While not often directly mathematical, several of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories are interesting efforts on his part to grapple philosophically with many of the concepts of infinity: The Library of Babel most famously, but also great stories like The Book of Sand, The Aleph, and even Death and the Compass. They won't necessarily tickle you in the same way that Stephenson's work did, but they're still a fine jumping-off point into fascinating and deeply philosophical mathematics.

Everyone else on the net seems to point to the article in the NY Post (not exactly known for its careful fact-checking) and the Post article talks about Hulu 'taking its first steps' without a single mention of what those steps are. No other news stories I can find in the last several days talk about any changes occurring to Hulu's model (other than more original programming) or the Hulu user experience. So what the hell is the Post talking about, exactly? What evidence is there — beyond some editorial negative-wishcasting — that anything like this is going on?

Compared to Windows as of 15 years ago, maybe. The Windows APIs the last few years have been mature enough that while diverse hardware testing can still improve the user experience, it's gotten substantially less necessary for game developers. That just isn't the case for Android games.

I already have half a dozen different devices in my house that I can compile on, most of which have better storage and faster CPUs. Why do I care if I have another one? My iPad isn't trying to replace one of my computers and it seems silly to judge it by the same standards.

TFA seems to be long on speculation and short on actual data. Obviously streaming video isn't bandwidth-cheap, but does anyone have real figures on how much data streaming, say, a standard 24-minute TV show would take, and how many episodes it would take to hit the 2GB monthly cap? If they can, for instance, stream a low-quality episode in 10-20 MB then this seems like much sound and fury over very little...

Isn't this effectively the core purpose of copyright law? A hundred years of precedent suggest that my free speech rights don't extend to, for instance, performing my own stage production of Spiderman for all the world to see, or for writing and selling (or giving away) my word-for-word version of "Arguing With Idiots", and I'm not sure why anyone would expect results in the digital world to be any different.

Strange, then, that the 'bitcoin isn't worth the energy it's minted on!' article isn't the one that made Slashdot headlines...

Well, except that this didn't happen. Yes, a number of cards definitely lost value once they fell out of Type 2 - but the price of the core type-1 power cards has never actually gone down, and in fact Legacy has meant that a number of secondary cards from that era have now skyrocketed. A white-border Black Lotus will set you back more than a thousand dollars; a black-border one you'd be lucky to find under two thousand. All the dual lands are north of $50 in white-border now and more than $200 in black border; half-blue duals are at least $5-600 each in black border. Some of the cards from the earlier sets (esp. Arabian Nights) have seen corrections, but that's more a matter of the market realigning itself around playability rather than just rarity - old out-of-print cards that see any tournament play at all (or even saw tournament play at one point) have skyrocketed (Karakas at $50-60, Sylvan Library at $25, etc.)

Why do you think the iPhone was/is the hottest thing going? Hint: it's not the hardware, and it's sure not the carrier...

'Pretty much he can't talk or think about the PS3 for some time.'

I wasn't aware that the only things one could say about the PS3 were related to cracking its protection schemes and pirate! (or, okay, 'traffic in copyrighted works'). He can talk about the games, he can talk about the OS, he can talk about the hardware, he just can't, y'know, talk about how to circumvent any of it. Really, this seems like a relatively reasonable restraining order all around, at least by the metrics for such things; it stops the specific (alleged) infringing behavior and doesn't strike much more broadly than that.

Perhaps the reason the court didn't overturn the encryption restrictions is because the defendant didn't challenge those restrictions? The judgement in the linked-to article seems relatively clear (even if by omission) that the only restrictions challenged were the three restrictions (to use their lettering and wording) (A) on 'Use of Computer for Non-School-Related Purposes', (B) on 'Use of Instant Messaging or Social Networks', and (C) on 'Use of Computers Contaminated with Viruses or Unwanted Software'. If the defendant didn't request to have the restrictions on encryption (which are certainly there so that the juvenile justice system can track his communications) overturned and made no request for the total overthrow of his probation conditions, then I'm not sure the court even has standing to unilaterally throw out the encryption provision, and certainly it's little surprise that they wouldn't do so without being explicitly asked.

God, the 99/4a was a horrible system. Not bad as a games machine, but the worst possible machine to get a budding young coder (one of the most locked-down systems I've ever seen; even PEEK only came in extended basic and that still didn't get you POKE, and doing fast graphics was all but impossible unless you were an expert assembly coder and sprung the $100ish for their assembler). I still haven't forgiven my parents for that.

Parsec was also flat-out excellent, and it had one of the best versions of Miner 2049er out there, but that appeared on so many systems that it could hardly be called a hidden gem.

So far as I know, Knuth has done essentially zero work related to the P/NP question; a lot of algorithmics and tons of fantastic work in combinatorics, but I can't think of a single significant result he's contributed to complexity theory. While it's not impossible that he could have some sort of 'outsider breakthrough', it seems almost infinitesimally unlikely given the mathematical context and techniques that have had to be developed for similar complexity problems. My money would be on either a formal open-sourcing of the TeX codebase or the development of a full HTML5 rendering engine for TeX along the lines of the system that mathoverflow.net uses.

The reason why PageRank 'has to be' linear is essentially mathematical; treating importance as a linear function of the importance of inbound links means that the core equations that need to be solved to determine importance are linear and the answer can be found with (essentially) one huge matrix inversion. If you make importance nonlinear then the equations being solved become computationally infeasible.

What's interesting to me is how close the connections are between PageRank and the classic light transfer/heat transfer equations that come up in computer graphics' radiosity (see James Kajiya's Rendering equation); I wonder if there's a reasonable equivalent of 'path tracing' (link tracing?) for computing page ranks that avoids the massive matrix inversions of the basic PageRank algorithm.