Or you can do similar command-line magic for NTFS symlinks (they call them junctions, probably because it tested better with focus groups).

I've done it both ways - on my laptop, I did the junction (C;\Users\gman -> D:\Users\gman), while on my desktop I only moved the library folders (docs, music, videos, pictures and downloads), so that things like AppData would be sped up (my desktop has a larger SSD that's bottlenecked by SATA2, so it was a logical tradeoff).

If it's a permanent colony, then of course. That's one-way, but with a solid intent and good odds of dying only when old age catches up.

If it's a long-term mission, but with only X years of supplies and no plans for return, then there needs to be some strong benefit. Altering the course of an Earth-bound asteroid? Worth it. Perhaps some extremely useful science could also justify this - if we somehow get a sudden radio broadcast from Europa, sending a crew on a suicide mission to investigate might be worth it. But the xenogeology and such that we'd be doing on a Mars mission would not really justify a suicide mission, unless we can continually resupply them (but at that point, they're basically a colony without population growth).

If it's just a "put feet on the rock to claim it", hell no.

The company I work for does a lot of contract work making apps (it's about a third of our business, the rest being traditional websites or a pair of large, ongoing projects). People come to us with an app idea, we charge them for us to build it (plus hourly rates for continued updates or changes), they get all the profits from it, if any.

As far as I've heard, very few have actually turned a profit for their owners. Most are genuinely useless apps, that nobody would ever pay to use. Others are decent ideas that compete with too many similar ones. And often they're poorly-designed or have other limitations that prevent us from actually making a good app (for one in particular, we did the app but the server-side code was done by another group of contractors, who seem to hail from Elbonia judging by the fact that it takes 15 minutes for a user login call to succeed - the app has a one-star rating even though we did everything we could to make it better, even offering to take over the webservice side).

Still, we get paid well to do it all. We're never going to make a massively-successful app (or if we do, we're not getting massive stacks of cash from it), but we usually turn a profit on each project because we get paid regardless of whether the app succeeds or not.

Like the old saying goes, the real winners in a war are the ones selling the guns. In a tech bubble, the real winners are the contract companies.

No, the Chatroulette "feature" on here one a few years back was worse.

Wow, that's sure taking "publish or perish" to new levels.

Yes, as is the Xbox One and the latest APUs.

AMD has been focusing on tight CPU/GPU integration. They're pretty far along with it.

Nvidia was primarily focusing on power efficiency, and they're pretty good on that front right now. Their actual mobile stuff is selling like crap because they aren't quite there yet, but compare Kepler to GCN and you'll see how efficient it is. Maxwell is supposedly more so, but they haven't launched high-end parts yet so we can't really judge yet.

Nvidia did have CPU/GPU integration on their long-term plans, but the sudden importance of it (due to AMD's console wins) seems to have caught them by surprise. They haven't really had incentive to rush it - on the mobile side, nobody seems to care about it, and on the desktop they don't have CPUs to sell the way AMD does.

And yes, that feature probably will make the consoles fairly long-lived, although they really do need more graphical horsepower. The Xb1 in particular is struggling just to run at 1080p, and neither of them will be very useful if 4K takes off.

However, all of those have already been determined. All of the presented options are functionally equivalent in all of those regards (note how each of them have illumination, for instance). While you are definitely correct that the cover can be considered a functional part, there are no functional decisions between the options we have been provided.

None of what's being voted on can be considered a functional part. All that we're voting on is the cover, basically some soft armor to protect the actual suit from damage. And then all that we're voting on is the coloration patterns.

Oh, and this is purely for the prototype - it will never even go into space. So all that the voting public is being trusted with is picking out the colors of a protective cover for a model that's only being used for testing, not actual spaceflight.

And since pretty much 0% of the voting public are experienced aerospace engineers, that's probably all we *should* be trusted with. I know the 150 hours I've put into Kerbal Space Program certainly does not qualify *me* for designing anything that actually goes into space and needs to work properly.

The NSA is part of the executive branch. President Obama could shut down the whole thing and fire everyone involved without needing to go through Congress. What he needs a law for is to find another way to do exactly what they're doing now.

If you want me to actually believe that you're changing, just issue the shutdown order.

Your argument is flawed in that it assumes people are rational and make logical decisions.

Bitcoin became popular in no small part because many people believe government-backed currencies are overregulated or poorly managed. Because there was a market demand for a non-government-controlled currency, Bitcoin took off. Other things definitely played bigger roles, but being unregulated was a feature, not a bug.

To an extent they were right. It's very difficult to handle money electronically without a middleman, and there are few enough middlemen that the costs can be prohibitive. That's just one thing that an unregulated currency could do better - there are dozens more, but they would be a bit complex to explain even though they boil down to "a managed currency can be ruined by bad management".

