1.5 years ago. I finally got my molecular dynamics package to run properly, but after messing with it I never did get the sound or advanced buttons working. Yes, I know there are ways, but it still required fiddling... It's better than messing with IRQ's and stuff, but it's still fiddling.

Getting the sound card, network card, and multibutton trackball working on my Linux machine took plenty of finagling too. Just sayin', neither this cast iron pot nor kettle are LeCresuet red - they look black to me...

Almost identical in nature? You mean because there is a eink screen over a color touch screen? They look nothing alike to me.
http://www.springdesign.com/resource/jsp/products/Products.jsp
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/
I think the screen size and button placement on the Alex looks fairly awkward. Adding an advanced but power-intensive feature that's usually turned off onto something that's more efficient but more limited is a pretty standard design approach. And until this gets some full investigation (journalistic or legalistic, either is fine) we're putting the cart before the horse in passing judgment. For all we know, Spring Design really is a troll-like company, whose idea of "working closely with B&N" is having a meeting once with the company who decided not to license their stuff. Who knows yet?

I hit it with java/js disabled - it shows the first line and demand you turn it back on to see the rest... ...but you can select down past that in the frame that it's hiding and paste into Notepad. Immediately afterward, I realized that there was an ad to the right of it that was scrolling the same lyrics anyway. So, one obnoxious site managed to fix another one - guess two wrongs sometimes DO make a right!

It seems to me that the issue lies in whether the data pieces are on the cloud, or if just the programs are. If I lose the ability to edit a Word document from Office-For-Cloud but I have the file stored locally, I grumble that 'the idiots who run the thing' broke the program, and wait for the 'smart guy white knights' to come fix it for them. But in this case I'm holding those bits (exclusively, or a copy) so I know the data are safe. Nuke the server from orbit, for all I care - I'm annoyed that I lost the ability to continue working, but I've only lost time (bad enough, I know...) Downtime length and frequency becomes the only factors to my unhappiness

If the whole thing is on the cloud without a user-held copy, my SuperImportantLifeWork.doc can turn into vapor if the worst case happens. Now, we add a new factor - what files I lost, and what's involved in regenerating them. This is the predominate factor in my user unhappiness - phone numbers are hard enough to pull together again for many of us, but when we expand that to everything else on the phones (or extrapolate to what may eventually be on-cloud - pictures, documents, schedules, patient data, etc.) these losses become more catastrophic.

In the end, we usually hear about the same set of factors being important for 'good' backups - different physical hardware, offsite, different power system, geographically-separate, etc., in something like that order (depending on data, usage, etc.) These companies really need to make sure that the user has the opportunity to implement these factors by maintaining a complete (or optionally partial) copy of the data local-to-user.

Nope - IR is a photon (i.e. an energy packet). This energy matches the vibrational energy levels of a molecule, so when it's absorbed it results in the same motions that we call heat. Heat can bleed in all directions, while light can only go in straight lines. Next time you're at a campfire/bonfire, hold up a hand and put your face in the shadow - you'll notice that you feel a small amount of heat on your face, but that overall it's much colder-feeling since you're not absorbing those IR photons.

I suspect the difference isn't in the hardware - it lies in the recording process. Modern music has greater 'production values' than historic recordings did.

Note - I use the phrase 'production values' in a completely value-neutral sense. Some would argue that today's music is over-engineered. Others might say that this is the difference between camcorders and IMAX recordings. Either way, no one is going to confuse highly-engineered video as being from a camcorder unless they take drastic steps to make it look that way. I'd say the same is true for music.

Also, the production goals are different in the two eras. In the 60's-early 80's (yes, I know there's a ton of exceptions....) the aim was more to give you the feeling of being there. Today, the aim is to give you an immersive experience (for lack of a more value-neutral term), and much has been written about the differences in the frequency balance between these eras. And that alone would mean that modern digitally recorded music wouldn't sound live played on speakers.

I'd love to see the control experiment where a pure analog recording (i.e. from soundboard to recorder) was done with a digital shunt (i.e. both get the same board settings, dB's vs frequency, etc.) for an acoustic set. My prediction is your upstairs neighbor wouldn't know the difference between analog and digital in this scenario, since my view is that the biggest difference is an era-dependent outlook on how the recording system is set up.

By "confirmed the feature last night", did you mean:

"confirmed their intention to include an interesting feature, which in all likelihood will be dropped in the last quarter before release because other issues critical to the fundamental infrastructure of the OS have been discovered and will require 110% of effort in order to result in an acceptable basic release?"

I've been trying to learn Spanish lately - my corpspeak is seeming pretty fluent.

Plus, there are hardware based differences in interaction that modify your reading/interaction behavior. Analyzing mouse cursor movements for a trackball, mouse, and touchpad will likely give very different results - and that's assuming they're being moved the same way. When I'm reading with a mouse, I tend to 'follow along' on the page - with a trackball, I park the cursor to the side - with a touchpad, I tend to move in blocks. Add enough variables, and you can model any behavior (at the risk of losing the ability to probe correlation of real factors) - by adding enough exceptions to the algorithm to handle all these cases (and all the others) it strikes me as unlikely that the algo would be able to distinguish between humans and bots.

And if it does, the spammers will probably write a trojan that watches for the user generating a login, and swaps the interaction with the captcha the spammer wants solved. Reminds me of the good ole days of Cold War Arms Racing!

People keep citing technology as a reason that the classroom will be obsolete, and following the basic premise that you've laid out: the lecture is canned, I could watch a video and get the same result. (I'm not ignoring the rest of your points, but I do want to respond to that one.)

The current trend in educational technology is just the opposite - it's an attempt to make the dialog more symmetric (note: I did not say completely symmetric, and it should not be!) Student response systems (aka Clickers) allow instructors to get a more real-time feedback about how well a class has understood a topic, and allows us to adjust our delivery/explanation approach, and reallocate time from mastered to unmastered topics. Online homework systems help large classes still receive feedback regarding their progression through the topic, and 'shrink' the size of the class (my 140 person class gets interaction that feels more like a 40 person class).

That's not to say that we've reached a new steady state, and it's not an advocacy for large class sizes. However, I hope that these passing examples point out that when properly used, technology can help make the classroom more relevant than a video file. There will certainly be a growing-in period for the technologies and their uses to mature, and I do think we're in the early stages of that now, but I see a lot of faculty growing beyond 'PowerPointless' presentations and that's a good start!

Or to work for perfectly competent people who are part of the same company as an idiotic HR department. Clearly, this case is rare as demonstrated by the lack of Dilbert comics depicting HR as ninnies.

Unfortunately, I suspect that we've Slashdotted Senate! Anyone happen to have an email address for her office (not a webform)?

In this context, I guess that makes you a real Moroni!

It's not a bad plan, but I'd shorten the reinstall time even further by setting up a backup image of the OS+programs after a reinstall, and park it on the RAID. Then, your time spent is limited to the transfer rate between the two drives.

Remember your offline backups of the RAID as well though - otherwise you may simply end up with a well-preserved virus refuge.

And if your metabolism allow it (mine used to), there are other health problems to consider. I had to have kidney stones removed surgically by 23 due in part to the too-high concentration of caffeine, dehydration, and high mineral content in the component water back when I used to drink 2 Double Gulps of Mt. Dew/Surge, plus assorted cans of soda during the day.

Surgery = bad. Surgery - incisions = really not fun (it's the kidney, and there're ways to reach it without cutting. RotoRooter. Think about it, then think about reducing your intake instead...)

That made for a rough few months...