This reminds me of the 80's when a lot of Elementary and Middle schools bought Apple II and III computers and the obligatory 2 to 3 Macs. Apple had a big push to capture the educational market. After about 3 years, most of the Apple computers ended up in closets collecting dust. Universities and High Schools went with PCs and the education software market followed. In my opinion, history is about to repeat itself....

I am not a lawyer but as far as I know, search warrants are tied to a specific crime. Any evidence of any other crime is inadmissible in court. Of course, if investigators stumbled on evidence of something like terrorism your still likely to end up in Gitmo.

Plus, the striking down of the law limiting corporate contributions by the Supreme Court has made things even worse. Now they can give as much as they want.

How a corporation came to have the right of free speech is beyond me...

The reality is that law enforcement, and other areas of the government, used the war on drugs as justification for increased budget, manpower, weapons, laws (search & seizure), etc. Now that the justification has moved towards terrorism, both real and based on hype, and the drug war isn't needed any more. In fact, most law enforcement agencies now have bigger and more expensive toys today (i.e. drones, highly weaponized SWAT teams, etc.) based on terrorism.

As you said, the one lobby that NEEDS the war on drugs to continue is the US prison industry. From Wikipedia "Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. The result, 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans." Granted, a good portion of this includes people who are violent criminals and are also booked on drug charges. However, there can be no denying that if 1 in 10 people are going to jail based on a single type of crime, perhaps it's time to re-evaluate public policies and whether these activities should be considered crimes.
 

It's true that most gamers aren't exactly fitness buffs. However, If VR and the Virtuix Omni makes a game more compelling and gives a player an advantage, then I think that you would see a higher adoption rate than you anticipate.

Personally, I was thinking that if the Virtuix Omni becomes popular, gamers could become as fit as some professional athletes. Think about it, if you game for 6 hours a week using the treadmill, ducking, jumping, etc., all while having fun, you would get into shape fairly quickly.

The key word, there, is scaling.

It looks like this is meant to make the network more efficient within a data center that handles a high volume of traffic, including high traffic spikes, by receiving a network time slot request from the end point (i.e. software running on a UNIX server) and sending a response that schedules packets to arrive just-in-time along a specific path to avoid queuing.

However, there is a less complicated way of achieving the same goal: Scalability - Increase your switch and server up-link bandwidth to eliminate congestion and queuing.

Yes, it costs money to add network capacity. But the big question is which would cost more? Adding capacity? or installing a pair of servers, rolling out software clients to all of your endpoints (servers), and supporting the system? Personally, I'd rather add network capacity and be done...

So that's how De Beers keeps their monopoly, they dispose of extra diamonds... by crushing them with a really expensive laser...

Windows NT 4.0 never needed a restart every 24 hours, desktop systems maybe. If you had Windows NT servers that needed reboots that often, then you simply had bad Windows NT admins who didn't know how to resolve device driver, memory, or disk issues.

The main argument is that automated cars will reduce traffic accidents and save lives. Personally, I'm willing to bet that automated cars will suffer from similar accident statistics, they will just be shifted to things like software bugs, automated network down (solar flares, weather, etc.), failed sensors, hacking, etc.

Personally, I'll never buy an automated car. But, I can understand why some people would want them.

Our family and friends share an Amazon account for Kindle books.

If the subscription service allows books to be installed on more than one Kindle (i.e. up to 5), then this might work for us. It would allow us to use the same account but have access to the full library. However, if it is limited to the lending library, does not have newer books, or does not allow multiple Kindles then I'll pass.

The ideal would be to to have a subscription service that allows multiple Kindles and has access to the full Kindle library. I'm willing to bet, though, that Publishers would only be willing to sign up for something like this if it is restricted to older books. They will still want the revenue from full priced new books.

The big deal is when you have a laptop or a desktop without touch or you just hate having a screen full of fingerprints. When using a mouse, the windows 8 GUI is inefficient and poor to navigate. Of course, those unhappy with the Windows 8 or 8.1 interface can easily find add-ons that fix the Start menu and re-enable boot to desktop. Personally, I installed Start8 and have been happy ever since.

Here is what I have done in the past with network gear:

1. Make sure that you have a test environment that is as close to your production environment as possible. In the case of network gear, I test on the exact same switches with the exact same firmware and configuration. For servers, VMWare is your friend....

2. Build your script, test, and document the process as many times as necessary to ensure that there are no gotchas. This is easier for network gear as there are less prompts and options.

3. Build in a backup job in your script, schedule a backup with enough time to complete before your script runs, or make your script dependent on the backup job completing successfully. A good backup is your friend. Make a local backup if you have the space.

4. Schedule your job.

5. Get up and check that the job complete successfully either when the job is scheduled to be completed or before the first user is expected to start using the system. Leave enough time to perform a restore, if necessary.

As you can probably tell, doing this in an automated fashion would take more time and effort than baby sitting the process yourself. However, it is worth it if you can apply the same process to a bunch of systems (i.e. you have a bunch of UNIX boxes on the same version and you want to upgrade them all). In our environment we have a large number of switches, etc. that are all on the same version. Automation is pretty much the only option given our scope.

My Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro 7.1 surround 24-bit 192KHz with an external breakout box (1/4" MIC, optical, etc.) has now been in 3 systems and is still going strong. I'm running Windows 8.1 using the DanielK drivers. It's PCI, so as long as I can buy a modern motherboard with a single PCI slot, I'm golden. In my opinion, is is one of the last great Creative Labs discrete sound cards.

I tried switching to the on-board sound in my latest build but I prefer the sound from the Audigy. My current motherboard is an Asus P8Z77-v deluxe and has a Realtek ALC898 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC.

However, much like computer systems in general, people have different requirements. If you just want something that will play sound, music, videos, games, etc. then the on-board sound should be adequate. If you get into podcasting, video creation, etc. then you might want something that can provide good quality I/O ports (i.e. MIC, Line-in/out, etc.). If you want excellent separation of sound for movies or gaming, then you are better off with a discrete sound card.

Is Creative the best? Probably not. But I haven't researched discrete sound cards since I bought the Audigy 2 about 9-10 years ago....

No... programming does not encode intelligence in a machine. Intelligence indicates the ability to think for itself and come up with a creative answer that isn't part of it's original programming. When you write a program, all you are doing is telling the computer what to do given a specific input. There is no intelligence involved.

Especially since it takes 15 years+ to get a Nuclear plant off the ground in the US... In order for this to happen, every single power provider in the US would have to submit plans to build Nuclear reactors this year. It's not going to happen, especially with large natural gas reserves and low natural gas prices.