Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.

Das doesn't make the switches; Cherry does. Nearly every mechanical keyboard manufacturer these days uses Cherry MX switches, which are rated for 50 million cycles. Whether you're buying a mechanical keyboard from Das, WASD, Ducky, Razer, or any of a host of others, you're getting the exact same 50-million cycle switches.

In contrast, a membrane keyboard's switches are generally only rated for 3-5 million cycles.

To use the obligatory car analogy, it's like complaining that because the car's manufacturer didn't put in a premium audio system, the engine will only last for 10,000 miles.

I see no reason that insurance history could provide insight into the cause - be it fossil fuels, freon,

History is simply a record of observations; a dataset.

By itself, it doesn't provide much of anything. It's data.

Combined with our understanding of physics and chemistry, however, and the story changes significantly. We are able to chart what we know about the materials against what we see in the data, and tease out very relevant data.

Measured data over a period of time + physical and chemical knowledge = simulation. Whether it's a flight simulator, racing game, crash simulation, or fluid dynamics - the principles are the same. Over time, the simulations become more and more complex, and more and more accurate.

The process is along the lines of:

• Take what we know, and create a computer model that accurately models previously obtained data (ie. matches known data as closely as possible)

• Next, get a new slice of reality - such as crash two real cars together and film and instrument it to collect the desired data

• We input the same initial conditions into the simulation, and run the simulation

• We compare the results between the two, and improve the simulation model

It's a simple feedback system that improves over time.

High quality simulations are not simple, but they are based on simple building blocks, just like all human knowledge. Over time, the models become very accurate (and peer reviewed, often by a competing company whose interest is in disproving your model to their gain). Eventually, the simulation becomes close enough to reality that we base our decisions on the simulation, and tool up for production using simulated data. Verifying the simulation's accuracy is often little more than a formality with an already expected outcome. (And if the outcome is different, then it's an opportunity to improve the simulation model - and profit from that knowledge).

Modern simulations have reached the point where nearly everything that happens on a human scale (be it vehicle design, structures, radio transmission, or even diaper packaging) not only can be simulated with nearly perfect accuracy, but is routine to the point of being almost boring.

This was not always so. Only a couple of decades ago, simulations were crude affairs with very approximate results. Yet these crude simulations were more than sufficient to get us to the moon and back, as well as build the most powerful heavy lift rockets ever made.

While the order of complexity for simulating the climate is many, many orders of magnitude higher than what is required to simulate the structural and aerodynamic performance of the Saturn V or N1 rockets, our ability to perform such simulations has also increased many, many orders of magnitude.

A great deal of the academic papers with respect to climate science are about finding problems (and solutions) in the simulations. While it may sound like that means the model isn't any good, the reality is the discussion has reached the point of minutiae that increase the overall accuracy, but don't actually change the overall result (or prediction) significantly.

Also fire zones... more than a few people build their dream home in a wooded foothill, where they can't see their neighbors through the trees. There's a lot of prestige in building your home higher up the hill than the next person.

The problem is such areas are tinderboxes, and are poorly maintained from a land management perspective Irrigation, landscaping, and pesticides tends to increase the amount of overgrowth. The presence of humans (and our cars, electricity, and tendency to cook food) greatly increases the number of opportunities for a fire to start. It's not uncommon for a car's breaks to throw out sparks that start a fire, to say nothing of backyard fires and tobacco smoking.

Wildfires eventually strike, and destroy everything. It's a very common pattern in the Western US, where drought is common. The firefighters often call such areas the "stupid zone," as you have to be pretty thoughtless to build your house in the middle of a tinderbox. All it takes is one of your neighbors (miles away) to be either thoughtless or unlucky, and the whole area is torched.

In my experience, it's not that there aren't safe places to build. It's that the safe places are so... pedestrian; so conventional; so... bourgeoisie.

So these geniuses build their homes are built on cliffs, mountainsides, floodplains (near the river/creek), or in the wooded foothills.

BTRFS has a large number of features that are still in the "being implemented", or "planning" stages. In contrast, those features are already present, well tested, and in production for half a decade on ZFS. Many touted "future" features (such as encryption) of BTRFS are documented as "maybe in the future, if the planets are right, we'll implement this. But not anytime soon"

Comparing the two is like making up an imaginary timeline where ReiserFS 3 was 4-5 years old and in wide deployment while ext2 was being developed, with plans to implement journaling (ie. ext3) and extents (ie. ext4) still in the "TODO" stage.

My own BTRFS system is appallingly slow compared to running ext4 on the same hardware; in contrast zfsonlinux is amazing.

I'd mod you up if I could.

Xbox Live Gold is required for everything except downloading patches. It sounds like a fanboi who really knows nothing about the Xbox is proving his ignorance/making an ass of himeself.

There's nothing new here; the Xbox Live Gold has been a thing since the original Xbox.

Why do we want to homogenize discourse?

Simple: It's helpful to be aware of the mainstream in society. This isn't the same as homogenizing discourse; it's simply being well informed.

I'm a fan of Fever

Fever is an excellent RSS reader in its own right, but what sets it apart is "hot feeds", which is a list of feeds sorted using something vaguely similar to pagerank. If a story is linked several times, its 'temperature' goes up. It makes it easy to find interesting stories, without wading through thousands of entries.

