But just no, to the conversation mirror - most parents already don't keep their eyes on the road, we don't need to give them another excuse.

Ah, memories of my childhood. Things like my father flying down the freeway at 60 turning around in his seat and screaming "You look at me when I'm talking to you boy!" while everyone else screamed about oncoming traffic.

At the time I learned to drive, I considered my greatest achievement was being able to hold a conversation without looking at the person I'm speaking with.

If you believe that's not a scam then boy do I have a deal for you! One bridge*, slightly used!

Ever talked to a chatterbot? Some of them can produce utter nonsense, some of which can be downright hilarious.

That's also seen in bad console ports, by the way.

I've long since overcome my motion sickness (mom's van came with multiple barf buckets), but watching the screen move like I flicked google maps and it slowly pans to a stop (especially in any kind of curved motion) tickles the part of my brain that says "stop that, it's trying to make you sick".

Only if the master process quit after forking twice. This is not typical

No, this IS typical. The double fork allows the original process to interact with the user ("Enter your private key password:"), then exit and return 0 to the init script so init can print [ OK ] on your console.

The middle process needs to close file descriptors and do other cleanup then fork and die, causing the final process to become re-parented to init. Init then becomes responsible for cleaning it up if it dies, so it won't become a zombie.

Step-by-step "how to daemon" guide here.

This is apparently my president's nightmare because he will call me at midnight and ask me when our domains and SSL certs expire.

OpenSSL's RNG is used in many places separately from the SSL communication protocol itself, sometimes just for encryption in general (S/MIME) or sometimes someone just wants really random bytes.

Many servers fork twice in order to reparent to init, repeated forking is a common idiom in unixland.

Apache with MPM-prefork forks a bunch of children from a master process, which is typically itself a descendant of apachectl. In apache's case, this shouldn't be a problem since the "master-process-rng" would have recognized the fork and reinitialized on the first openssl connection, so the children are protected because they cannot have the same PID as the master-process.

Where it would be a problem would be an application or daemon that starts up, initializes the RNG, forks twice, then without this fork touching the RNG, starts forking children to do something random (say, encrypting one file per process or establishing a single SSL connection per process or something). Without having the RNG reset by the master process, one in 65534 or so processes will have the exact same RNG, because it will have inherited the original RNG untouched and be assigned the PID that created the RNG.

with fewer regulations for everyone

Ahahaha whoa there now, slow down sonny. Those regulations are there for a reason, mostly to keep people from competing against me and to make sure that nobody smokes anything I wouldn't openly admit to smoking. Let's back up to that low taxes thing.

I did. Just build a moat around your power plant with the water tool. That way, when the beam misses it won't cause your very expensive power plant to catch fire and explode. Can't say the same for whatever is on the other side of the moat though :)

Leaving a computer on all the time causes the mechanical parts to wear out. The bearings in the hard drives won't last as long, and the fans won't last nearly as long. Electrolytic capacitors have finite lifetimes, many of them are only rated for 10,000 hours at their rated voltage (that's only slightly longer than a year!). Tin whiskers will grow faster. A computer that is left on will be exposed to all the power spikes and brownouts that come down the wall power instead of just those that happen to hit when the computer is running (granted a good UPS helps here). A computer that's on all the time will also accumulate dust and lint faster, and that can also shorten the lifespan if you don't keep on top of it.

I've found that my computers that I regularly turn off (or sleep) when I'm not using them typically outlast the ones that have to be left on all the time for whatever reason. In both cases, the failures are almost always the mechanical parts such as the fans and hard drives, or the power supply. While it's true that thermal cycling stresses things like the CPU, chipset, memory. GPU, etc. those parts I've found to be very reliable no matter how I used them and they fail very rarely. Well, maybe slighly more so for GPUs.

Well, they discontinued the half cent in 1857, and just a few years later the whole country was thrown into civil war. Do you think they're going to make that mistake again?

Soundcards generally aren't high voltage or high current, and those are the situations where the bad capacitors made themselves known. That's not to say that it isn't the caps though, especially if the sound card was in a computer case that tended to run hot.

I remember buying some Realistic speakers for about $15. They were unmistakably crap, but on the other hand they were amazing compared to anything else you could get for $15.

Assuming that the scale setting controls some gain stage before the ADC, all they really need is enough bit resolution to match the number of vertical pixels on the screen. Considering some the screens I've seen put into digital oscilloscopes an 8 bit ADC would be good enough. Now, a fully analog scope with a CRT wouldn't have this particular problem.