TL;DR

Seriously, this is something that can be read when the attention span is longer and there is more context for the naughty bits. No one wants boring lists of who begat whom and who tried to kill whom. The incest and polygamy and slavery will appeal to many the undeveloped mind, but again, is this what kids should be exposed to?

If you want to indoctrinate a kid into the religious cult, use Little Pilgrims Progress. It is short, sweet, and makes everyone seems like loser. It is more effective at creating Christians than Twilight is a creating Vampires.

If you want just general 'miracles happen' try The Little Prince.

If you want debauchery and long winded elegant writing, then you are to the Canterbury Tales. This will help with the SAT scores

Yes, the bible is cultural model, but, as shown by the behavior of the average christian, it is not that is read as whole. Rather it is taken piecewise and then used to construct a reality that is acceptable to the user. As has been my experience, as one who was read it, the main use it to tell others that their bible based beliefs are much less than that. For instance, as those who push school prayer don't want to accept, the bible says that praying in a public secular setting is exactly what one does not want to do.

It seems to me that the list is really 'products I don't like'. Certainly the dumbest idea of the year was MS WIndows 8, and Surface, write down of nearly 1 billion.

As far as the lack of professionalism in the IT sector, I worked in various professional enterprises. Some allow men to do whatever they want. Others have higher standards and require men to think. Say that men cannot think is silly. Men can think before they say or do stupid things. The trick is to fire the incompetent men who refuse to do so.

XBox is not a loser like surface, and trying to monetize Xbox is not dumb. MS responded to the issue.

The internship was stupid, but so are half the movies that get made.

The new Apple mail does suck. Where have you been? Every release Apple screws up one or two of the applications. Who is using google mail anyway? Google is the one company with a direct high speed link to the NSA, if a not NSA mining servers directly in their facility. The must have done something to rate the cheap gas.

When I bought my Powermac G4, it had no SCSI which left me in a pickle. Neither did it have floppy. Fortunate because it had Firewire it did not matter. A simple adapter meant that I could run all my SCSI stuff and a floppy. At the time USB was a toy. Fortunately such a thing exists for Thunderbolt, either as a cheap cable or a full docking station for Ethernet, monitor, firewire, USB, etc.

One advantage that the external expansion model has over the everything-stuck-inside PC model is migration is easier. Not everything has to replaced at once. It can be upgraded over time. I appreciate that I can add features without opening the case. I also appreciate that the Powermac has always been one of the easiest machines to upgrade and repair.

I argue that these less liberal copyright laws, along with changes in technology, are really the reason why kids today have little respect for copyright law. Some argue that the ability to sell ones work is an basic right, but really it is something we set in law to help and encourage creation of derivative works, as something that is completely new is quite rare. A compromise between a reality where things are chopped and screwed to maximize creation and where a producer can exclusively benefit economically for a short period of time, thus reducing the creation of works.

The developed western world is not going to be able to compete with these draconian copyright laws. Places like China are soon going to be a major competitor. Having things copyrighted in perpetuity provides not benefits for a nation, only for a select few who think they are above the nation. And at some point the cost of enforcing the law on mickey mouse is going to be so great that it will fall, just like the current war on drugs.

This is obviously advice for MS Windows, so a mirrored backup may be all that many people can deal with. However, I agree that if one has a way of doing continuous incremental backup, it does provide value. There seem to be a lot of cloud backup services that do incremental. But a simple mirror certainly will not do this.

My concern is the lack of whole system backup as part of the plan. This is clearly a MS Windows issue as MS does not seem to like to give consumer end users carte blanche to restore the system. However, as been mentioned, this is the easiest way to deal with some very horrible problems.

I would invest in something like Acronis and a terabyte hard drives. Backup the whole machine every few days. Incremental backup daily.

The incentives of the nation state are different from pure exploration. The incentives are either to be first, to establish national ownership, or research. No one nation can currently claim a planet. The precedent has been set with Antarctica, as well as more explicitly with the moon treaty.

So the question is why send anyone off earth. It is risky, expensive, and provides no value. The answer is of course entertainment. A Space Shuttle used to cost around half a billion to launch. Harry Potter probably cost as much to make if distribution and publicity are added in. Everyone says how much it costs to go to space, but those costs are not uncommon in other areas.

The people in Mars One are not likely to survive to reach a standard life expectancy if they travel to mars. They may die on the trip. They are volunteers giving their lives. I expect some of them to make it to the hatch and refuse to enter, or even get fully strapped in and then demand to get out. I often say I would die for the opportunity to go to space, but I really don't know if I would have the courage to sit there on a million pounds of explosives and actually go through with it. I would hope the show producers would actually do some science so these people would not give their lives just for entertainment.

