There is still room for novelty in solving a traditional, well-explored CS problem in the physical space, largely because the cost of operations is different. In a computer, quicksort is the accepted way to sort data without foreknowledge of how it is mixed. Sorting railcars using quicksort would be a terrible idea because you can't swap arbitrary cars in constant time (https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/issue.aspx?id=369&y=0&no=&content=true&page=5&css=print). In this case, Amazon may well have developed a novel caching scheme that is efficient in the space of their distribution network, which likely has a different topography than the memory of a 286.

At least in CT, the age at which you can practically operate a vehicle on your own keeps creeping up, and there are always new rules restricting the privilege (only during the day, no passengers, etc). Assuming that the rest of the nation passes similar policies (given that we never repeal such things it has to be a purely additive effect anyway), I would think it obvious that teens drive less on average, as teens can't drive as much.

Putting the home/end/etc cluster in upper right in the same configuration as desktop keyboards is one of the more intuitive pieces of design I've seen. I use home/end a lot while coding, and it took me about 5 minutes to adjust the muscle memory when I got my first Thinkpad (well, only Thinkpad; the T40 is built like a tank).

By and large, yes. Red Hat picks a version to baseline for each major RHEL release (4,5,6 ...). So, RHEL6 runs kernel 2.6.32, whether it's 6.0 from 3 years ago or 6.5 that just came out. What they then do is selectively back-port changes from the latest version to create their own special version number: 2.6.32-431, for example.

While hypothetically they are guaranteeing to protect you from any breaking changes, it makes it an absolute nightmare to guarantee that anything is FIXED. For example, if I am asked "is bug xyz fixed?", I can look in the upstream changelog and see that the bug went away in kernel 3.2, it's very hard to see if that fix made it into Red Hat's version -431. From a stability standpoint, RHEL is wonderful, but from any other, specifically security certification, it's a pit of despair.

If the Federal government hadn't used taxation to effectively eliminate most of state government, "the majority of Americans" could have their coastal utopias and leave the big, square states in peace. Unfortunately, states are forced to clone whatever rules the Federal government comes up with to recover the taxes paid by their citizens. Example: states individually manage their highway systems, but if they want them to be funded they either need to double-tax their citizens, or reduce the speed limit to 65, set the drinking age to 21, and care more about seat belts than safe foul-weather driving.

The Voting Rights Act calls specifically for certain states, by name, to submit any changes to state voting law to the Federal government. Also, if the Senate were ever to legitimately consider state's rights when evaluating legislation, the Federal government would be a great deal smaller.

If two demographically different groups are also geographically distant, is one group being larger a reason to give it dominion over the other?

I believe that there is something to be said for an age where there are potential scheduling conflicts between lunar probes.

What attribute of a "real" currency prevents collapse? Governments (looking at you Venezuela) will claim to enforce exchange rates, but once they run out of hard currency to trade at their declared rate (or just refuse to exchange at that rate), the collapse happens anyway. It's unlikely that there is anyone who would attempt to maintain a charade around a collapsed Bitcoin, but just because someone is willing to pretend doesn't make something real.

When a block of Bitcoin is solved, the bonus goes to the machine that solved the block and then everyone starts over. You're basically in a race each block to be the one to solve it. By having a larger portion of the total computing power, you increase your chances of hitting each block, but are by no means guaranteed to ever hit (much as you can put money down on both red and black on a roulette table and still lose since the house is playing green). At most, someone could approach generating BTC2.5/min as their hash rate approached 100% of the total. Bitcoin would collapse long before that point, though, since once you hit 51% of the total hash rate, you can double spend and send yourself infinite coins.

Death spiral or technological change? No industry will last for all time; churn from new industries emerging helps to keep a crop of fresh minds at the helm of society. Modern efforts to bail out shrinking companies are directed by oligarchs seeking to hold onto the reins of power, under the guise of helping the little guy.

Since the no-fly list identifies you only by name to the airline, the government can quite easily claim that YOU are not on the no-fly list, but it's just a mix up with some OTHER John Smith who totally exists and is a terrorist. Naturally, the details of the other John Smith are classified, so there's no piece of identification that you can possibly produce to prove that you are not they. The lovely part is that you only need to be on the list a short time for the restriction of movement to hamper whatever you were doing that the powers-that-be didn't like, so even if this judge were to take the unprecedented step of revealing the contents of the list, they could produce one from five minutes before or after lacking your name ...

While any user-facing application is going to spend most of its time waiting for the user to do something, the latency to finish that task is still something the user will want to see optimized. Further, if a long-running task tops out at 20% CPU, apparently optimization was weighted too much towards CPU and you need to look into optimizing your IO or memory usage.

In addition to its brevity, it also implies the 4 times as many "flags" were taken simply from searches of Google, Linkedin, and others (2x as many points scored, with flags being worth 0.5x those taken via social engineering). Sounds like the corporate website and employees' social networking accounts are the real threat ...

Two questions: Are we going to wind up developing the equivalent of a "USDA Certified Grade A Cycles" sticker? And what is the cloud computing equivalent of Taco Bell "meat"?

I feel like commoditization might provide a level of anonymity to allow both a low grade of service (faking processing with either less accurate processing or known-faulty equipment) and a security risk (While a collection of cloud services are mining your customer data for you, how many are copying it off for later perusal?)