I generally refuse to post anything but the most anodyne statements on public web forums under my own name. Who knows what political or cultural opinion some future interlocutor might find offensive?

However, give me a pseudonym and I'm happy to post. The risk of search engines making the association is small. I'm fine with being legally responsible (and culturally anonymous) for what I post, which is precisely what pseudonymity gives me.

As with moderation, this is something Slashdot gets more or less right.

Exactly. SF could fix this problem by enacting much stronger rent control laws!

CPS pays an average of just under $75K to teachers, which is more than most private schools do. Along with the extra job security and (promised if not delivered) pensions, that makes the teaching positions attractive to quite a few people. The teachers I know also feel good about dedicating their professional lives to students in CPS, who are generally in need of every bit of help they can get.

If I had made a bundle in the dot com bubble or something, I could see myself teaching CS in CPS. Or at least trying -- I teach grad school and don't know if I have the personality for younger students.

"Make your society egalitarian with this 1 weird trick!"

If we postulate that this measure will leave company profits unchanged, then the cap will send extra money somewhere else. Its backers seem to assume that it would go to the rank and file workers, but I think it likelier that the owners of the firm would begin experiencing a better return on their money. That cohort, too, is wealthier than average, though not by so much as CEOs since a lot of it is comprised of pension funds and mutual funds. In any case, the loopholes around this kind of measure are so numerous that it would be silly to pursue.

What we really need is to bring back serious inheritance taxes, even if some people want to call them "death taxes". In the long run, huge wealth is not a societal problem so long as it doesn't become dynastic. Rather than playing havoc with the incentives of the living via convoluted tax laws and weird rules, let's concentrate on fighting the growth of entrenched classes.

Given the recent revelations about NSA spying, I refuse to use these services. The risk is simply too high that the government might see my tax returns.

There's a lot of useful chemistry and energy in ammonia (a significant component of urine), because nitrates, or bound nitrogen, have potential energy. Gunpowder manufacture in the middle ages relied on factory-style processing of animal urine.

I think you mean KeePass and I quite agree.

It would be interesting to know which "level" people tend to choose for their MMORPGs (at least of those who have "levels"). On the one hand it's just a game, while on the other it involves a gargantuan investment of time and attention.

I haven't checked, but I assume my own Adobe account was part of this leak. And I don't care.

Along with a large portion of the increasingly savvy population, I have more than one "level" of password in use. My account used the lowest of these, basically something like adobe_123. Learning that is not going to help anyone form useful heuristics on how I create my banking passwords -- it might even poison them.

On the whole, I believe the breach will probably help crackers (if decryption can be achieved). But, I think it is foolish to automatically assume that accounts with "weak" passwords are contributors to the problem. As with me, they might be poor indicators of how humans choose more important passwords.

It's always interesting to hear of novel (to me) industrial processes Apple uses to make its product. Case in point: the article mentions Apple has switch to friction-stir welding.

A point I've read in The Economist, and has really stuck with me, is how one of America's strengths is the somewhat loose federation of the states, which allows for different approaches to any given problem. Each state can try its own approach to the ACA, or education, or taxation laws, et cetera. Eventually the "better" approaches should become clear, and the country as a whole will adopt them.

Now in practice it doesn't always work like that, but I think we see it in action right now with marijuana legalization and gay marriage.

Of course, the federation also means that, in cases where the "best" approach is known a priori, we lose efficiency when some states fail to adopt it. I don't consider that a big problem, because I think politicians are rarely capable of identifying and engendering quality programs right from the start, especially at the national level.

Let's hope the rule proves true here, and that other states copy Kentucky. (Maybe Kentucky can even share the code?)

He's a little off, but pretty likely referring to the Iran Contra Affair.

Clearly you are a Wikipedia editor.

I would have been interested to see what the gap looks like on a Hackintosh where, presumably, hardware optimizations would be in Windows' favor. I suspect the gap would remain, since the battery optimizations don't depend much on device drivers.