Re: Cable Cutting
 
The Amazon FireTV (the full size square, not the HDMI dongle) is a fantastic device for $99 and XBMC has native support for it now. Once you bump the buffer from 20MB to 500MB and remove the bandwidth cap XBMC + Amazon Fire TV is a fantastic device for streaming the largest uncompressed 1080p video. It also handles your standard 100MB-4GB video files without cache modification as well. Also it does stuff like Netflix, Amazon Prime (aka HBO), most Android apps (like BombSquad, a Smash Brothers clone), you can side-load APKs without rooting it etc etc Amazon did a great job with the device and I use it daily instead of owning a cable box.
 
Absolutely zero interest in an Amazon branded phone though. I heard their Fire Tablet or whatever was pretty fantastic for the time but the market has moved on and even the $79 chinese branded tablets are competitive these days for most users.

Of note, high efficiency station-keeping engine technology has exploded in recent years, there's at least six cubesat kickstarter projects, mostly in the 2U-3U size which can at least partially get out of LEO on just a tiny, tiny amount of "fuel". Ion/electron propulsion has made huge advances in the last 15 years and is expected to bring the cost and size of communications satellites way, way down.
 
Right now fuel + engines + station keeping makes up 50% or more of a communication's launch mass. With electric propulsion, station keeping will make up less than 10% of the satellite, which in turn means less fuel required to push that mass around.

Not sure if it's the fact that you can host PHP on Godaddy's lowest tier(s) or what, but PHP seems to be the lowest hanging fruit and a lot of "babby's first project"s are written in PHP. I know a few people who avoid PHP projects based on that principle. The average PHP project seems to be dramatically lower in quality compared to similar ones written in Python, Ruby, heck even C#/ASP.

As of about 2010 we already had clocks so accurate you could demonstrate relativistic effects by separating them by just a few feet. It sounds like the vibration from walking in the same room as these is enough to knock them out of sync.

China, Iran, North Korea, occasionally Turkey, Libya, Egypt, perhaps Russia, Ukrane, Hong Kong. Something like 25% of the internet either can't or potentially can't access Facebook right now. But with TOR you can.

We're already assigning resources to see how we can leverage this next year at our office/windows shop.

Win8 and WS2012 run on the same kernel, the only difference is Win8/8.1 has the "desktop" role enabled rather than the server roles. It's not uncommon to see people hack in server roles to their desktop machine as an exercise

If you want more control, stop using the GUI and start using Powershell. Windows Server is designed to be used with Powershell. There's a lot of storage options that are only available from the command line that you wouldn't even know existed if you tried setting it up via the GUI. And you can do this remotely.

I think the problem is that "good accuracy" is not yet to the point where the driverless car is less likely to run over a pedestrian at an intersection than a car piloted by a human. Until that threshold is met it's just a science experiment.

Agreed, my bay trail Atom powered "net top" lives bolted to the wall of my hall closet as a Wi-Fi repeater and headless CentOS box. The HDMI port on it is useless media applications. Thanks, PowerVR.

You can pick up a used 2012 Nexus 7 tablet for $75 from a variety of locations, it will be getting the Android 5.0 update. It is Google's official tablet development platform.

Power VR is terrible, Intel released a ton of low end Atom powered devices with Power VR GPU, but due to licencing agreements never released drivers except for the 32 bit variant of Windows 7 and never for Win 8 or Linux drivers worth a damn. Means Linux users were SOL when they tried using these machines for anything media related. And I doubt the situation with Power VR is going to be any better this time around. Avoid like the plauge any Intel hardware that's hard wired to a Power VR chip.

What's stopping ESPN from offering their entire HD channel package for $10/month via Amazon, HuluPlus or a bundle deal with HBOGo?

While I've seen some gross examples of this case in the past, Docker while being new is already a buzz word, they went 1.0 back in June or July, so one fiscal quarter after the fact is not too bleeding edge to need a description here.

No, I am referring to the NERVA rocket engine, a nuclear reactor that shoots superheated hydrogen out the back. The program was so successful followng the Apollo era that Congress cancelled all funding as it would have made a very expensive Mars trip viable using even 1970's technology (shortens the trip from 6 months to 2 months).
 
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
 
Clearly someone doesn't play Kerbal Space Program. This has nothing to do with RTGs.