When I had these questions, the Wikipedia article on BitCoin (and the associated one with the protocol details) answered them.

G.

n/t

Nothing to see here...

The original Spaceship One went something like five or six times higher, so I presume these are just "low altitude" test flights before they try for "space".

It's notable as continued progress in the development and testing of the Spaceship Two vehicle and system, not for its altitude.

Use of the word "record" in the summary is not particularly helpful.

G.

I'm going to start demanding a nickle in response to every press release announcing a new miracle battery technology.

I figure that will let me retire in about 18 months.

G.

According to TFA linked in the summary, this does NOT include the Family Sharing feature, just Family parental control options.

G.

The ability to join in a course based ONLY on the fact that you're interested in it, with no risk of "failure" is, I think, one of the best features of many MOOCs.

Where there's no difference between "auditing" a class and trying for a certificate, it means that people may be much more likely to try something which they might turn out to enjoy and do well in.

Now, I'm sure if you required people to pay something for the class, or commit to trying for a certificate such that there would be a record/cost of failure, then that would greatly increase the *percentage* of people who would pass. The question is whether you would get more people passing overall since it would stop everyone who was not sufficiently "serious" from attempting the course.

Even those who sign up on a whim and don't get far in a course will probably get something from it, and they might well decide that it was something they want to try again more seriously the next time once they have a taste of what it's about and the amount of work involved.

So absolutely I think "no pressure" is the right way to run a MOOC.

G.

I find that reading a good book is like a complete exercise workout for your brain, and I know I feel a lot sharper when I'm reading regularly.

If I'm having trouble working through some problem or other then taking some time to read is always helpful, even if the subject of the book is unrelated to the problem at hand.

It seems as though it needs to be something with a lot of prose but either fiction or non-fiction works.

Moderately technical non-fiction is OK as long as it is interesting and mentally stimulating (makes you stop and think etc.).

But pure technical books don't seem to help at all and may just clutter things up with new knowledge that the brain is trying to assimilate. So for example pretty much anything from O'Reilly will not make me feel generally smarter even though it may be very good at cramming in the domain specific knowledge I need for some project.

So just reading tech books is not very helpful at all, and needs to be supplemented with more general works from my experience.

G.

Well, Mathematica is now free for non-commercial use on the Raspberry Pi of all things.

You could run a Raspberry emulator and run it inside that on other operating systems. But I haven't looked at the license agreement so maybe that's explicitly prohibited.

No idea how it performs, but the screenshots at Wolfram look promising.

G.

http://xkcd.com/1234/

Probably my favorite XKCD strip so far.

G.

Seems to me that the device itself had to be relatively harmless unless you managed to actually crack it open and get directly at the cobalt. Maybe this was a very old device, but after previous deadly incidents of ignorant people getting their hands on such things, I would think they would be manufactured such that it would be REALLY difficult to get at the cobalt inside. Maybe if you stare into the bore of the thing for a while though?

If the cobalt had actually been accessed/exposed then I would expect them to have a nasty hot clean-up exercise on their hands, but the Mexican authorities seem awfully unconcerned.

I suspect they are just trying to scare the shit out of the thieves, perhaps to motivate them to turn themselves in hoping for some sort of treatment.

G.