And I habitually bring my Kobo reader everywhere I go, and read every time I have a few minutes to kill. It fits nicely in a jacket/cargo pocket. I usually read several hours each day, and there are several reasons why I also bring it when leaving my apartment:

• * When reading for hours at a time the better display eliminates eyestrain
• * Battery concerns is not an issue
• * The display is larger and fits more text, making for a more comfortable reading experience
• * Fewer distractions than on a phone

If the phone is good enough for you when it comes to reading, that's great, and I would also like that to be the case for me. But for me it's not cutting it, so I end up choosing clothes based on whether they can store my (admittedly light and sleek, but bulkier than a phone) e-reader. I really, really hope that E-Ink aren't going away anytime soon.

The problem with this line of thought is that, to continue the analogy, a lot of your legitimate house guests will be kept out by the locks, while the criminals outside all know that you don't lock your cellar hatch and can help themselves.

Most DRM to date don't even slow down the pirates, as long as someone can see the content they can copy it. My experience is mostly from working at a publishing company, and the legitimate customers have a far easier time using a non-crippled file than a DRM'ed one. Basically, DRM is just a big fuck you to your legitimate customers, especially on downloaded files that are ostensibly usable anywhere like an ebook.

That said, I don't really understand why DRM-free streaming is so scary to content providers. Strong authentication would hinder casual link sharing, and the pirates would be able to make a copy of your stream even with any DRM you could imagine, as long as they could see the content. The only ones to suffer are legitimate customers that can't view the content because they don't have the right combination of equipment and software. The music business, and to a lesser degree the ebook industry, have found that in going DRM-free you can still rely on the majority of customers to be perfectly allright with paying for a good product, and they are happy that they can be sure of it being accessible. Currently the pirates are far superior when it comes to objective quality of product in the movie/TV-show department.

While your parent *was* a bit snarky in his reply, I can see only two reasons why you would try to finagle your NoSQL needs into a PostgreSQL server: you don't understand how to use a traditional RDBMS but would still like to advertise that you're using PostgreSQL instead of MongoDB (not likely for most devs), or the decision is made for you by management for the reasons you mention. If you need some NoSQL solution in a new project it's not very difficult to create an instance, and the infrastructure for the future production DB of your project should be a consideration based on your needs, not what is incidentally already there (hey, it's a DB, it should do the job, right?). Right tool for the job.

For the record I am very used to working with traditional SQL databases, and I particularly like PostgreSQL. Still I know there are lots of use cases for the various NoSQL DBs. They are different beasts, some of which are tailored for very specific applications. I haven't scrutinised the new features of PostgreSQL, but if a NoSQL db were a better fit for the project I would need strong reasons not to go for it.

*Analogy warning* If you have to change a large amount of Torx screws, you could probably accomplish it with a flat blade screwdriver of an approximate size if that's what you have in your shed, but it might save you a lot of destroyed screws to buy a Torx driver instead.

Yeah, it's irritating, but should not be an insurmountable obstacle for migrating schema+data. I have done this thrice for a database consisting of 40 tables and about 2.7 million rows total (DB2 -> PostgreSQL 7.something, DB2 -> SQL Server 2005, and SQL-Server -> PostgreSQL 9.1). Yes, I know that those numbers are small-ish, but the data contained a lot of user input and included every quirk and special character under the sun :)

This database was storage for a Java application using Hibernate, which likely evaded some obstacles (see below). The procedure took a couple of days in each case: export schema, change a few data types in the schema (bool/int, date/datetime and so on), after which the inserts work if you pay attention to string escapes, encoding, and so on. I scripted the conversion in each case, so that every test iteration started from a fresh dump. I tested it by exporting all data from both DBs to native language data types and diffing the results.

Of course you can get in a lot of trouble if your client software is not using abstraction for db access, I suppose that some software contains quite a lot of literal SQL in the source, and SQL syntax differs in amusing ways. In some causes I can see no other reason for it than "because fuck you, that's why". Also, if your client software relies on non-standard features of a specific RDBMS you might have to rewrite to account for that.

So yes, I would very much like for all vendors to have a standard-compliant default mode, from which exported data would seamlessly import into other RDBMS's (re. sig, how do you write that correctly?). Sadly, most vendors (apart from OSS alternatives like PostgreSQL which should bend over backwards to make migration easier) have no interest in making it easier to switch to another RDBMS, so this will never happen.

Granted, I was part of the team developing said application, and DB portability was something of a pet peeve of mine, for which I was very thankful during the migrations. Due to that we had few DB-related issues during those migrations. I'm not even a DB-admin by trade, so most real DB-admins should have no problems doing what I did.

