Systems people just need to do their goddam jobs. Workers have enough crap to worry about.

Nonsense. If you spend 6+ hours a day working at a computer, you have some responsibility to know how to use that computer.

What next? Is every company going to have an "office chair support" department so people don't have to figure out how to raise and lower their own chair? A typist pool so that nobody has to learn how to type?

While the researchers in TFA took account of "harmonic" and "timbral" chnges, whatever that means, the study is still meaningless because it doesn't take into account:

1. Changes in population demographics;
2. Changes in recording technology, e.g. multitrack recording, use of digital effects such as delay, flanging and reverb;
3. Evolution of synthesizer technology including sequencers, MIDI, etc.;
4. Changes in distribution channels, i.e. obsolescence of physical media;
5. Increases in the amount of music composed and produced primarily as motion-picture promotional tie-ins;
6. Changes in radio audience measurement (ratings and their effect on playlists);
7. DJ motivation for airplay, including payola.
8. Changes in the way consumers access music, for example transistor radios, boom boxen, Walkmen,. iPods, smartphones, Sirius XM.

I'm sure I could think of a dozen or so other factors. Nice try.

His business card said "Office of the Public Defender."

Here is the actual washing machine.

If I enter -$1000 will they credit my PayPal account?

It's not clear that saturated fat is bad for you either. That leaves trans fats as bad, and Omega-6's as questionable.

The trick is that "the level of cholesterol in the blood" is not a meaningful health indicator. The ratio of LDL to HDL is much more useful. And saturated fat actually makes that ratio slightly better (while raising the values of both). Thus, the best evidence indicates that saturated fat is *good* for you.

I used to think the author(s) of Revelations were unbelievably prescient and ahead of their time in predicting the ascendence of bar codes, RFID tags, etc. to identify and to number people.

Now with facial recognition, and with DNA readers in the future, who needs to "mark" people?

The problem remains: it's very likely that other projects just as important as this one are probably facing the same kind of issues, but it would be nice to hear about them before they get in trouble, and not after.

Not really, because there aren't that many projects as important as GNUPG but without a foundation or something backing them up. OpenSSL is probably the next good example, but that's run by a consulting company.

Without GNUPG, no major GNU/Linux distros could security download updates. It's *the tool* that does digital signatures. It's at least as important as OpenSSL, but in that case there are viable alternatives (e.g. GNUTLS, NSS).

Really, the GNU project needs to spend some more money on maintaining the infrastructure that they sponsor. They'd get quite a bit more money if the had fundraisers directly for core GNU software (e.g. GNUPG / GCC / Bash / libc) development rather than generic funds that might get spent sending their mascott to protest at an Apple store or some nonsense. Activism is great and all, but it's a waste of time if the concrete infrastructure that the movement has built is allowed to rot.

The President should have his own Beaver.

Absoutely not.

Shutting a city down for a day *guarantees* huge damages. Let's look at Boston. There are 240,000 households, each with a median income of $70,000/yr. Let's use a really simplfied model, and say that there are 365 days in a year - so each day is about $200 per household in wages. That means that shutting down the city for a guarantees a loss of $48 millon.

For salaried workers, that's a loss for their employer. For hourly workers, that's a loss for the to the household.

Without a government intervention, people would have gotten to make their own judgement calls. And they could have made that judgement call based on the weather information this morning, not what we had yesterday afternoon. Based on the actual weather, lots of people would have said "lol, no - I'm not going into work today". And others would have made the completely reasonable decision that they could make it to work fine.

It's physically impossible for the human eye to discern the difference between 720p and 1080p on an average-sized television, much less the difference between 1080p and 4k.

And in the 1970's, it would have been physically impossible for the human eye to distinguish between NTSC and 720p on an "average size television" at a "normal viewing distance", because people had 14" TVs that they watched at 20 ft.

Personally, I'm a fan of the 70" TV at 6 ft, or the 30" display at 18in. And for that, I can see the difference between 1080p and 4k clearly even without my glasses.

I'm teaching a university level intro to programming course right now, and we have absolutely no problem supporting users with any reasonable operating system on their computer. We're using the HTDP curriculum with DrRacket. We start having the students write interactive GUI programs week two.

There are dozens of other platforms that handle cross-platform development equally easily. You can go whole-hog IDE with Java and Eclipse. You can teach Python with Idle. You can teach programming with C or C++ and the GNU toolchain (Cygwin is pretty easy to install). You could even teach C# with MonoDevelop. There's really no need to use single-platform stuff to teach basic programming.

There's really only space on a mouse for one wire coming out, so if that wire is HDMI it'll be annoying to hook this thing up to a keyboard.

On the other hand, if they built this thing with a USB-C port then it could be pretty neat. You could sit down at a desk with a USB 3.1 Hub, a keyboard, and a monitor and just plug in your mouse and be ready to go. The USB 3.1 cable would happily handle power, video, and the USB keyboard.

On the other hand, it'd probably make more sense to just have a regular mouse at the desk and hook up your cellphone or something to be the computer.

You can't really separate those things. The simple fact of securing information is that once it's out you have zero control over where it goes.

As a company, the only outside people who should get access to your information are your lawyers and entities that have signed an NDA. Unless GCHQ is going to sign an NDA, a competent Airbus managment can not tolerate snooping.