And yet the incumbents enjoy something like an 80-90% reelection rate. That's the part that I don't understand. If Congress is doing such a lousy job, how do any of them last beyond one term?

While the actual election is relatively free of corruption, the selection process for candidates is anything but democratic. There are few primaries, and caucuses are easily (and regularly) stacked in a way to exclude participation; most citizens are locked out of the caucus process entirely.

Both caucuses and primaries have another overall problem: They are not about supporting a candidate; it's about supporting the party. As a result, instead of getting the most qualified and capable candidate, or even the candidate most likely to win the general election, you get the party favorite.

Once the general election comes around, you have two wing nuts, and you have to pick which one you hate less.

The whole system is set up to effectively shut out everyone but D's and the R's. It's considered a moral victory when a third party gets more than 2% of the vote...

Wrong! It's "By the way iFarted."

That's hyperbole.

How many people complain about Steam forcing them to upgrade?

It's not a case of "upgrade now or be forever offline". You can always choose to upgrade at a later date.

There are very valid reasons for either a console manufacturer or game publisher from refusing to accept non-updated clients. The first one that comes to mind is cheating in online games; you patch the problem and refuse to allow unpatched clients. The game publishers and console makers both have a vested interest in removing cheaters from their ecosystem. It spoils the game for everyone else, which generally means the gamer will spend their money elsewhere.

Most MMO games on PC's have similar policies: You must keep your game upgraded, or you can't play. "Oh, you wanted to play today? Sorry, you have to download this 2.9 GiB patch first. See you tomorrow."

Gaming ecosystem issues aside, think of the upgrade process on the various platforms:

From a user's perspective:

* with a console, you get a popup window telling you it will install updates -- for both hardware and software. Users don't have to keep track of anything. The user just presses one button on the paddle to manage the entire update process. One click, 15-20 seconds, no problems at all.

* Touchscreen phones & tablets are another very popular gaming platform, and they are also painless to use or upgrade. Whether it's an OS upgrade, a driver upgrade, or an application upgrade, users automatically receive a notification that there are updates, and can tap to upgrade automatically and painlessly.

Now, let's look at the way a user would have to update a driver on the PC:
* Know exactly what hardware is in your machine
* Determining if you need to update the driver (news of some sort)
* Launching the web browser
* Visiting the driver site
* Find & Download the correct driver
* Opening the download folder
* Unzipping the driver
* Executing the driver installer

All of that takes dozens of mouse clicks, launching several different programs, and several minutes of time.

I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with PC gaming. I'm only saying you can't gloss over the additional complexity and overhead gamers have to deal with on a PC.

After 20 years of being a hardcore PC gamer, my tune towards consoles has changed dramatically. Consoles have become a perfectly adequate platform for gaming, and have always been a lot less trouble to use.

"Better" is a relative term

The following are things console users don't have to deal with:
* Variable hardware platform - different CPU's, GPU's, memory, disks, etc, etc.
    * This gives developers the ability to tune very tightly to the hardware, instead of having to support everything.
    * Users don't have to mess with "detail" settings to tune for performance & appearance.
* No constant upgrade march (that ends up being more expensive than buying several consoles)
* Not having to deal with endless driver updates
* Consoles "just work". No maintenance, no constant fiddling with the system.
* I have yet to hear of malware on a console

If you're willing to pay the maintenance and administrative overhead that you have to deal with a PC, then sure, it's fine.

Consoles, however, just work and don't require constant fiddling. It's a gaming appliance. You plug it in, it works. No advanced knowledge required.

I'm not arguing about whether it's right or wrong.

I'm just pointing out that in a number of ways, forcing someone to decrypt an encrypted disk isn't that dissimilar from compelling a defendant from unlocking a combination safe. In both cases, it unlocks a trove of data, and can give the prosecution evidence to help them ruin the defendant's life.

You're correct to a degree, but...

Local governments (including city, county, and state) are far more sovereign than most non-Americans know. The US is more tightly integrated than the EU, but one principle is the same: the idea of allowing for, and preserving differences that are valued by an individual state.

Nevada and California are different states, just as Germany and France are different states. Each has its own culture, law, traditions, and so forth, but share a common currency, and cede some control to their respective unions.

With such a government, you have an escalation process that must be followed before you make a ruling that affects everyone.

It's probably more like the court ordering you to unlock a safe when they have a warrant to search its contents.

That will be a tough one to prove

Obstruction of justice? It'd be hard for the prosecution to screw that one up.

As they already appear to have enough evidence to incarcerate him for possession of CP, it's hard to see what sort of good pissing off the judge and adding further penalties would do.

The far better course of action is to comply with the court's orders, and then contest that any data obtained is inadmissible as evidence as the order to decrypt it violated his 5th amendment right against self-incrimination. Then he can get the conviction thrown out entirely.

As the FBI has already shown it is proficient enough to crack one of the guy's disks, there's a good reason for the accused worry they'll decrypt more data.

Anything the FBI decrypts on their own will be used to screw him to the wall.

Honestly, I'd prefer to contest all the way to the Supreme Court that being forced to decrypt a disk is a violation of the 5th Amendment.

I'd rather have a meaningful 5th Amendment as my shield than a faith in my ability to misunderstand and misuse encryption.