We wanted a 55" and it had to be Samsung as I like the image processing magic. Netflix is great, the app gets used every night. Good image, good enough controls (fast forward and rewind could be improved. Everything else on a SmartTV is total crap and was tested once. The skype client is truly awful.

Gesture recognition is used once in a blue moon when the couch has eaten the remote.

So that means that you don't own a laptop with a builtin webcam?

I've got one of these TVs and although the article is accurate the headline is not. When you issue a voice command you have say "Hi TV" or one of two other phrases. These are simple enough to be recognised by the TV itself. Normally you repeat this about 10 times in varying pitches and speeds because the recognition is crap. At this point a big microphone appears on the screen and what you try to say next it records and transmits over the internet to some service.

No matter what you actually say the TV then tries to change the colour key, or randomly fires up skype. After which you disable it completely in the menus and it never records you again.

August 13th 1954?

My bank has pain-in-the-ass 2FA. There is a piece of partly public info (social security), followed by a short pin code, that leads to a challenge-response with a grey box that has my unique token in it as a smart card. Although the box is USB the browser plugin demands custom device drivers that do horrific things to ensure they are "alone" on the system.

All of this protects me against a hacker breaking my password, which would be impossible, and has no effect on the much more likely attack of a hacker targeting the bank itself. So I have to access my bank from a custom VM because the other plebs like to choose "bigtits" as their secure password.

2FA is the overrated wet dream of sysadmins everywhere.

I love you, whoever you are. You may collect your prize of an internets at your convenience.

Online playing = greater social skills, that I don't know about.

But there was a pretty convincing TED talk recently about FPS games and some visual perception/processing ability improvements. Significant ones, actually. Not anecdotal, and not simply survey-type statistics, but repeatable lab experiments with measurable effects that lasted beyond the game playing. It was done by a Swiss scientist, but I forget her name and don't recall the name of the TED talk.

She was not, by the way, saying that (1) you should play games all day, nor that (2) it's a better way than other ways (say, for example, sports, which I'm sure must help visual perception as well), etc.

But it wasn't useuless outside of holding a controller, it wasn't only muscle memory, etc.

This coming, by th eway, from someone who pretty mucn never plays FPSes. I much prefer strategy or RPGs (it's all about the story!). And fun, social-ish games to play with other people that are just fun, like the Lego series.

Yes. Ugly policy decisions is exactly what I was going for, in fact. It's not as simple as "ugh, stupid anti-vaxxers, we need to mandate vaccines" as some seem to think it is. There are some of us who are cool with vaccines ... the ones that make sense. And leery about spending the money (government) and risk (yes, the rather small but real, especially with new-ish and thus much less understood vaccines, it seems) for the ones that don't.

And of course, there's the question of the efficacy of the different types (e.g., acellular pertussis) and the different schedules and whether it's good to throw them into kids all at once or spread them out and .... etc. Doctors don't seem to agree completely (not with vaccination in general, but when, how many, which ones, etc.), countries don't agree, studies don't agree, yet we expect the government to mandate something... that seems iffy to me.

Whoever chooses wields an awful lot of power. Including monetarily. I'm sure the vaccine makers would have input on which ones and how often. :) Good thing we don't let corporations influence political decisions.

I think you missed the point. How is it I am doing anyone harm by not being vaccinated for something I am not going to spread since it's an STD and I only have sex with one other person?

So at what point does the liability stop? If I allow my kids to play on sleds or go skiing and they get hurt or killed or maimed ... should I go to jail for child endangerment for allowing them to be in such danger?

I am NOT arguing that all vaccines are junk and we should all not vaccinate. I AM arguing that we need to think through the ramifications of this pretty seriously. It's not exactly a slippery *slope* argument as much as .... an ice rink argument. I am not saying that "if we mandate vaccines, we're going to mandate carrots and spinach next" as though one is worse than the other... I'm saying that it doesn't make sense to mandate vaccines in because of child endangerment if we don't also start curbing all these other dangerous behaviors that kid's do. Like playing in the dirt, riding horses, riding bikes, taking walks where there may be drunk drivers without putting them in helmets ... or whatever.

Furthermore, WHAT vaccines? And how often? I got one MMR vaccine I believe, but it's since been raised to two. Ought I to be mandated to get another one? What about the flu vaccine? What about STDs which I highly doubt my 8 month old will be contracting anytime soon?

Things like MMR and Polio make sense (though I am still unsure about mandating), but I don't know about some of the others... so I am leery about having random people in D.C. choosing these things for me based on who knows what.

I'm trying to be good and avoid the vaccine manufacturer profit arguments.

Because we thought it was a good idea to protect vaccine makers from lawsuits and replace those lawsuits with a government program.

I'm not sure that was really a good idea. I'm not saying it doesn't help, but protecting for-profit (and very profitable) companies from lawsuits seems ... well, a bit odd, shall we say.

Ok... so if it's an STD and I am one of those monogamous types, could you explain the benefit to me or others for me getting it?

I'm not anti-vaccine, though I am anti-vaccine-if-the-risk-of-the-vaccine-is-greater-than-the-benefit. And no, I don't think autism comes from vaccines, etc.

I tried to use this a while ago with local unique passwords. Could not get it to work without allowing unauthenticated logins, which was a bit scary. Seemed like a neat feature though as it is more available than rdp/vnc running inside the guest. Will probably have another go when I get some time. In combination with teleporting guests between hosts I can have some fun.

So, you don't indent code? Or if you do, at what point is the indent meaningless (how many spaces/tabs) ... ? No spaces after semicolons? Or before/after braces? Or ...

Readability should count as meaningful. It helps. And the compiler strips it out anyways, right, so ultimately it doesn't matter, just like comments, except in helping understand the code.

I may be misunderstanding something completely in what you said... but I don't get why you would say it should be removed. Maybe in javascript for network performance reasons or something, but you should just minify or something in that case, because of variable and function name length and all that...

Ah a drive by troll. How refreshing. Today I am bored enough to respond.

Once there was a Mongol army of such power and ferocity that it came close to wiping out western civilisation as we know it. So you are suggesting we should worry about that happening again? Are you really worried about getting nuked today, or tomorrow? I'm not. But then again I associate the frequency of an event with the risk of it reoccurring. I guess that by your reckoning we should not, and that all events that have ever happened are equally probable in the future, so we should treat them all the same.

I will now start worrying about herds of velociraptors raging across major cities causing carnage and destruction. After all, it is about the same level of hysteria as complaints that the one-time mob attack of a paediatrician is relevant 15 years after the event.

Man. I'm going to have to write out a Liszt so when I actually do go browser Chopin, I can remember all these.