I imagine Beats/Apple isn't too happy with Bose's shenanigans regarding telling NFL players they can't wear their Beats headphones until 90 minutes after the end of the game.

Of course the players do it anyway, and Beats apparently pays the fines for them... but still.

Incidentally, the NFL isn't doing very well with regards to their endorsement deals - first Microsoft, and now Bose.

The problem is you have a conflict of endorsements.

The NFL is being paid directly by Microsoft and Bose to promote their stuff - Microsoft and Bose can put "Official NFL Product" on those things.

The problem is, the teams and players don't really see much of that money because it goes straight into the league. Sure, they may get a few bucks in the way of stadium improvements and such, but you can bet most of that money isn't going into their paycheques.

So the players and teams often have their OWN endorsement deals. This money goes directly to the team and the players themselves. Sure some goes back to the NFL in terms of league fees and whatnot, but it's extra income for the team and player.

So what's a player to do? Be forced to wear Bose which nets them ZERO dollars in the end? Or wear their Beats which nets them millions in extra dollars in their pocket?

It's obvious why the players are defying the rule. And in fact, you have to admit, it's getting a LOT of marketing for Beats as well - I mean, they're being fined, in public, for wearing Beats. With photos. In the news. Now what is better marketing - the player wearing it on the field or a news conference, or having it plastered all over the news with closeups of the offense with news they're being fined for wearing Beats headphones (and barely a Bose mention!).

It's actually kind of brilliant marketing - Bose gets made out to be the bad guy, and Beats gets plastered all over the news section, so much so that the $10,000 fine is well worth it - marketing expense.

List of NFL Finable Offenses, with fines.

Heck, one wonders if they're going to get a bunch of stickers to stick over their Bose headphones with the iconic "b". I mean, it doesn't get more interesting than that - they wear Bose headphones, but they're sporting the "b" that clearly indicates Beats.

Do you hear nothing? No, you hear a background roar of muffly rumblings.

Actually, a small (but not insignificant" amount of sound comes from around the ear as well - bone conduction can transfer the lower bass notes to the ear directly (it's why you can't have perfect silence except by being in an anechoic chamber). Of course, your ears when wearing ear defenders does crank up its gain - people in anechoic chambers do report hearing blood rushing through their veins in the ears, their heartbeats, etc. All noise conducted through the body.

It can get pretty freaky.

I shamefully admit clicking on it at least 10 times and cursing at my browser before realising.

The middle button on my mouse has acted up before, so I was clicking it and nothing was happening. I kept thinking it was the mouse so I clicked it harder, softer, and every which way. Then on a lark, I clicked a link elsewhere and a new tab opened sup, to which I noticed the link wasn't bringing up the destination in the status bar and figured that was the reason why it wasn't middle-clicking.

..is to not have a backspace ruin everything you just did just because you didn't have the focus you thought you had (Chrome!)

The big problem is the javascript "rich" editors that mess with browser state saving.

Backspace is a non-issue a lot of the time if you're using standard HTML widgets - every browser I've used from IE, Firefox and I think even Chrome save the state so if you accidentally backspace, you can hit Forward and boom, everything is restored. It's useful if you want to multi-quote Slashdot, for example.

But, rich editors break this functionality. I don't know why. Though, most rich editors work enough that backspace won't leave the page (or they use a javascript alert to keep you from blindly doing it), which is good for accidental purposes, but you lose it all when you return.

Quite annoying, really. Especially since the browsers even return text field contents if you close and re-open the tab (using Ctrl-Shift-T to reopen last closed tab, or reopening a tab from the history). Except well, rich editors. They always blank themselves...

There's a park near us where people fly RC planes. Fun to watch, and people keep them over the park, and there's no question they're controlled. The first time someone put up a multi-rotor, though, someone asked, "Is that a drone? Can it go by itself?" No. It's an RC plane just like everything else. And if you keep it over the open land in the park, and stay away from people's windows, you'll be fine.

A lot of multitrotors, while not completely autonomous, are partially autonomous in that they can handle a lot of the flying duties by themselves. As in the pilot merely controls altitude, direction and motion, while the onboard computer handles stability to reponse to commanded inputs.

So if the pilot gives it no input, the multirotor will simply hover there in the sky. (Contrast this to regular RC vehicles where active control by the pilot is required to maintain control - e.g., a RC helicopter cannot maintain a stable hover without pilot input).

So technically they are autonomous, they just won't really do anything without a command. And many have built-in intelligence where if they lose signal, they will attempt to return either to a safe spot, or fly in the reverse direction to regain the signal.

