I work in San Francisco and live in East Bay. My house is a block away from a Transbay bus stop, and with its use of the carpool lanes I can get into the city faster via bus than is possible in a car. Once in the city, I can either stroll for a pleasant walk along the Embarcadero to my office or I can ride a Muni for under a buck, and the latter drops me off next door to Safeway with their Sriracha Sausage Breakfast Burritos ($2.71 including tax).

It's easier, faster, and cheaper to ride the bus than drive, and I get breakfast burritos. I'm living the dream.

It's soon going to be easy to do a screen on the security of a system or application: just ask for delivery to the UK of the system you were planning to use somewhere else.

This is a wonderful idea, as long as: the people facing backward don't puke on takeoff; flight attendants don't mind breaking up the inevitable fistfights; and you remove the bathrooms so that there's no temptation for the 6'4" next to the window to want to pee mid-flight. Except for all the horrible downsides, I don't see any drawbacks.

Secondary radiation, however, is a different matter. And someone said that the fusion was only a source of neutorns to enhance fission. (That seems like a pretty wierd idea, since we don't currently have fusion working.)

Hate to break the news, but bog-standard fission bombs have been getting a boost from fusion-generated neutrons since the 50s (maybe 40s -- I don't feel like looking it up ATM.

https://careers.mozilla.org/

HTH, HAND. :-)

There's a mechanism in US law to deal with this kind of thing. It's called a "declaratory judgment," where a plaintiff who has reason to be afraid that the law will be enforced to land him in prison or bankruptcy sues for a judgment that either the law doesn't forbid his (in this case) publication of his research or that the Constitution forbids a law that would. Yeah, such suits ain't cheap. Fortunately there are several nonprofits that exist to fight exactly that kind of battle.

... that wiretaps would be WAY down over the past several years since the NSA can get the same results without a warrant in most cases (the only time they need a warrant is if they're planning to play the recording in court.)

The market loves when we have formal documents laid down by the Formal Documents People confirming what we've been telling our bosses for years. I would bet large sums of money that some tech, somewhere, just walked out of a meeting happy because he finally has permission to deprecate a long-broken system.

You seem to be under the impression that backward and forward hardware compatibility are easy things:

1) That an arbitrary OS could be expected to run well on hardware made many years in the past and many years in the future, and
2) That arbitrary hardware can easily support ancient software.

Suppose you'd said this about DOS. Microsoft should support it in perpetuity! OK, then, but where are you going to buy a mouse today that supports the hardware ports that DOS knows how to handle (or would you think mouse makers would spend the effort to write MTRACKPAD.SYS so that a new Apple Magic Trackpad would work on it)? And it's not exactly free or cheap for a modern i7 to maintain 100% 8088 compatibility.

Conversely, should iOS 9 be expected to run on an original iPhone, with CPUs and GPUs many times slower, an eighth the RAM, a fraction of the storage, and utterly obsolete in many other ways? Even if the minimal core could be made to run, so many features would have to be stripped out (at great development and testing expense) that it'd be pointless.

There are good reasons for dropping compatibility. Software isn't easily made to scale down to ancient predecessors, and hardware leaves stuff behind regularly - I don't have serial ports or ISA slots on this motherboard. It's not plausible for Apple to carry iOS all the way back to hardware that almost no one is using, and it's not realistic for Microsoft to drag Windows 7 all the way forward to hardware that hasn't even been conceived yet. At some point, you just have to let go.

"Swift" was a generic noun and a generic adjective long before Taylor's ancestors started using it. I've never seen a wild dylan or ran dylanly down a racetrack, though.

Apple did not do this unilaterally. They approached the rightsholders who actually own the music - that is, the labels and not the artists - and proposed this arrangement. After much negotiation, everyone agreed that this was a solid plan and started moving ahead with it. How much money Apple does or doesn't have is immaterial because they could not legally do this without the consent of the people who own the material, and those people thought it was a fine idea and signed on the dotted line.

So yes, it's perfectly fair: not because you or I think so but because the people capable of vetoing it said it is.

Did I misinterpret that, or did you really mean to say that £40,000/year is a plausible amount for an IBMer to make while living in London? What would you say is a nice salary for a senior engineer?

Don't underestimate the value of free entertainment. Sometimes that guy coming home from his second job really needs to unwind a little before he gets his 6 hours of sleep, and a little YouTube is probably a healthier and cheaper alternative to an after-work beer. Also, entertainment has traditionally proven useful to help prevent the proles from revolting against the bourgeoisie. It's generally not a great idea to insist that the poorest be made more and more miserable for their own good.

I admit I'm getting old, but is "mamware" a new name for tittypics?