Sapphire would not have prevented this. It would have made it worse. Sapphire is much more brittle than glass, which is actually quite flexible. With sapphire people would have bent phones with shattered screens. Luckily you'll probably never see a phone with a sapphire face:

* It's brittle
* It has to be milled to shape, increasing costs over glass due to manufacturing and lack of quick scalability in the manufacturing process.
* It is less transparent than glass, so battery life will suffer due to increased screen brightness requirements to be on par with glass phones

Apple bought that sapphire factory for the high-end apple watches. Sapphire is common on high end watches and Apple wants to hit all of the checkboxes necessary to be able to sell into that market.

For Pete's sake, read and comprehend before being incorrectly righteously indignant!

September 2013 comes before December 2013 by any reasonable reckoning. If the last post on the blog was December 2013 and the one from September 2013 is referred to as the penultimate post it's a fairly safe assumption that the author is correctly stating that the September 2013 post was the second to last post made.

I'm glad the author cites the blog posts he's written against the idea as supporting evidence that there is a groundswell against the idea....

Up the road at Purdue University there are always quite a lot of memes about Indiana University. They're all really negative, so that might affect the study results.

The first commercial game I shipped, SVGA Air Warrior (November, 1992) came on five 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disks. Three of those disks contained nothing but drivers for various video and sound cards. DOS absolutely had drivers, they were a nightmare to deal with.

John Conner will save us.

... ... ...
But why male models?

Do you truly, honestly, I mean...REALLY believe that Microsoft expends any time at all even thinking about ReactOS or WINE, let alone worrying about the .00000000000001 of a fraction of a portion of a negligible amount of a percent effect it might, MIGHT have on their bottom line?

Seriously, answer seriously, please.

Does advice that crosses the TLDR threshold score well with CBR but poorly with WABR? From TFA, [brackets added]:

> (if you make your advice hard to follow [read], that reduces the chance of somebody actually climbing that mountain [reading it]
>and then pointing out to you if your suggestion didn't work). So it's not just that the advice-giver is being unhelpful, it's that they're being a dick.

what is the TLDR threshold anyway? I'd love to see a quantification of the amount of information that can fit inside it

You're not going to just put a 777 down on some rural 2 lane road. You need a clear 1 mile (or more) straight reinforced runway. Not only is a 777's wheel track too wide for an average road the gross weight of the plane would crush the asphalt (or dirt or gravel) under the wheels. Bare minimum you'd need a fairly modern multi-lane highway. Something like that would be traveled enough that someone would notice a large commercial airliner attempting to land on it.

All he needs to do is point a webcam out his window and I'm sure he'll be able to get face recognition hits, names, addresses, SSNs, etc... of everyone standing in his yard.

...and all you ever saw on store displays in the 80's was the result of:

10 PRINT "FUCK "
20 GOTO 10

I'd have to say that code is a contender.

My phone is about to catch on fire! It is actually uncomfortably hot to the touch running the twister server -- some sort of CPU usage regulation would be nice. Love the idea.

.. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property

This doesn't light the way to radiation-free energy.

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412

"Although there have been a few proposals for fusion reactors employing plasmas far out of thermodynamic equilibrium (such as migma and inertial-electrostatic confinement), there has never been a broad, systematic study of the entire possible range of such devices. This research fills that gap by deriving fundamental power limitations which apply to virtually any possible type of fusion reactor that uses a grossly nonequilibrium plasma. Two main categories of nonequilibrium plasmas are considered: (1) systems in which the electrons and/or fuel ions possess a significantly non-Maxwellian velocity distribution, and (2) systems in which at least two particle species, such as electrons and ions or two different species of fuel ions, are at radically different mean energies. These types of plasmas would be of particular interest for overcoming bremsstrahlung radiation losses from advanced aneutronic fuels (e.g. ^3He-^3He, p-^{11}B, and p- ^6Li) or for reducing the number of D-D side reactions in D-^3He plasmas. Analytical Fokker-Planck calculations are used to determine accurately the minimum recirculating power that must be extracted from undesirable regions of the plasma's phase space and reinjected into the proper regions of the phase space in order to counteract the effects of collisional scattering events and keep the plasma out of equilibrium. In virtually all cases, this minimum recirculating power is substantially larger than the fusion power, so barring the discovery of methods for recirculating the power at exceedingly high efficiencies, reactors employing plasmas not in thermodynamic equilibrium will not be able to produce net power. Consequently, the advanced aneutronic fuels cannot generate net power in any foreseeable reactor operating either in or out of equilibrium."

You're shooting a beam of protons through a gas of fuel, this is about as far away from thermal equilibrium as you can get. Only a small proportion of protons will actually wind up fusing, the power it takes to generate those protons and shoot them into the fuel (or the power to take the ones that miss fuel ions and recirculate them to give them another pass through the fuel) will dwarf the power you get from the fusion reactions. In other words: big fat hairy deal. Fusion is easy. It's the extracting useful amounts of energy from it that's hard, and this process can't do that.