Here is the final note. If they Mars One team dies on launch, en route, or on the planet, there is a whole range of liability and monetary claim. For instance in the Colombia disaster there were apparently million dollar awards from the manufacture as well as lawsuits fired against the government. The compensation for private disasters such as this are going to be different and not government backed, which means that liability exposure might be much less. For instance, the family of a women killed during a stunt for a reality show on the Discovery channel is asked for a mere $75,000. In other words, it is probably cheaper to have someone die as part of a tv show than as part of a legitimate research mission.

That said, I think this may be a scam as well. They will have actually launch a test vehicle in the next year if they are going to have a human certified ship in four.

this is simply a case of not caring. Here are three simple cheap things that can be done to insure that the effects of these attacks are minimal and tampering evident. 1) log USB port use in a secure memory space, uploading it periodically. 2) Place a validation on the USB port dating the last access. 3) Secure the USB port separately with some lock box, tiggering an alarm in the box is broken. 4) have a switch elsewhere is energize the USB port.

One issue pointed out in the article is that same machines were attacked repeatedly. A tamper evident security program would prevent that. This is often the case with computers. There is no way to determine if a box has been tampered with.

Basically the problem the US has is that it is difficult to escalate this to beyond a civil matter. He was not in the military, he was not employed by the federal government, he was not a spy for a foreign power. He was a private citizen who decided to become a whistleblower. The US has rules protecting whistleblowers. For instance, if the IRS were doing some of this, and he reported it, most of the conservatives in congress would be buying him hookers and drug and throwing a parade, even if it did mean that the US governments ability to pay bills might be jeopardized.

As far as treason is concerned, in the US that is a very narrow legal term defined by our constitution. That any high level government official would throw it around I think speaks to the lack of competency of that official. Treason is declaring war, giving aid and comfort or aligning with an enemy. Diplomatically, the US has few nation states that it claims as enemies. In fact we have a diplomatic term for them, 'rogue states', so we do not have to use the term enemy. In the current climate treason is a high bar, otherwise we would have some Generals who have been recently executed, for instance those that have somewhat decreased the ability of the navy in some parts of the world by selling secrets to foreign agents.

In the US the governement should not function under an excess of secrecy. People like Snowden are part of that. If he is convicted of anything, the next person who wants to report an abuse of power, for instance the FEMA concentration camps being built to imprison dissidents against the coming UN World Governemnt, will be too afraid to come forward. This is clearly not in the peoples interest.

Artists that make money during their lifetime by doing art tend to be pretty aggressive. Most consumers of art do not tend to belive living artists should be well compensated, perhaps only thinking that consumables and a minimum wage is required. Artists have to aggressively create a value added.

We can idealize astronauts and space, but ultimately we are all just humans trying to make a living. Astronauts do this by leveraging the opportunities they were given by the taxpayer. Hard earned opportunities, but taxpayer funded opportunities nevertheless. To say that we are going to believe one person over another, or deny one person his livelihood just because we find it inconvenient, is really a limited view.

This is what I was thinking. I have had jobs where bonuses were 35% of my compensation. In addition to that, there are other means to keep compensation non-transparent. Health care plans can be more expensive for certain employees. Certain employees may get various allowances. In the religious racket, these allowances are often kept hushed up to make it appear that leaders are compensated in a limited fashion. For corporate compensation, the number of under the table tricks are endless, including cars, jets, household staff.

' If one is transparent, one must include total compensation.

The perception is that a physical attack is expensive and risky while a cyber attack can be cheap and have little risk. This physical attack risks two people lives and only did limited damage. To do more damage you have to hire and train more people willing to be killed, and get them into place simultaneously before security responds.

The reality is that utilities have control systems that can be accessed from the outside by a well funded attacker, then that is a huge risk. Cyber attack can also be used for other nefarious purposes. For instance, if one wants to attack a location, and the location has a smart meter, then the smart meter can be used to track the traffic patterns, remotely, with no risk of discovery.

Many years ago there was a similar discussion of conventional versus biological or chemical weapons. The consensus was these types of weapons required a high level of skill and higher levels of risk that just blowing something up. I think the types of attacks we have seen of the past 15 years has substantiated this. We have seen very few successful biological or chemical attacks by 'terrorist' groups, but have seen even small governments manage. Does this mean we don't protect against these attacks. Sure we do. But it is probably more likely that someone gets a dirty bomb, or even a fusion device, to the top of the tallest building in a city than someone poisons the water supply, although both are probably highly unlikely.

For walk in sales, that is probably correct. A price is mis-marked, a few customers get the deal, yes you have happy customers. However it is not clear that online customers have such loyalties. They will tend to go where the low prices are, as there is little opportunity cost for doing so. That is why Amazon has what much a loss leading Amazon Prime program. To keep customers coming back not just for low prices, but other perks. Same thing for airlines.

