I think the Steam hardware survey is a pretty good indication, of the people on steam only 23.5% have >1TB disk space. And they're probably way above average as the average officer worker (no, not you with the MSDN collection and 14 VMs) sure doesn't use that much, nor the kind of people who could use a Chromebook. The "problem" for HDD manufacturers though is that they've killed any interest in anything but $/GB. The most typical big media people have is video and it's accessed linearly and for that hard drives work just fine. Everything else you can put on an SSD. So the incentive to invest is really, really low.

Yes, I looked building an 8x8GB rig back in end of 2012 when the RAM market tanked but couldn't really find any reason to. In fact the 4x4GB RAM from 2011 is pretty much the only component I kept when I upgraded last year. By the way, for $2-3k you can now get an X99 mobo, Xeon E5-2603 and 8x16GB DDR4 Reg/ECC RAM but unless it's all about the RAM performance will be very anemic. But I haven't even found the incentive to bump it up to 32GB yet, which I could do any time. It doesn't exactly help that prices have more than doubled the last 2-3 years.

Well in this case I'd say there's Google and Wikipedia, use them. The source code is not the right place to teach someone about what CRC32 is or when, where or why you might want to use it. It's almost as bad as comments that try to teach you the programming language you're in. If you're implementing something that's not in an RFC or standard of some sort, I'd agree with you.

Or they could start making horribly bad decisions because they have no clue what to do when the computer glitches, like with Air France 447. I don't know the number of ways an airplane could break and probably neither does the pilots, they just drive the thing. I'm pretty sure the engineers at Airbus and Boeing can simulate a whole host of instruments failing or malfunctioning to add redundancy and determine which instruments are actually unreliable, probably far better than a pilot. If we increase engine power and our airspeed doesn't go up, are the engine control failing or the airspeed measurements? There's probably other instruments that can tell you the difference, but I wouldn't have much faith in the pilots figuring it out on the spot. Degraded autopilot mode might still be better than manual mode.

The whole point of the cabin lock-out is that a terrorist can't threaten/torture the code out of a crew member and gain access to the cockpit. All you need to do is add a second terrorist to press the other switch and they now got access to the cockpit. That would be silly.

The right solution is always having two persons in the cockpit. That way one would have to assault and incapacitate/kill the other which is a pretty big psychological barrier compared to turning a few knobs and waiting for impact. Anyone in mortal danger will also put up a good fight and hopefully alert other crew, who may then try to unlock the door and divide the attacker's attention. Or with luck maybe the attacked person can manage to hit the unlock switch.

It's not a perfect system but you should also realize the current crash was probably not the fastest way to crash the plane. There's almost certainly a "you're malfunctioning, give me manual control" override on the flight controls and after that a pilot could send the plane nose down in a spin which would make it almost impossible for any other crew to reach the cockpit within a matter of seconds, be almost impossible to recover from and with impact in less than a minute from flight altitude. The Germanwings pilot crashed it slow because he had all the time in the world as long as he kept the captain locked out.

Ah, but that's just the regular bureaucracy, you can add another order of magnitude if you want a military grade hammer.

Indeed, and in some places of work (notably government) they still give 10-20 "ATV-dagen" (workweek reduction days) on top of the contractual amount of holidays. But keep in mind that wages have been decreased accordingly as well.

Exactly. And I see the same happening over here with teaching "critical thinking". It's important, but it got turned into the idea that questioning everything makes one a critical thinker. A college professor in history once told me he gave a guest lecture at a high school. The kids kept challenging him on points during his lecture, and at the end of class, the regular teacher proudly noted how critical the children were and didn't take everything from an authority figure at face value. To which the professor replied: "Yes, but it's a shame they know bugger all about history".

Some of this attitude carries over when these kids graduate and get a job. They're highly vocal and opinionated, but they are equally noisy on topics they have no knowledge on as they are within their own area of expertise. Thankfully, most of them quickly learn better, but sadly some of them are perceived as "strong decision-makers" (whatever the hell that means) and promoted to management, where their unfounded opinions actually do damage.

We tried this in the Netherlands in the 80s, and it didn't work. Only a handful of jobs were created; instead productivity was increased by 20% (let people work less but keep their workload the same, and don't pay overtime...over time, employers and employees figured out how to do the same job in less time) The effects of a shorter work week probably vary a lot between industries. In services, you may see hardly any increase, also because a lot of the work is knowledge work and communications, and adding extra people to the team to make up for lost hours will certainly decrease productivity. In manufacturing however, it may be easy to slot in extra workers working shorter hours, while increasing productivity is not something easily done.

