) but on the other hand it does work well for nearly everything and there's something to be said about keeping things standard. You can literally take one of those old General MIDI songs and feed the data in to a modern sampler. I do just that all the time to remake old game soundtracks because I enjoy it.

It's too damn complicated for level 1 techs, let alone end users and the general public, to attempt to opt of surveillance, or even intelligently express their dissatisfaction with government and corporate policies.

Politicians don't care and corporations do. These policies will persist until people's lives are strongly negatively affected. Will it require significant damage as a result of foreign powers hacking into the industrial grid? Probably. God knows we aren't in the streets protesting TSA security theater, and its difficult to get more privacy invasive than seeing folks naked.

The US always pays its debts when they are due. I think perhaps the problem is you don't understand how US debt works, and why it is a bit special:

So the most important thing to understand is the US doesn't go and beg people to give it money, rather it auctions debt. People come and purchase the debt. You can do it yourself on their Treasury Direct site. The US sells debt instruments to interested buyers. They are bid on, and whoever bids the lowest interest rate wins. The upshot is the US sets the terms of the debt instruments sold. They have a variety, some are as short as 4 weeks, some as long as 30 years. When you buy something, the terms of repayment are stated up front: What it'll pay, and when. There is no provision to cash out early, and you don't get to dictate any terms, you just choose what note you want to buy (if they are available).

This is how public debt works in a lot of countries, but it isn't how things go when you are getting loans from the IMF.

The other important thing is that all US debt is denominated in US dollars. A US debt instrument specifies how many dollars it'll pay out and that number is NOT inflation adjusted, except in a few very special cases. Well the US government also controls the US mint, which makes US dollars. So the US government can literally print money, and inflate its way in to payments. There are negatives to that, of course, but it is perfectly doable. The US controls its fiscal and monetary policy regarding its debt. Since all its debts are in US dollars, and since US dollars are the world's reserve currency, the US cannot face a crisis where it can't pay, unless such a crisis is internally generated (via the debt limit).

Not the case with Greek debt, it is in Euros and Greece doesn't control the Euro.

Finally, there's the fact that the US has great credit. Doesn't matter if you disagree that it should, fact is it does. Investors are willing to loan the US money for extremely low interest rates because they see it as a very safe investment. 4 week T-Bills have been going for between 0%-0.015%. 30-year bonds have been going for 2.5%-3.75%. Investors bid the interest rates very low because they desire it as a safe investment.

It is easier with something simpler, not something smaller. When you start doing extreme optimization for size, as in this case, you are going to do it at the expense of many things, checks being one of them. If you want to have good security, particularly for something that can be hit with completely arbitrary and hostile input like something on the network, you want to do good data checking and sanitization. Well guess what? That takes code, takes memory, takes cycles. You start stripping everything down to basics, stuff like that may go away.

What's more, with really tiny code sizes, particularly for complex items like an OS, what you are often doing is using assembly, or at best C, which means that you'd better be really careful, but there is a lot of room to fuck up. You mess up one pointer and you can have a major vulnerability. Now you go and use a managed language or the like and the size goes up drastically... but of course that management framework can deal with a lot of issues.

And also other tradeoffs. It is fashionable for some geeks to cry about the amount of disk space that stuff takes, but it always seems devoid of context and consideration, as though you could have the exact same performance/setup in a tiny amount of space if only programmers "tried harder" or something. However you do some research, and it turns out to all be tradeoffs, and often times the tradeoff to use more system resources is a good one. Never mind just capabilities/features, but there can be reasons to have abstractions, managed environments, and so on.

There is little I can do in that regard.

Because they couldn't overcharge. I'm sure they researched the industry and discovered that it is highly price competitive and that just putting an aluminium frame on it would justify a doubling or tripling in price. So they weren't interested. Apple only likes markets where they can overcharge to a massive degree. They don't want to just make money, they want to make stupid amounts of money.

I know, only because where I work is using them. Idea is it is a general two factor token. Can be programmed by the end user or their org. Also in theory a lot of companies could all use their platform and you have one two factor device for everything but in reality you use it for whatever your company does and nothing else.

Once programmed it acts like a HID class keyboard. You push the button, it spits out a string of characters, that being the two factor code for your account at the time.