Nope, wrote it myself, asshole. But thanks!

So they're not even based on Broadwell yet; when are they expecting to get Xeons based on Skylake out - next year?

It seems to me the attraction of a chromebook is a solid state, light, durable machine for around $200,with wifi, and immediate start up, and all day battery life. The weight is around a MacBook Air, but at 1/5 the price. So I do not see how repurposing a laptop will result in any advantage other then integration with the Google stack. Using a chrome browser and logging in would accomplish much of this. Ubuntu seems to have variations that have recommended usage at or below 2GB.

...and your comment represents the absolutely fundamental misunderstanding that pervades this discussion.

The truth no one wants to hear:

The distinction is no longer the technology or the place, but the person(s) using a capability: the target. In a free society based on the rule of law, it is not the technological capability to do a thing, but the law, that is paramount.

Gone are the days where the US targeted foreign communications on distant shores, or cracked codes used only by our enemies. No one would have questioned the legitimacy of the US and its allies breaking the German or Japanese codes or exploiting enemy communications equipment during WWII. The difference today is that US adversaries -- from terrorists to nation-states -- use many of the same systems, services, networks, operating systems, devices, software, hardware, cloud services, encryption standards, and so on, as Americans and much of the rest of the world. They use iPhones, Windows, Dell servers, Android tablets, Cisco routers, Netgear wireless access points, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Gmail, and so on.

US adversaries now often use the very same technologies we use. The fact that Americans or others also use them does not suddenly or magically mean that no element of the US Intelligence Community should ever target them. When a terrorist in Somalia is using Hotmail or an iPhone instead of a walkie-talkie, that cannot mean we pack our bags and go home. That means that, within clear and specific legal authorities and duly authorized statutory missions of the Intelligence Community, we aggressively pursue any and all possible avenues, within the law, that allow us to intercept and exploit the communications of foreign intelligence targets.

If they are using hand couriers, we target them. If they are using walkie-talkies, we target them. If they are using their own custom methods for protecting their communications, we target them. If they are using HF radios, VSATs, satellite phones, or smoke signals, we target them. If they are using Gmail, Windows, OS X, Facebook, iPhone, Android, SSL, web forums running on Amazon Web Services, etc., we target them -- within clear and specific legal frameworks that govern the way our intelligence agencies operate, including with regard to US Persons.

That doesn't mean it's always perfect; that doesn't mean things are not up for debate; that doesn't mean everyone will agree with every possible legal interpretation; that doesn't mean that some may not fundamentally disagree with the US approach to, e.g., counterterrorism. But the intelligence agencies do not make the rules, and while they may inform issues, they do not define national policy or priorities.

Without the authorities granted by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), the United States cannot target non-US Persons who are foreign intelligence targets if their communications enters, traverses, or otherwise touches the United States, a system within the United States, or, arguably, a system or network operated by a US corporation (i.e., a US Person) anywhere in the world. FAA in particular is almost exclusively focused on non-US Persons outside the US, who now exist in the same global web of digital communications as innocent Americans.

Without FAA, the very same Constitutional protections and warrant requirements reserved for US Persons would extend to foreign nations and foreign terrorists simply by using US networks and services â" whether intentionally or not. Without FAA, an individualized warrant would be required to collect on a foreign intelligence target using, say, Facebook, Gmail, or Yahoo!, or even exclusively foreign providers if their communications happens to enter the United States, as 70% of international internet traffic does. If you do not think there is a problem with this, there might be an even greater and more basic misunderstanding about how foreign SIGINT and cyber activities fundamentally must work.

If you believe NSA should not have these capabilities, what you are saying is that you do not believe the United States should be able to target foreign intelligence targets outside the United States who, by coincidence or by design, ever utilize or enter US systems and services. If you believe the solution is an individualized warrant every time the US wishes to target a foreign adversary using Gmail, then you are advocating the protection of foreign adversaries with the very same legal protections reserved for US citizens -- while turning foreign SIGINT, which is not and never has been subject to those restrictions, on its head.

These are the facts and realities of the situation. Any government capability is imperfect, and any government capability can be abused. But the United States is the only nation on earth which has jammed intelligence capabilities into as sophisticated and extensive a legal framework as we have. When the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress, multiple executive agencies under two diametrically opposite Presidential administrations, armies of lawyers within offices of general counsel and and inspectors general, and federal judges on the very court whose only purpose is to protect the rights of Americans under the law and the Constitution in the context of foreign intelligence collection are all in agreement, then you have the judgment of every mechanism of our free civil society.

