Huh? Metric is based on multiples of 10. So 100 years is a metric century. Maybe you're thinking of 36 years, the imperial yard-century.

No. Just no. This guy stole from Target, not Lego. Why would Lego lower their prices just because there's a shoplifter at Target? Anyway, Lego's patents have expired, and other companies are free to compete.

Something far more basic would work. Ban software patents.

Okay, not every tech lawsuit is about software. Or even about patents. But it would do a lot to reduce these risks and it's an easy change.

P.S. Treble damages is a real legal term, believe it or not. Because "triple" would sound too ordinary?

It seems to me that another important use case is 911 in remote areas. Your reception may not be good enough for a voice call, but it may still be good enough for a text.

That's not really on-topic. Yes, WPF makes life difficult, but Mono for Android doesn't even support WPF. On Android, you'll be using the same widgets in C# as Java developers do.

Not exactly. The bulk of the construction costs are at the last mile. Wires into homes are built regardless of whether a homeowner uses them, and neighborhood-level equipment must be built and operated (at roughly constant cost per house) regardless of how much downloading or uploading occurs. So it doesn't automatically make sense to count local communication toward a bandwidth cap. Instead, the standard monthly fee seems like a fairer way to cover those costs (and the fee is certainly high enough to do so!)

Long-distance links, while also a fixed cost to build, are used at capacity or near capacity; therefore, they tend to be built according to demand and so their cost is dominated by the amount of bandwidth needed instead of by the number of potential customers.

It does, therefore, make some sense for Comcast to "forgive" local traffic since it usually doesn't go though very many saturated internet links. To evaluate fairness, my question would be, is this a special exemption for Xfinity, or is all local traffic (e.g. file sharing, Skype) forgiven, within, say, city limits?

Of course, if the long-distance costs are very small, as you imply, then that just means the long-distance bandwidth cap ought be large, and overage fees small.

Python is a good choice because it offers an interactive interpreter prompt. Or better yet, see if you can acquire the (Javascript) interactive programming tools by Bret Victor, featured in his CUSEC 2012 talk.

An 11 year old can learn from books, too--that's how I learned when I was 11 (most of the books in the library were about BASIC, I thought "integer" was pronounced "inte-geer", and I didn't know that other languages existed for about a year.). But I'm not sure it's necessary in the internet age.

Some have suggested C... give me a break. I started using C when I was 13 and hated it compared to BASIC. I mean, there's no function to read a single key without reading a whole line? No function to check if a key has been pressed? No function for changing the text color or drawing stuff? What's this pointer nonsense? Why do I have to wait for it to "compile" and "link"? I use C++ routinely now, but it's not for beginners.

Despite your probability error, come to think of it you have a better case if you consider not just WC but all the various diseases against which parents are not vaccinating for fear of autism. The combined risk of death from all of those unvaccinated illnesses may be similar to the rate of autism.

But what really matters, of course, is not the rate of autism in the general population, but rather how much the risk of autism drops by not having vaccinations. We know this is roughly 0.0%, but even if you believed in this link, the "safety" gained by not vaccinating must surely be less than the total rate of autism (which is 0.1-0.2% according to Wikipedia and 0.6% for Autism Spectrum Disorder).

Nope, that's an elementary probability mistake. The rate of autism applies to everyone while the rate of death from whooping cough only applies to the people who contract whooping cough, which is probably a small fraction of those who are vaccinated (partly because most people are vaccinated). You have to multiply P(dying from WC) times P(getting WP) before you can compare with the autism rate.

Interestingly, optimizations that are "no longer valid" on new x86 CPUs are typically still valid on ARM CPUs, so don't count out those old techniques yet. The ability of x86 desktop CPUs to do fast floating point and division depends on having millions of transistors, dedicated to those tasks, running at high clock speeds. Since ARM is intended for low-power markets, it does not have an integer divide instruction, some ARM CPUs don't have a floating-point unit, and those that do floating point can't do FP as fast as they can do integer math. Similarly, very deep instruction pipelines are not available in ARM. Consequently, the performance characteristics of ARM CPUs are more similar to the oldest Pentiums than to the newest ones. And of course, although demos targeted at old CPUs don't use new CPUs in the most ideal way, they still run much faster on new CPUs than they did on the CPUs for which they were intended. Thus, the old demos should still work perfectly well.

There is an alternative that doesn't suddenly take hundreds of thousands of computers off the internet: periodic denial of service. For two minutes every hour, on the hour, redirect all the most popular web domains to a HTTP server with a page with an FBI logo on it, explaining that you have the DNSChanger malware on your computer (or in your router) and that you must fix the problem or your internet will stop working completely in 4 months.

The goal is to inform users that their machine is compromised in such a way they can't ignore it, and won't mistake it for a problem at their ISP. There's no need to kick them off the internet (if you completely block their access to DNS, how can they perform the necessary research to clean up their machine or router?)

Well, they'll probably keep it stored in a booted state. 16 hours is very hard to believe, though.

Let's hope this weapon doesn't become too effective or cheap in our lifetimes; how often do you want the local cops to use the thing? Not to mention anyone who buys one on the black market, or third-world forces that buy it "legitimately".

Let's hope technology limitations force them to bring it out only on special occasions. The guy pulling the trigger will probably get away with pulling it far longer than he ever has to experience for himself. And with less evidence than a taser.

WTF is a customer device huge?

Switching to "freemium" now may have increased revenue now. That doesn't necessarily mean it would have been a good idea to release as freemium in the first place. Valve had 4 years to convince people to pay up-front for TF2, and they succeeded quite well! But after four years, you've just about exhausted the supply of people that are willing to pay up-front. Switching to freemium not only brings in new customers, it also convinces some of the original buyers to pay again for in-game items. Now that's smart.

IMO they struck the right balance, too: TF2 is still fun without paying anything (or in my case, any more than I paid for the Orange Box.) If you had to "pay to win", people might be pretty pissed off.