Telsa... you're being banned state by state, what's wrong?

They're too successful, that's what. Mess with the Big Three and you're bound to run into trouble.

Sorta kinda like Tucker.

I'm worried that the mini may go the way of the iMacs and head into being a totally sealed/pre-configured device and have no user changeable parts.

The mini started out that way, though now the unibody ones have a huge rubber root that can be twisted to remove it and exposing the RAM and innards. RAM swap is easy. hard drive swap requires a bit of work but the /. crowd should have the requisite skill to do it (

About the most "proprietary" part is the PCIe SSD, but it has a SATA port too for regular spinny hard drives or SATA SSDs.

Anyhow, the easiest way is to wait a couple of days and iFixit will have their teardowns.

The biggest problem for Intel in the mobile space is they don't really know how to make radio hardware. Qualcomm and TI are kicking their trash as far as that is concerned.

Infineon (owned by Intel) is a pretty big player in the mobile market as well. And while it's true Intel doesn't do radios, they bought Infineon for that reason.

Of course, a lot of phones are using Qualcomm SoCs so naturally they want to use Qualcomm modems and bundle it together (along with an Qualcomm (Atheros) WiFi/Bluetooth chipset).

Do you even understand that MONEY IS A TOOL and that "more nuanced world views" about money are about as relevant as more nuanced world views about hammers?

If you want to consider money as just a tool to transact and the simplified world view that getting the best value for money is the end game, then yes, you're correct.

However, money is also an instrument of change. If I want a buy a book, I could go to Amazon and get it, or my local bookstore across the street. Monetarily, I'd come out ahead using Amazon as Amazon has way less overhead than the bookstore, and thus be generally cheaper (at the expense of waiting a couple of days). And on a strictly money for goods transaction, yes, that makes most rational sense.

However, there are reasons I decide to buy said book at the bookstore. For one, I may actually like shopping there and want to keep them in business so they don't turn into a coffeeshop I don't use, or a high end clothing retailer or whatever. Or maybe the environment is such that I feel welcome and more like a valued contributor to the arts than just a customer.

Basically, I choose to spend more of my money because of the non-monetary benefits of the transaction.

It should not be a surprise that the big corporate stores are suffering from things like showrooming because they don't offer much added value to justify their costs.

They make gold ATMs, too, and the same arguments apply. There's absolutely nothing practical about it, and you're going to be ripped off by the fees no matter what. I guess it's a fun novelty for some folks, "Press Button, Receive Bitcoin." No one who's serious about using Bitcoin for any quasinonymous purpose will get them this way, especially considering that these ATMs tend to be in locations that have cameras everywhere.

Two reasons.

1) The power of physicality. Sure you can do all your Bitcoin transactions electronically. But people DO enjoy some physical interaction with their money now and again. The Bitcoin ATM does just that.

2) Emergency cash. Shit, you ran out of cash. You know you have bitcoins in your wallet though - so you can cash out right there.

A bitcoin ATM is a last bridge between the virtual currency and the real world - you can definitely get better rates at an exchange, but those are all online and can be a little iffy (they can ask a lot of personal information and have questionable security).

Or you want to show some people how easy Bitcoin is and show how they can get bitcoins out of it as an introduction, to how they can get regular cash from their bitcoins.

Who pays full price for something like this up front?! Across an international border?! I would never sign T&C's without some recourse for a non-functioning product. Things like paying customs and shipping, installation and support costs, that's all divvied up ahead of time.

Wanting 100% cash up front is just not how business is done. You might pay some portion of it, but you never shell out the whole price unless you have some other leverage. Especially on something that is months out. In this case Robocoin had all the leverage. Even if they did ship a functioning ATM, they could flip a kill switch any time they wanted. I would have paid at most 30% up front, written proof of functionality prior to shipment, some payment at time of shipment, some payment at time of installation, and withhold a symbolic 5-10% for at least 30 days to make sure all the bugs are worked out.

Depends on the product and the seller. If the seller is one of a few, you're going to be hamstrung by their terms because there's no competitor to turn to.

And it looks like if they were first, they get to decide the terms of sale. If that means they get to demand 100% payment up front, so be it.

And there was a contract of sale which stated it would arrive fit for service blah blah blah.

The end result is, if you wanted to play, you had to pay. Most sensible people would do as you said and do partial payments on milestone completion, but bitcoin tends to make people a little bit crazy and all that, especially wanting to do first-mover advantage. Extremely risky, but if you are first, it's extremely rewarding.