Or we could just keep laying our intelligence sources, methods, techniques, and capabilities bare to our enemies.

âMany forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." - Winston Churchill (1874-1965), Speech in the House of Commons, November 11, 1947

"The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged â" all that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, Success depends in most Enterprises of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned and promising a favourable issue.â â" George Washington, our nation's first spymaster, in a letter to Colonel Elias Dayton, 26 July 1777

That would be far too logical of a solution...government regulations don't work like that.

The version of Windows was Windows 95, and the number of days was 49.7.

https://support.microsoft.com/...

Yes,
      we have something here as exciting as cold fusion or polywater. it seems to violate newtons second law so people are looking for the escape clause. If it's real it's a huge deal because it means the fundamental problem of space travel--- bringing your propellant--- is permanently solved modulo the nitty gritty of making it more efficient.

On the otherhand, like polywater and cold fusion it's likely a reproducible experimental error that's not been identified yet. 3 groups have independently observed it so far.

My guess: it's just ions sputtered off the walls and accelerated or it's attraction towards an induced dipole in the room, neither of which would be exciting.

What's wrong with the plain old internet that we need this? I'm thinking that the notion here is that by making money by limiting access that they can give people free internet. AOL.com sort of started with the notion of monetizing a walled garden to offer cheaper internet access and it did spread to eventually giving access to the whole internet. But you could also describe indentured servitude in a similar rosie way of giving people opportunities.

Chrome is truly awful at opening multiple tabs at once on my mac. unbelievably slow loading times compared to Safari. And when a page is loading in one tab, other tabs don't continue to update swiftly. I find this really a weirds because chrome uses a separate process for each tab so one would think they would not step on each other. My guess, wild, is that tabs are contending for some resource like network or GPU and actually slowing each other down. In general I much prefer safari or firefox, but I use chrome because I also own a chromebook and I can't run safari on that. Basically, google is doing the same thing microsoft did to make IE dominant by not allowing other browsers on their platform.

An example of what? That patent is legal because of bad patent law. That's not the USPTO that's congress.

Why the hell should companies, including tax payers (costs of running courts & all) have to pay for the USPTO's fuckups?

There are two different issues here.

For the USPTO to vet patents properly would require a substantially higher cost per patent. The tax payers through their elected representative did not allow for patent fees to go high enough to cover that cost nor subsidies to cover that cost. They are the most responsible party for the policies.

As for companies. Companies don't have to pay for the USPTO. What they do have is a situation where their patents are registered but unvetted. They have to understand what they bought. They didn't buy much more than a filing.

Either the USPTO didn't do their job right (incompetence gets you fired in the real world, but not if you're a bureaucrat apparently)

In the "real world" offering a lower quality product at a much better price is applauded. It doesn't get you fired it makes you rich.

#1 Richest man Bill Gates got their for cutting the cost of desktop software.
#2 Warren Buffet got their for cutting the cost of running insurance companies
#3 Larry Ellison got their for reducing administrative expenses

etc...

What does often get people fired in the real world is blaming others rather than owning your mistakes. If people want a better patent system where the USPTO vets patents rather than registers them, they should pay for that system and stop pretend the reason they aren't getting such a system for 95% off is because patent examiners are being lazy.

I am wondering if this is a case where authors should be omitted in the submissions, and instead have the review based on content and quality of citations? Beyond the gender aspect, it would also ensure that there is no preferential treatment given to a 'buddy' or someone with a certain reputation.

My guess is it's the same sort of testing magic the latest cold fusion dude in italy is peddling.

You recycle them. They contain some lithium, a transition metal like cobalt or equivalent, and various anions (PF6, BF4, BPh4) that make up the electrolyte.

You can separate out and recover all of the materials you used to make the battery and make another one.

Lithium ion batteries also don't contain rare earth metals.

There wasn't enough fuel to sustain orbit. The team responsible for this went to heroic lengths to keep it in orbit --- including at one point venting the spacecraft's helium to give it a final boost. This was all done so the probe could keep sending back data, which it did happily. In the end we got approximately four times the expected data we wanted from the probe.

Not bad for government contractors.