There already is a simple limit scheme available, but this business owner chose not to use it. Presumably this failure was a combination of lack of due diligence by the business owner and some pressure from Groupon sales staff. Groupon assumes that few businesses will ever offer a deal through them twice, so their strategy seems to be squeezing as many sales out of them as possible, margins and customer quality be damned.

Hopefully stories like this will make more small business owners aware of the risks associated with massive cut-rate promotions through sites like Groupon.

I have often wondered what the total amount of temporary packet storage in the world's routers is.... How much data can actually be in transit at any given time?

Moreover, why do we need to adopt Highlander Rules here? An electric car is a practical replacement for people whose driving habits don't require a fuel station on every corner. That doesn't work for everyone, and those people shouldn't buy a pure electric car.

However, complaints about the range issue do highlight one of the real problems in selling electric vehicles: discomfort in giving up some capability regardless of how often you actually use that capability. I owned my first car (quite the beater) for two years, and drove it more than 150 miles from home exactly once. Would I have been happy with a vehicle that had a 300 mile range? Sure. (Would I have spent $200k rather than $2k? No, but I would not have spent that much money on a car, even if I never had to refuel it.)

Because that's what he said?

"The 300-mile range Tesla would suffice for about 90% of my driving. 90%, but not 100%, so I still have to own another vehicle for the remainder."

I'm not sure how else to interpret that statement without stuffing words into the author's mouth.

I think you mean "Apple management."

For the software end of this, check out CrashPlan. It saves incremental backups of your system to external hard drives, your friend's computer (also running CrashPlan) and/or the CrashPlan servers. It's great stuff, and works on Win/Mac/Linux. Plus, your backup data is encrypted before it leaves your computer, so you don't have to worry about the security of your friend's computer. (By default, your data can be decrypted on the CrashPlan server in order to support web access to your files. If you don't want that, you can set an encryption password that CrashPlan can't access, and then no one can see your data outside of your computer.)

Hah, I thought the registration thing was silly for a while as well, though clearly a little longer than you. :)

BTW, keep in mind that 802.11n is not synonymous with 5 GHz support. Some devices list 802.11n, but still only work on 2.4 GHz.

For the devices that support it (decent laptops, iPad, and possibly other tablets), going to the 5 GHz band is a huge win. There are plenty of non-overlapping channels, and congestion is lower. The problem is that most WiFi enabled phones only support the 2.4 GHz band, so this will not cover all cases.

Yes, I am aware of what is for sale, since we buy these things for our lab. (Although our sources are low enough in intensity to avoid the tracking required for the big boys.) I am confused by the use of the term "reactor" which is typically used to describe a device that is designed to produce fission reactions (or fusion, if you are a Farnsworth kind of person).

Generating fission is different than having a bunch of things that undergo radioactive decay. You need some neutrons, and a fissile material. It sounds like the (alpha, n) reaction on beryllium is a reasonable guess for neutron production, and you can use the neutrons to induce fission on uranium, even if it won't be remotely self-sustaining.

I'm puzzled how this guy was going to build a "nuclear reactor" out of mail-order isotopes and smoke detectors. Smoke detectors usually contain Am-241, which is an alpha emitter. The mail order stuff I assume was uranium ore. Was he planning to create neutrons from (alpha, n) reactions and use those to trigger a few fissions from the uranium?

This sounds like his experiment bears as much similarity to a reactor as a balloon full of hairspray resembles a car engine.

Internet Selection Effect. (AKA "self selection bias + online discussions") The comment distribution is generally shifted toward angry rants about the topic. It turns out that anger plus a sense of "rightness" provides good emotional fuel to convince someone to click the "Reply" button.

Right, the only way it could be a source is if you use a ski lift for moving material down a mountain in a mining operation. (It sounds like this is a common application, actually.)

Sure, being able to rent a computer for $1.68 an hour to do this cracking is a huge win. I was taking issue with the implication from the summary that this has been beyond individuals up until now, or that Tesla cards are some kind of magical supercomputer thing. We've had the power for a while, and high end GeForce cards can hold their own with Tesla on everything but double precision.

In fact, looking at the specs of the midrange NVIDIA GPU in my laptop, it could probably do this calculation in a few hours. Not as impressive as 6 minutes, but one should wary of breathless enthusiasm here.

The assertion that high end Tesla cards (often $2k) are required for this crack is nonsense. In terms of integer, single precision floating point and memory bandwidth, a GTX 580 is actually FASTER than the most expensive Tesla card. Tesla cards have better QA for 24/7 usage, 4x faster double precision floating point, and 3 or 6 GB of memory, plus some other occasionally useful features. But anyone with an NVIDIA SLI gaming rig built in the last 2 years could easily have done what this guy did in less than 20 minutes.