Have you ever tried to keep up with constitutes a "catch" in the NFL? Rules change all the time in pro sports, and players need to keep up. There may be good reasons why pro videogame players are locked to a particular game, but I doubt rule changes have much to do with it.

More likely, in my opinion, is that pro games excel at the game they first learned deeply enough to play "intuitively", and trying to switch is like trying to switch to another language. Do-able, sure, but requiring a long period of immersion to "speak like a native".

With any encryption scheme, key management is usually the biggest pain in the ass. No doubt, this is the biggest problem with implementing encryption for webmail.

Keeping my private key on a USB drive on my keychain could ALMOST work, in that on any desktop or laptop I could insert it to get to the key. For mobile, I think Yahoo will need to release a mail app that supports an easy & secure way to load your key.

Also - keying a passphrase on a moble device to open/sign/encrypt email will suck big time. This could be a great use for a fingerprint sensor on phones.

As neither a farmer nor a marine biologist, I should probably shut up, but hey, this is Slashdot!

I have to wonder how much use of synthetic fertilizer could be reduced by systematic crop rotation between corn and legumes to fix nitrogen naturally rather than dumping on the land? I suppose the price would probably be yields down/food prices up, but food is historically cheap at the moment.

I've been in the IT infrastructure business for years, and have always relied on physical destruction (shredding) of hard drives when disposing of old systems.

I can see where that may not be cost effective with leased systems, but I would take your experience as a warning to clean up after yourself and secure-wipe hard drives when your lease is up and not count on the datacenter to do it for you.

IANAL, but I also wonder who owns the data on a leased hard drive when the lease is up? If you improve an apartment or build a building on leased land, those improvements typically become the property of the owner when the lease is up. I wonder if that has been addressed with data in the absence of relevant contractual language?

It would be interesting to know if an unlocked AT&T phone moved to T-mobile's network suddenly lasts longer.

Here's the thing: quality technical writing DOES require specialized skills. It also requires close collaboration with and cooperation from the dev team.

Having worked with a professional tech writer in the past, the process works something like this:

1. Dev team writes the software to meet the business requirements, keeping notes about which requirements are met completely, partial solutions, known bugs, etc.
2. Tech writer meets with dev team on a regular basis, developing draft documentation from dev team notes and business requirements following appropriate style guidelines.
3. At some point, a release is declared. Tech writer completes draft documentation draft for work completed for that release.
4. Dev team and tech writer reviews draft documentation together for completeness and correctness.
5. QA team implements the software in the QA environment PER THE DOCUMENTATION. -- this is the key part. If the documentation is insufficient to implement the software and/or the software does not work as documented, it is a bug.
6. Bug reports are filed against both the software and the documentation as necessary.
7. Release is ready when the software is acceptably debugged and works as documented.

Of course, this hardly ever happens anymore whether software is FOSS, commercial, or in-house, but I have see the process happen, and it is a beautiful thing when it does.

I don't know how practical it will be, but this looks much cooler:

http://www.laserfocusworld.com...

What the Supreme Court actually did was to disallow direct regulation of CO2 unless the EPA actually wants to attempt to regulate ALL producers of >250 tons annually, which is impractical.

What the EPA intended to do was to regulate producers of >100,000 tons annually, with the possibility of reducing that threshold over time as we get handle on the issue.

What the Supreme Court did leave intact is the ability to regulate CO2 production by producers who are already regulated for other reasons 'anyway'.

That does happen to match up fairly well with what the EPA intended to do originally, but does not allow the flexibility to regulate CO2 producers who do not produce large amounts of other pollution.

I wouldn't go so far as "useless", but I'd say powershell would be a lot more useful if I could count on having the AD and Exchange cmdlets available. As it is, many of my admin scripts are tied to my workstation due to dependencies.

Or, the answer is I'm an idiot who doesn't know the right way to package and distribute powershell scripts.

I was thinking "looks good", until I saw that this setup uses a dual-headed USB charger that sure looks designed for indoor use only. I'm fine with a fixed battery in my cell phone, tablet, and even laptop, but my bike a) lives outdoors and b) need to accept a spare battery because working lights can be a life-or-death matter.

Nice design, but seriously deficient function.

That is remarkably similar to what I used to use for a backup tape rotation once upon a time:

27 daily tapes labeled d1-d27
13 'monthly' tapes labeled m1-m13
1 year-end tape labeled appropriately

It was easy to manage since there was never any question which tape was 'next' or safe to reuse. Robotic tape libraries, software with better tape management, and eventually disk-to-disk backup make it obsolete, but I always did think that a 28x13+1(or2) calendar would be much more sensible than what we have now.

Not that I was ever silly enough to think that the world would adopt just because it makes more sense :)

Capable? We're capable of it now (for values of 'now' == 'using a current level of technology').

Doing it requires some heavy lifting in a few senses:

1. We would need to accept that the first group or groups out are most likely going to die, and that we're going to accept that as part of the learning curve. That sucks, but I wouldn't expect to have any problems finding volunteers regardless.
2. Those volunteers would need to accept that those who survive will probably live short lives in miserable conditions working hard to build infrastructure that followers-on will benefit from.
3. We would need to accept that doing this means dedicating somewhere between 1x and 2x the size of the annual US annual pet food & supplies budget ($35 billion) every year for the next decade or so (http://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp).
4. We would need to provide some incentive for the volunteers beyond adventure and fame. Land grants on Mars, perhaps?

Obviously way oversimplified, but once you take away the need to make it a safe round trip, the project gets much easier. I could be wrong; there may not be enough volunteers ready to risk their lives for a chance to colonize Mars, but I'd bet there are.

What's holding us back isn't technology, it's a lack of societal will to devote the relatively modest resources needed to try.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk is going to go ahead and do it anyway: http://www.wired.com/2012/11/e...

I wouldn't bet my life on his succeeding, but I wouldn't bet it on his failing, either.

Apparently I was mistaken.

I looked at this tech when it was actually new, around a year ago, and admittedly just pulled the datasheet today to double check my recollection. I'm glad that the limitations are less severe than I thought.

OTOH, nVidia really ought to fix their datasheets, also.

Better now? (and profanity-free to boot!)

This isn't particularly new. It's nice tech, but each ~$2000 K1 board supports 4 users. 4. The K2 board supports 2 'power users'. (ref: NVIDIA data sheet: http://www.nvidia.com/content/... )

If I cram 4 K1 boards in a server, I can now support 16 virtual desktops with 3D acceleration for an $8k delta over and above the other expenses of VDI.

Unless you ABSOLUTELY MUST have VDI for 3D workloads, I can't see how this makes sense.