There's a big difference between how you treat your desktops and your servers.

I wanted a change of pace and moved from embedded stuff on Linux to iOS development. So my desktop is basically always the latest OS X version.

I still have Linux servers running for OwnCloud and my personal website, and that's all Debian Stable. But given that it's Stable, I always update to the latest.

"no real attempt to move the launch platform up to 80,000 feet or so using gas balloon technology. I would have thought this would be feasible, and could result in a substantial fuel saving."

The fuel cost of a launch to low orbits is not for the altitude, but for gaining enough speed to stay in orbit, i.e. about 8 km/s. The gravitational energy becomes significant if you need altitudes comparable to the earth radius (6400 km).

Amen. I've been visiting this site around user ID 110.000 or so, and I've actually never experienced a full blackout. Static version every now and then, that's all.

Couldn't they have come up with some ridging or some pattern of grooves?

I bet some stupid manipulative marketing asshole/bitch just made that up.

Japanese also lacks words for yes and no. The words "hai" and "iie" are mistaken by English speakers for equivalents to yes and no, but they actually signify agreement or disagreement with the proposition put by the question: "That's right." or "That's not right.

Our first flight didn't end well due to another reason. The next balloon flight, the electronics engineer just removed enough insulation to keep it cosy at the height where the balloon would mostly stay. He then added a small additional battery pack connected to a heating element. A colleague coded a PID algorithm to keep the big pack warm at the start of the flight.

I've seen this up close. I'm a software engineer and I've worked for a scientific institute in the past. One of the project involved putting a camera on a helium-filled balloon. The electronics and PC equipment (a PC104-sized Linux box) were powered from a big pack of lithium batteries.

The problem is basically that lithium batteries perform best in a certain temperature range, say from 10 to 25 degrees Celsius (50 to 65 F). But that's rather difficult.When you lift off, it might be cold and you want the batteries to have a decent temperature. Otherwise they can't deliver enough power. So you insulate them and they stay warm by themselves, because when you draw power, they get warm.

But then the higher you lift off into the air, the thinner the air gets. Thus convection will be less and less. You can shed heat via radiation (into the infrared spectrum) but that's only half of the heat or so. And then the insulation can overheat the battery packs.

There's all sorts of tricks, for example copper-strapping the packs to a large piece of black metal so you increase the heat radiation. But if you automate that (or the insulation), you also get additional possible failures.

What it comes down to, is some calculation but also some experience.

studying an encryption scheme that is widely considered completely and irreparably broken?

All known issues with RC4 have to do with statistical biases in the first bytes of the key stream, in particular the first 256 bytes (this paper also mentions a significant bias at byte 258). As far as we know, all issues with RC4 are avoided in protocols that simply discard the first kilobyte of key stream before starting to apply the key stream on the plaintext. SSH does this (discarding the first 1.5 kiB IIRC). For WPA I can imagine that this workaround would have an unacceptable performance penalty on small data packets. For some reason, this approach was never implemented for TLS/HTTPS or WPA.

So why would one be interested in RC4? It's significantly faster than AES when run on processors that do not have hardware AES support. If I use scp and rsync-over-ssh to copy files to devices like a Raspberry Pi or my home server which runs on a low-power VIA processor, it's a big difference (aes versus arcfour), something like 4 MB/s versus 8 MB/s. Here are some benchmarks: openSSH cipher benchmarks.

I keep my eyes open for papers like this, in particular I check whether they make statements on weaknesses after the first kilobyte of key stream.

It's not that bad, actually. I moved from a steady job to contracting and it's not like you run a full-fledged business. I get my work through a bunch of agencies, so I don't have to do calling and selling and what have you. I just spread my resume around those, and they call and email me. There's also a local site where you can check out companies looking for a contractor. Once you have a client, it's usually a multi-month/-year, stable affair.

I do my own bookkeeping because I happen to like it, but a friend of mine simply gives it to an accountant. Since it's only a one bill a month and a handful of invoices, the costs are quite limited.

And I easily earn twice of what I used to earn.

"Congratulations, you're a spammer."

You're jumping to conclusions. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for that kind of mail volumes, such as administrering mail servers of a company that handles customer support tickets or a web shop with order confirmations, shipping notices, and invoices (3 emails per order). It could also be an opt-in mailing list.

For some reason, probably because you posted some amazingly insightful comment in the past, I have you marked as a friend here. Thus a new journal appears in my message center and I read it :)

No, because a big hurdle is of course lithography on 7 nanos, but the even bigger hurdle is using it with a high enough yield to make it commercially viable.

As long as my smartphone lasts through a long, busy day, I'm fine with the battery. I used to have an Android phone, and carry two extra charged batteries. However since the iPhone 6 Plus, I'm coming home with 70% charge left.

If you just need one extra screen, you could use an iPad: http://www.zdnet.com/article/d...
Of course, it looks to be Windows/Mac only and limited to one iPad, but they say they're actively working on it.

That is pretty darn funny :)