I've been looking for a router that can also host a HDD for network storage, and give me global access the data on it through FTP and HTTP. I've done this with various USB routers running TomatoUSB and the like, but the USB bus on those is so painfully slow that it's basically useless. This thing wouldn't suffer from the same problem, and the price and energy consumption are router-competititve. And compared to the price of NAT, this thing is a bargain! The way I picture it, you would need to add an 802.11AC radio to the USB3, and then you'd be set.

The thing that I'm hoping for is that this was a panic buy because somebody at Facebook got spooked that a killer rival VR social app might render FB gradually irrelevant. So the purchase was a defensive move only, to make sure that they leading VR hardware comes from their own house and can't be used to undercut them. I think it's quite possible they didn't have any concrete social VR application in mind. This would not be a strange move for a rich and paranoid company. I'll call this the "playing defense" scenario.

If FB really is just playing defense, then maybe they'll invest in Oculus to make sure it's the VR standard, but they won't really profane it with stupid Facebook shit, because they don't really know how to do that anyway, apart from maybe some app that nobody will really use (except maybe webcam girls).

Of course, if they really are playing defense and they realize that VR isn't really a treat to their market, maybe they will cut funding from Oculus and let the project rot on the vine. That's a real danger, and it would set back the field for a while.

On the other hand, maybe Facebook knows exactly what they want to do with Oculus, and they are about to bend the project to their evil will. Whatever that would be, I'm sure I would think it's an abomination. This is why the gaming community reacted to badly to the announcement. But even if this is true, it might not be a total catastrophe. The important question is whether the technical issues that make VR so hard (latency, pixel persistence, motion tracking, etc.) will be getting a lot of attention, or a little. If it is a lot, then even if the final product is larded up with stupid Facebook crap, a hack will exist to remove it, thus producing an excellent VR headset. I just wonder how much FB is willing to invest in fundamental VR research and hardware improvement. Hopefully they won't neglect this side of things.

The niche of 3D printers is with geeks who want to make stuff, but are uncomfortable around dremel tools, files, saws, sandpaper, clamps and glue. However, they are comfortable with software, know how to install quirky drivers, etc., so they feel like with a 3D printer, they become empowered make stuff without having any idea how to make stuff.

But you know, for the price of even a crappy 3D printer, you can put together a pretty impressive collection of real tools and materials. Just check eBay. Yes, your first projects will be crap, but as you get better, the work will get really fun, and you will be doing something new with your brain, which feels good. So figure out what you can't buy but need to have, and ask yourself whether it could be made of wood, paper machee, machined from brass, or made in a sand mold from aluminum (which you later finish). In many cases, the results will be better and cheaper if you don't make it in a 3D printer.

I recently sat through The Desolation of Smaug and now I have no appetite whatsoever to watch another Peter Jackson movie. It all started so promising The Fellowship of the Ring, but now his movies have more shark-jumping than Tolkien.

I assume that this is really the core of the idea - that the move would raise coal prices enough to stimulate more investment in renewables. I'm not saying it's a good idea, or even a better idea than investing this $50B directly into renewables, but I imagine that this is what they must have been thinking.

But the point is, the remaining 90% of the coal would be left in the ground, where it is not going to hurt anybody. This isn't about punishing coal miners or even mining companies. This is supposed to be about protecting the Earth's atmosphere and climate.

When we hear these impressive bandwidth numbers, usually a prophecy that "the future is on the cloud" is not far behind. Once our connection to the server is faster, we will get everything we could want without doing any of the computing on site. But people forget that a very low latency is also very important to the cloud experience, and there is very little that we can do about latency. At some point, we just run into fundamental laws of nature. I have a feeling that in my lifetime, consumers will basically stop caring about the width of their pipe (for most, it will be wide enough), and prefer the ISPs that give them the best ping. People who are thinking a few tech generations in the future would do well to keep this in mind, I think.

They already sold a trailer of weed to Canadian prison guards and smuggled weed into the US using a "drone" model train. This is exactly the sort of thing they would do! Bubbles buys a quadrocopter to play with, Julian figures out how to use it for selling drugs, Ricky crashes it, Trevor and Corey take the blame.

If the test is 90% accurate and then has 10% false positives, then one out of ten people who fail the test is actually free of Alzheimer's. But if only 5% of the general population actually develop Alzheimer's, then even if you fail the test, you are still most probably (67%) in the clear. Granted, it's a reason for concern, because your odds of being in the clear dropped from 95% to 67%, but it's certainly not as big an update of your odds as you might have expected from a 90% accurate test that you just failed. (Right? Or did I screw up the math?)

Something doesn't add up. If he used anonymizers even for email, why did he attach his *real name* to the Bitcoin project? Vanity? Or what?

How many times do we get to "discover" that bears actually do shit in the woods?

(This is years after we've seen clear pictures of Martian flood plains, with obvious river channels. This is years after we've detected signals for hydrogen under the Martian surface. This is years after models of solar system history basically make the conclusion inescapable that early on, Mars would have had to have liquid water. And I could go on.)

Maybe I'm just more cynical, but isn't this an incredibly convenient and free advertisement about the morality, kindness and social responsibility of a giant corporation? I'm not saying that the "ideologues" were told to manufacture a controversy for the sake of publicity. But if they did it spontaneously, it's pretty clear that Apple was eager to shut them down loudly enough to make the news. There isn't a better image-building exercise than one which pits the altruistic benevolence of a company against the money-grubbing greed of some shareholding scrooges. We love to see them being told off, and feel like this makes Apple our ally. Well, however this episode ultimately came about, I must clap and declare it "well played" on Apple's part.

You're right, but recall that the article had a much longer list of pseudoscientific bullshit that sells at Whole Foods. Homeopathy is just one really obvious instance. Credulity in that stuff is at the core of their business model. The thing is, they also have lots of stuff that I like to buy, but I don't appreciate the deeply cynical nature of their marketing strategy. When you absolutely know that your products do not do what they claim to do, and you sell them anyway because you count on your customers being too dumb to figure it out, that is just really disrespectful.

It's like they're inviting pirates to come aboard and have a little look around. And it would be pretty cool to camp out on a Chinese drone cargo ship as you cross the Pacific. Will this herald the rise of intercontinental hobos?

I don't have a ton of insight about this, but the way I thought of it, QNX is efficient in spite of all the message passing among the microkernel and the modules. The architecture was done that way for robustness, not for efficiency. That they achieved such efficiency is a testament to their coding skills, not the architecture.