Why not just turn off your speakers? Every mobo comes with built-in audio these days anyway, doesn't mean you have to plug anything in to it.

The /. writeup sounds like audiophile wank to me. I would be surprised if this Soundblaster could justify its price in a proper double blind study on real world data (music, games, movies, etc...) vs. the built in audio on your mobo.

You could get a CFL in 1985? Back then "Compact" florescent seemed to be those fixture with the 12" diameter circular tube and a conventional ballast. They certainly did not fit in a traditional socket. I started seeing what we consider CFLs around 2000 or so, and the first versions were pretty bad. There was some seriously defective Chinese garbage all over the market during the first few years. Once I found a bulb I liked (Commercial Electric from Home Depot--they don't appear to exist anymore sadly), I bought a bunch and swapped out most of the bulbs in my house.

It's strange. Of the many CFLs I've installed, I've only had three failures. Two of which were early Walmart bulbs that were shit. The other was one of the bulbs I settled on for everything else, it got a smoky smell and discolored the plastic near one end of the tube: clearly some magic blue smoke escaped. Other than that, I've had 10 years of reliable service from a couple dozen bulbs. A few of the oldest ones (4 bulbs) have a "warm up" time where they are noticeably dim when you turn them on at first, but all of the other bulbs come on at or near their full brightness.

I do have underground power though, I wonder if comes out cleaner thanks to that?

My plan is to switch out my CFLs for LEDs when the CFLs burn out, but thus far none of them have. I did the bulk of the CFL replacements back in 2004 and they just don't want to quit. The only LED light I've been able to install is to replace an incandescent flood on a circuit controlled by a dimmer switch.

They work with regular old dimmers.

I tried out a Cree flood in a light I have on a dimmer. The bulb mostly works, but it has somewhat odd behavior on low brightness levels where it will cut out after a few minutes. This only happens when the dimmer is near the bottom (but not totally off). Our workaround is to not use the lowest dimmer setting on that circuit, but it was unfortunate. I considered returning the bulb as defective, but that's effort and I only give a replacement bulb a 50/50 shot at fixing the problem.

Originally it was supposed to be a cash cow for Verisign, but they screwed up and didn't assign a "trustworthiness level" to each CA so there's no reason to spend the big bucks on a Verisign cert over Joe Blow's Free Cert Shop now. Browsers treat both the same.

x509 is as strong as the weakest signing authority, and there are many many signing authorities now.

It's a shame that browsers have such freakouts over self signed certs, because there is really little difference between them and officially signed certs. IMHO SSH did a better job of this by simply having you inspect the certs the first time you log on to a site and storing the result, only freaking out if the cert changes. It eliminates the complex chain of trust that in the end comes down to just trusting people you don't know anyway and hoping that none of the thousands of people involved are corruptible or incompetent.

Uh, the factory reset doesn't wipe the storage on the phone. These phones that were bought off of eBay were probably factory wiped (people aren't quite as dumb as advertised), but the issue is that Factory Wipe doesn't do what people think it does.

This would seem to be Airbus's long game. They already prefer the pilots just set the autopilot and handle the radio. It's not hard to imagine them attempting to build a fully automated airliner. Getting the FAA on board will be a different matter however.

A lot of people look at the AF447 disaster as a case study in not disconnecting the pilots from the aircraft quite so much because when they're suddenly thrust back into control unexpectedly, they end up with a ramp up time before they're fully aware of the state of the aircraft and know what they need to do. If this takes too long the aircraft will crash. I think Airbus took home the opposite message: In the event of sensor failure the autopilot needs to switch to a failsafe flight mode (throttle up 10%, pitch up the nose a couple of degrees, warn the pilots) instead of disengaging. Once they have the autopilot able to handle all airline emergency situations (at least you had better hope they get all of them) and work out any ATC issues then there's little need for human pilots.

Any non-military ideology didn't last terribly long inside NASA. The Space Shuttle only makes sense in the context of crazy cold war missions that the Air Force thought up where it would lauch on a polar oribt, make one pass over the USSR, and then land again on the assumption that any satellite that came around for a second pass would get shot down. Of course this mission profile requires a vehicle that's horrendously complex and expensive to operate which is why the Shuttle was never terribly good at its primay job of peaceful satellite launches and the occasional in-orbit repair. Well, that and every launch had to be man rated, even if the astronauts weren't terribly necessary for the mission.

Siri is not a good example of AI work. Once you've used the service a bit it becomes painfully clear how incapable it is of handling any requests that are off script. The only AIish part is the natural language recognition, and even that is wired to a fixed list of known phrase structures. You can't even define your own. The worst part is the service used to be better at offbeat requests, but then Apple dumped the Wolfram Alpha integration.

In some ways Perl 5 is getting the best of both worlds. 10 year old modules still work just fine pretty much every time, but really good features in Perl 6 get backported by people who are tired of waiting.

As long as they believed "in good faith" that the material was infringing they'll get off scott free. The bar for proving bad behavior on the claimants part is extremely high.