Especially when a promised 2.5K return a month which means the investment gets recoupled in about a year or so.

Let me translate that into real-world terms. Do NOT rub your eyes, nose, or mouth with the hand/s that have come in contact with Ebola infected bodily fluids.

Actually, that's common advice good for flu as well (flu season's coming!).

Anyhow, the issue is that taking off PPE is actually the hardest part of the job - do it wrong and you've just nullified the entire reason for using PPE to begin with. It's a very careful dance of managing contaminated and non-contaminated surfaces, and screw it up and you're hosed.

(E.g., when removing gloves, the gloved hand should pinch the palm of the glove of the other hand (contaminated-contaminated contact) then use that as leverage to remove the glove. But now to remove the other glove, the exposed hand (which cannot touch anything contaminated! not even to run it against something!) must dig under the cuff the glove where it's uncontaminated and remove the glove that way. yeah, do you decontaminate your hands again to be sure, but still).

Now you have two uncontaminated hands, and need to remove your goggles and mask and hood by doing it from the back (less contamination, hopefully), and removing your suit requires touching the inside of the suit and pulling it off - you can't undo the zipper (contaminated).

Just one mis-step and you're hosed.

CUPS is an example of the sort of hairy mess that open-source developers don't like to deal with, like OpenSSL. It was the inspiration for Eric Raymond (the main guy of the Open Source movement) to scold the OSS community back in 2004. I think Eric Raymond's ire is misplaced; CUPS was uniquely horrible back then. But printing in Unix has always been bad, and CUPS made it much better than before, so everybody standardized on it.

Printing has always been uniquely horrible no matter the OS. Printing in DOS was always a fun exercise in hoping your program talked to your printer - or that your printer's language emulation was "good enough" for the program (and it didn't try to use fancy features). Oh yeah, if you were a developer, you had to hope whatever library you used worked well enough. Then there was network printing, a unique beast in an of itself where you hoped the drivers worked and the redirector could capture the output.

Windows was probably among the first to have a unified printing and graphics layer where Windows would, by Microsoft dictate, manage the printer for you, so all printers that wanted to support Windows must talk to Windows to talk to the printer (no hitting parallel ports directly, which also meant Windows networking could do network printers transparently), and provide the necessary interfaces for Windows to tell it what to print (i.e., a high level GDI interface).

Printing in Unix was well, not really well defined because printing is complex. Unix has supported a basic line printer since inception (teletype), but if you want graphics or other stuff, it was complicated by the fact that Unix had no native GUI toolsets or anything. so most developers invented their own.

And printers themselves ended up being unique beasts with their own quirks due to their electromechanical nature. So much so that a standard interface was going to be complex and practically impossible to do the Unix way.

CUPS was such a godsend that when Apple was creating OS X, they decided to not bother with a print layer of their own, and instead use CUPS as the engine powering the OS X print subsystem. (Prior to this, MacOS Classic had its own print subsystem).

I worked in a "paperless" office in the late 1980s. Or so the owner thought!

The real irony is that since the "paperless office" dream came about, we're using more paper than ever before. Even before the paperless office and computers!

I think what really happened is not the "paperless office", but "paperless INTERoffice". We're not shipping reams of paper around - we're sending them around electronically. And instead of receiving and sending that paper, we're scanning and printing it.

I like having things printed out - especially reference materials for hardware (register lists and such) because short of having a half-dozen monitors at any one time, it's impossible to have all sorts of documents rapidly available - schematics, hardware references, datasheets, and code all visible together easily traceable. I've tried it and it usually devolves into a mass alt-tab fest of switching between 6-7 windows trying to narrow down a problem or gather information.

Paper? damn that's more convenient as I can rapidly flip between pages (or "break out" pages so I can see both on my desk) and do all my tracing by moving my eyes.

So, in the long term the tendency is Mars losing their atmosphere and become a rock without air. Bad news for terraforming plans and long-term colonies :-(

Ignoring basic physics, that would be true. However, no, mars will not lose its atmosphere because the atmosphere is held down by a fundamental force in the universe - gravity. It's the same thing that keeps the Earth's atmosphere from dissipating into space as well, as well as a magnetic field that helps repel the solar wind produced by the sun trying to blow our atmosphere away.

Gravity determines the composition of the atmosphere - Earth's gravity is too weak to retain helium, for example - so the helium molecules simply continue to rise up and out. Gravity also causes the atmospheric gradient, or why air pressure is higher at the surface than at altitude, etc.