There are plenty of smart people who have never had to do a "thesis", if you mean a project to cap off a university degree. Conversely, there are plenty of dumb people who have degrees. That number is only going up from grade inflation and degree devaluation as the idea that everyone needs to go to college permeates deeper into society. An idea fed, in part, by comments like yours.

Instead of pulling this traffic light crap (which can increase accidents), they could just legalize marijuana... seems to be bringing in quite a bit for Colorado, in spite of the industry not being fully developed, and the banking problems the industry still has from the federal prohibition.

It looks like this is a more advanced method to accomplish the same thing. Meaning that recovering sanded serial numbers is not new, but this particular way of doing it is.

If you're working at some Silicon Valley tech firm, you're well off by any measure. The wage stagnation for people making $7.25/hr is the real issue in this country.

And yet, this article estimates it at more like 24 hours. It does make a lot of assumptions though - maybe the older article made a different set of assumptions.

Yeah, someone working in the police force there is either very incompetent or very shady. I think the latter is more likely. It's not 1990, this sort of data will be backed up unless someone specifically decides not to.

There are already equivalent or better levels of monitoring within the US. Now they're monitoring places that don't have the capacity or will to monitor themselves.

I'm well aware of iTunes, I actually use its AAC encoder on a regular basis. By "in the wild" I mean music that get distributed person-to-person, like on torrent sites. Where the uploader has a choice of formats to use. Not Apple's walled garden. My suspicion is that a good deal of AAC uploads you see on torrent sites do in fact originate from iTunes, and that we'd see a lot more of them if it weren't for things like Apple embedding your username in the file. I'm actually not sure if they still do that, but stuff like that hangs heavy on the memory.

The only good AAC encoders (Apple, Fraunhaufer, and debatably Nero) are proprietary. There are open-source encoders, but the quality is so poor that they aren't worth using.
This doesn't even take into account licensing/patent issues, which I believe come into play as well.

There never really was a "format war" as far as codecs go. Or if there is a war, it's ongoing.

In the 90s when music over the internet became a thing, MP3 was the only game in town. MP2 existed, but it was less efficient. At that time there was no such thing as "hardware support" so users were free to pick the most efficient format.

By the early-mid 2000s, there were several formats beating MP3 in listening tests. Musepack, Vorbis, AAC. You don't see many of those "in the wild" now, but I certainly see more today than I did in 2005, putting them on a slow upward trajectory. Once disk space and bandwidth come down a couple ticks in price, there will be no reason not to go FLAC which will make lossy compression irrelevant as you can transcode to whatever you want/need.

IIRC the number of accounts reached 7 digits around 2006, meaning he's probably been here 7 or 8 years.

And then there are those of us who blaze it up *on* the freeway :D

Presumably MH370 is no longer doing things like communicating, running engines, maneuvering, hosting a crowd of living people, etc - the things that can get you noticed.

Gitmo was in full swing years before YouTube came online.

My computer works more like a space heater.