But an unregulated currency is also inherently risky, at a much lower level. Nobody with brains is saying that Bitcoin isn't risky to use. Bitcoin exchanges and banks will continue to fail, or be scams, or so on. While never good, they are a sign at least that the currency is working as designed - uncontrolled by any governing body. And eventually things may stabilize - the intense speculation is likely the driving force behind many recent failures and scams.

Is it worth it, to have a currency that is beyond the reach of all but the most oppressive of governments? I think it is, but that's a question that's subjective enough that there is no wrong answer.

Even if it is a military training aid*, it's not like this isn't completely standard practice. America's own 11th Armored Cavalry is an entire regiment of troops using equipment modified to look and act like enemy equipment (still Soviet, both because most of our enemies are still using Soviet or Soviet-derived equipment, and because it seems like Russia wants to start WW3 again). They're used for training - every other army unit cycles through, "fighting" against them in a really, really advanced version of laser tag, with the 11th acting as the "opposing force", mimicking as best they can the enemy's tactics and capabilities.

Iran and US are currently enemies. We're not at war yet, and I hope it doesn't come to that, but expecting neither side to train for that war is preposterous.

* Given that it's size is wrong, it seems ill-designed for military training. If they were training for an air or sea assault, they would need a properly-sized target, and if they were training to try to capture it, they'd need more detailed internals. It seems more likely to be prop for a propaganda film.

It doesn't even have to do anything sinister - just say "if you want , we need to be able to audit your source code". They find the security holes themselves, tell the vendor about one or two minor ones to hide their intentions, then use the flaws they didn't disclose to hack others. The vendor wouldn't see anything that makes the NSA look even remotely sinister. Best part is that the vendors who aim for US government contracts, particularly ones needing security audits, will be the ones aiming for other governments' security-sensitive contracts, so you're catching the big fish.

The core problem is that "data" and "code" are being sent over the same path - the reporting data is being sent out, and the control "data" is being sent in, but it's over a two-way Internet connection. If you had an analog control system that was openly accessible in some way, you'd have the exact same problems. Or you could have a complete separate, non-public digital control connection that would be secure. But nobody wants to lay two sets of cable to one device, and there's a convenience factor in remote control. So since security doesn't sell products*, but low price and convenience features do, we got into our current situation. It's not "digital"'s fault. It's not "analog"'s fault. It probably would have happened even if all our long-range communication networks were built of hydraulics and springs.

* For those who are about to point out how much money antivirus software makes, that's fear selling, not security. Fear moves product *very* well.

I was a gifted child. Starting from Grade 3, I was in a special program. I went to a middle school that had an entire section for such students, and all my classes were with other gifted children. Then I went to a high school that was exclusively for gifted students, particularly focused on arts and technology. There was pretty much no fault in the system, save for the middle school being horribly overcrowded (which led to discipline problems, and when there's a lot of low-income students mixed with the typically middle-class gifted students, there's some adverse reactions).

It all fell apart in college. I couldn't get any scholarships, because when you're in a program like that, it's HARD. There were very few straight-A students because most of us were learning well above our grade level. I actually ran out of math to take - I did Calculus I (a college-credit class) in my sophomore year, and Statistics (an alternative to Calculus) the next, and that was literally as high as they could teach. Even the "core" classes were advanced - everything except physical education was at least one grade level above normal. Sure, on the state standardized tests we regularly got perfect scores, and my SAT was in the top tenth of a percent, but when a scholarship sees that you were a B-and-C student, they ignore you (it certainly didn't help that I'm middle-class and of no minority group, so I didn't qualify for any of those scholarships, but even the black female students had similar problems). I couldn't afford a good school, and I knew I would be bored out of my mind doing four years at a regular college.

So I did one year at a community college, to knock out the simple stuff cheaply (who CARES where you took Chemistry II when you're a programmer?), and was predictably bored the whole time. I then went to one of those sketchy "get your degree fast!" schools. They taught me absolutely nothing (my high school was several orders of magnitude better), but after testing out of about half the classes needed, I got my B.S. just over two years after I graduated high school, then immediately got a job from one of the internships they'd hooked me up on (I swear those schools have to get kickbacks or something from farming out interns - thankfully I had the foresight to refuse any unpaid internships).

Now, a lot of the stuff that helped me was state-level stuff, and I don't think it's the standard for US education. But if you want to make American education better for gifted children, make that system the standard, then fix the broken college system. Make trade schools for the people who don't need an advanced degree, make it cheaper to get into a college so you don't need a scholarship to qualify, and get some sort of standard in place for comparing grades fairly between unequal schools.