So no, the rules for online are not to fullfill orders that have clearly incorrect prices. If I go into a big grocery store like Krogers, and some disgruntled employee has put a a 50 dollar bottle of wine on sale at $10, they are not going to sell it to me for $10 when it rings up for 50. There is a secondary check there for price, the human element. Likewise, if a computer glitch, maybe put in by a disgruntled employee, allows me to check out for half price, then this is an admitted grey area. My payment has been accepted.

I would say, however, that until a product is formally charged to a customers card, which often happens as it is shipped, and maybe even until it is delivered there the retailer has an opportunity to cancel the order. Possession is, of course, paramount. This is why I would say one the product is delivered the price must be honored. This is a grey area as well, and we have seen cases where retailers have demanded delivered products back, but this to me is clearly bad manners.

So why is Delta honoring the price? I think it is because of delivered product. When I buy a ticket, my card is charged, and I immediately get a confirmation that I am guaranteed a seat on that flight. If something happens and I do not get a seat on the flight, I at minimum am sure to get a seat on a similar flight, often with financial compensation above and beyond that seat. Also, unlike most small retailers, the airlines have algorithms that continuously adjust the price of seats to maximize the total revenue on each flight. Therefore it is harder for airline to use the 'disgruntled employee' excuse.

People are going to buy computers to do stuff. Email, facebook, ms word, that is what the average users says they do on the computer. One big problem with netbooks was that people assumed that could MS Word, and when they found out they couldn't they returned the computer. This is a solution where OEMs can expose people to other OS while still allowing MS Office to run. Maybe some people realize that they don't need MS Office. Maybe they don't want to pay a monthly fee for Office and realize that Google Docs or OpenOffice is sitting right there fore free. Maybe the next computer they buy doesn't have MS WIndows.

This is scary enough that MS, allegedly, has in the past prevented OEM from installing two OS. The last thing MS wants a computer user to know is there is another OS. Look at the misinformation on the Mac, how expensive it is, when my last Macbook Air was $1000. Yes, more expensive that they mythicla $300 MS laptop that runs everything, but about what a good laptop costs. We can argue price, but MS is scared of users knowing there is choice.

We also see this in past EULA in which certain versions of MS Windows could not be the guest OS. This is likely the future of the PC. A reasonably functional and free client OS on top of which a virtualized guest OS can be run. This is basically what MS is doing now with the instant upgrade. Start with a functionality locked out, and buy a full OS after the fact. Like the Mainframe manufacturers used to do. You have all the hardware, but have to pay extra to use it.

I think the aluminum is just the cheap way to increase the fuel economuy. The basic problem with a truck is the aerodynamics and the engine. The aerodynamics are always going to suck, and there is little that can be done about that. The engine, OTOH, can be adjusted.

Right now most trucks are powered assuming that they are going to be carrying a significant load, and that consumers are going to be expect a good performance with that load. The result of this, and the reason many like trucks, is that when they are not loaded they are overpowered and therefore can achieve a great speed. That many people buy trucks for speed and not load is indicated by the number of automatics that are sold.

This need not be the case. We had an old Toyota pickup and it was a four cylinder 100 horse power r siries engine. When loaded it was slow, but like most people I did not drive it loaded all the time. But it was a working truck. We had a big chevy truck as well for work around the farm. Fords engines are not inefficient, at around 50 horsepower per cylinder. The point is that most people are driving around in a six cylinder truck wasting gas when what they need is 4 cylinder. It can be significant. In they city my six cylinder car get 16 MPG while my 4 cylinder car, just a fast, gets over 20.

You know, all this is true. Men in my extended community were some of the first of die of AIDS as I was entering my free sexual period. Yet I had no cell phone, would go off on my bike, be gone all day, and was unsupervised after school. Maybe it was luck. Maybe I wasn't dumb. Maybe I was because I was poor, as it was the mostly the richer kids I knew who did recreational drugs and still got through school. We had drug houses across from where I went to school, where drugs were plentiful and cheap, but it was clear that that was not the path to success. I am not a person who thinks the war on drugs is anything but a waste of money, but I also never saw them as a way to a better life. For kids I think we should focus on the mostly likely path to a caring and successful life, they will figure out the fun detours on their own.

As far as 'meagan law' danger, it is safer now than when I growing up. When I was a kid, at least 28 teenage boys were raped, tortured, and murdered over a three year period. When parents reported them missing, the police just assumed they ran away. The murders would have continued and probably never be solved if not one of the co-conspirators shooting the ringleader and then confessing. Not even then the police did not want to deal with it. In a few cities we still have a high rate of abduction and murders of children. Not the police force is more professional and will tend to take these cases seriously. If I had been born a few years earlier, I might have been one of the dead.