And GP is right: hiring 5 guys at 80% instead of 4 full time guys may well increase overall cost, because of the effects of tax and wage regulations.

A coupe of examples:
- Light recipes. Especially in the living room where there are many lights all around the room, including some Philips Hue bulbs that can change color. Instead of having to set all of them for dinner, sitting around or movie night or whatever, 1 button does it all. And it works with the media player, put that on pause and the lights dim up a bit
- Heating in certain rooms is turned off when not in use, and turned on automatically when someone is there. This saves a little on the heating bill.
- Irrigation in the greenhouse is fully automatic.
- If I go to bed, I get a warning if there are still doors unlocked.
- When leaving the house, 1 button switches of all lights, heating and airco.
- Notifications on my smart phone in case a smoke detector or flood sensor is tripped. The smoke detectors will also trip all lights.
Stuff like that. Nothing life-changing, but those little conveniences do add up and if the hub is offline for whatever reason, we start missing them...

And if you want to make it exceptionally strong, you combine those techniques. "correct horse battery staple" is strong, "correcT horXe batt6ery st&ple" is heat death of universe-strong and actually not much harder to learn.

At the cost of travelling around with the keys to the kingdom. Imagine you're on vacation and you want to pop into an internet cafe and log into /. because abstinence. Except it has a keylogger/trojan that'll steal your key file and your master password. Now you've compromised your email, online bank, ebay, paypal, steam and all the other passwords that might really matter. Personally I tend to keep three:

1) My mail, because it gets all the password resets.
2) My bank, but it's using two-factor anyway.
3) My "assorted junk" password where I might lose my forum account or whatever that doesn't *really* matter.

I really try not to use the first two on an untrusted device unless I really have to, because afterwards I need to change it. In fact if I know I will need to use it I'll change it on a trusted device up front and restore it later, good memorized passwords are a pain to relearn.

Are you secretly planning to use it as a Dunning-Kruger meter and avoid all that self-rate as 10 out of 10? Because if you think you'll get anything else useful out of it, I want some of what you're smoking...

How is it not anonymous? A wallet is just as anonymous as a numbered account, with the difference that no entity has a record of who owns which wallet (unlike bank accounts). Oh, I am sure clever law enforcement agencies are able to combine data and tie a wallet to a specific person, but for day to day cases, no one knows who owns wallet XYZ, and I do not need to present any proof of identity to get my own wallet. So: anonymous.

The transactions are public. But that has nothing to do with anonymity of the accounts.

Good for them. I'm still struggling to see what the benefit for me would be? I have little need for making anonymous payments, and international transfers are reasonably fast, cheap and convenient these days. One benefit is not having to give online merchants my full credit card details, but for local purchases iDeal (the Dutch banks' online payment solution) is better, and for international orders I can almost always use PayPal for that. Beats mucking around with out of date block chains and/or crooked exchanges (though some people would put Paypal in that category).

The problem is that unifying VAT and classifications basically regulating half a tax system without regulating the other half. You can tax income and you can tax consumption and there's pros and cons to both. If we're forced to lower our VAT, the other taxes would probably increase to compensate or the other way around. In addition many of the VAT brackets are made for a specific purpose because the goods are either particularly good or bad for society, like taxing books less (knowledge is good) and tobacco more (very bad for public health).

For example, around here we have about half VAT on food. If we can't keep that exception, prices would rise 10%+ on the spot. So would our taxes, in practice we'd probably funnel that money into agricultural subsidies instead which would make our food cheaper, thus creating an even more heavily protected, subsidized agriculture. And the things we want to punish, just add other taxes instead of VAT, unless the EU wants to regulate all consumption tax. That would be a tough sell, I think.

What products and services end up in what VAT bracket is sometimes controversial, for example here in Norway at the moment there's 0% VAT on buying a physical newspaper and 25% VAT on a digital newspaper, because it doesn't meet the criteria for an exemption. Also eating at a restaurant and takeaway ended up in different brackets, so if you take your burger outside and eat it on the sidewalk it's cheaper than sitting down at McDonald's. We have an exception for culture, they were probably thinking more like theater, opera, concerts but exotic dancers won at court as an "artistic performance".

Not saying it can't happen, but if it does it's a big step on the way towards a "United States of Europe".