Which one is cheaper? Which one has better dispute resolution procedures?

[...] but it's not more influential than Jesus.

Well, at least Linnaeus existed; that's a major strike in his favour right there.

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

OpenPGP was right in all ways except one: you can't even explain what it does to your grandma, let alone get her to use it.

Never mind grandma, I can't use it. Decided I'd try it this spring. Spent an afternoon reading manuals, blog posts and howto's, until I realized this is complicated and brittle enough that I'm likely to mess things up and compromise any security as a result. Better to avoid it, and behave under the assumption that people are bulk scanning and analyzing everything i send or receive.

They are talking about “Ability to detect sarcasm and false positives.” So now evil-doers will sprinkle their messages with omg lulz whatever i can has infidel pwnage.

The original note says "To put things in perspective, it [Google] looks like the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers." That doesn't put things in perspective. In 1947, there was a Negro League full of very talented players who were barred from major league baseball. If there was a league of very talented black hackers today, would Google (and the rest of the tech industry) hire them? How long would it take?

The solution is simple: more innovation!

All they have to do is make a 'smart' 4K glasses-free 3D curved tv, and everybody wins!

http://www.newegg.com/All-Lapt...

Perhaps you should learn how to use the filters at Newegg?

People make mistakes. Everybody makes them, everybody does it all the time, and they do it even when they should know better, when the consequences are high, and when they've received training specifically aimed at avoiding those particular mistakes.

Aviation, process and other industries know this by now, after many, many hard-earned lessons. They know you have to design your interfaces under the assumption that people will screw up, push the wrong button, or misread the situation. The general software industry, on the other hand, seems amazingly resilient against accepting this simple fact.

Pretty sure that it's a PCIe 2.0 x4 device. :)

It's easy to say we want to make the rural areas as attractive as the big cities. Notably, I've yet to see any credible ideas for actually achieving it.

Big cities are amazing. Because of network effects and the efficiencies of small distances and dense accumulation of resources, competing directly is extremely difficult. It's like deciding you want to make a new, fledging social network as attractive to users as the current big ones. The only thing you could feasibly do in both cases is to push it as a niche for special interests.

Thanks so much for this - this worked out great!

"I don't know anyone who just has a serial converter just lying around unless they're an engineer"

This is not a first project for anybody. Chances are high that you've already played with Arduino a fair bit, and built your own on breadboard as well. In which case you most likely have a USB-serial cable or board already, in order to program them.

"Which platforms were Java and Obj-C specific to again?"

The wording was unclear on my part; you pretty much need to use Java to develop for Android, and Objective-C to develop for IOS. Those platforms use those languages specifically, not that they are used only on those platforms. You can use a few other languages to develop Android or IOS apps if you insist, but with more pain, less support, and you'll normally still have to write minor parts in these languages to make it a complete application.