I wouldn't say that a particular word is part of your vocabulary if you can only guess its meaning from context. That's why good vocabulary tests only show you the word. According to this test my English vocabulary is estimated to be about 35000 words, probably because I have read *a lot* of English (it isn't my native language). This test only show you the words, and you have to be honest, so cheating is easy... however, I didn't.

There is also the difference between your active vocabulary (words that you would actually be able to recall and use in a sentence), and passive vocabulary (words that you know the meaning of if you see it standing alone). If you can only guess the meaning of a word from its context, it's not part of your vocabulary at all, and a test which helps you to the extent of showing it in a sentence is close to useless.

I agree with the rest of your post, but ship's diesel motors used on transport ships are about as efficient as you can make an engine run. For the vast majority of their time, they run at the ideal fuel/output ratio you can get. This is not because of environmental concerns, but because it saves fuel (and money) to the companies running the ships. True, the engines are larger, but you could do worse than looking at what they do to find the most efficient ways to run a diesel engine :)

Yup, that racket annoys me to the point where I try not to buy anything neither at the airport nor on the plane. Except for that I generally don't care about food and drink prices while travelling. At my local airport one company has an agreement about providing all food and pub services (apart from a couple of franchise stores) at the airport, and the prices are absolutely ridiculous.

I've noted a few exceptions, though. Both Munich airport and Las Palmas had pleasant outdoor cafés with food and drinks, with prices a bit cheaper than typical main street tourist places in those respective cities. Not your local corner joint, but better than expectations for airports.

Departing from Stansted, London last week, I had the cheapest pint of beer of the whole trip. £3.25 for a very nice stout (Saddle Black). Granted, we stayed in central London, where prices are high, and that particular pint was a promotion, but it was still actually good value :)

I, too, find this very irksome in some 3D movies. Avatar was pretty good in that respect, some of the Harry Potter movies were really, really bad. The thing is that my eyes will wander over the scene, and it is tiresome when my eyes instinctively try to focus on those out-of-focus areas. It does not happen in 2D, but 3D fools my brain into believing that focusing is possible. And yes, this is an artistic decision on the director's part which doesn't work for me at all, as it does *not* translate from the 2D equivalent.

I haven't gamed much in 3D, but I found it a very pleasant experience when I tried it in a store (I think the game was Crysis 2). I only played for a few minutes, it might have been tiring after a longer period of time, but I'm pretty sure that what made it so *good* during gameplay compared to watching a 3D movie was that the whole scene was in focus.

I don't understand that argument. Private homes generating the extra power in daytime are not the ones that cause a higher load; the offices and factories which are most active active during regular work hours does that. More power input to the grid at peak hours means that power plants could be throttled down. Of course utilities run for profit would oppose this change, which is why they try to make it economically unviable for customers. It makes a lot of sense for a society if your goal is to minimize peak output requirements for power plants, or limit the usage of some environmentally unfriendly, but easily throttleable electricity sources like coal plants.

That's more interesting than you would guess; your dogs know Morse. Dah = [t]elephone, dah dah = "[M]r. Watson—Come here—I want to see you", dah dah dah = [o]vert burglary attempt.

On a more serious note, I would guess that your dogs perceive the three ring modes as three different sounds, they're not actually counting rings. Dogs are good at responding to learned sounds. Sorry for the earlier snarkiness :)

Yes, it is in the UK as well, which was advantageous to sales the years after its release. People could drive it with an MC licence, and save a bit on taxes: "[...] the Robin can be driven by holders of a B1 category driving licence[3] in the United Kingdom, and registered and taxed at motorcycle rates[...]".

I'll only name one, since you specifically asked for only one. As you know, EULAs are bullshit.

I'm curious, I live in an European country. Here, the law serves as a baseline for which benefits you can contractually sign away. Basically, the parts of a contract which takes away rights accorded to you by law are illegal, and they are ignored in a contractual dispute (and the author of the contract might be punished if the offending company is in contempt of the law by even including such clauses).

I would suppose that the right to sue is prettty integral to US (as it is to many other countries' ) laws, and would be something that cannot be contractually removed, even in a signed paper contract, much less this "a-like-says-you-sign-a-contract" policy. I surmise that the lawyers of this company have thought of this, so my question is: why is this even possible? Serious question, I'm curious about how such legal obligations can be "signed" away.

I apologise for nitpickery, but that struck a nerve with me. A friend, who is an extremely successful salesperson employed at HP, talked about 50K IOPS for their top NAS many years ago without having any inclination what it meant. My modifications to the abbreviations are abominations, I know, but to me they seem more precise :)

Off-topic, but I would advise you to keep off-site backups as well. A friend of mine kept three physical backups of all the pictures and videos of his kids, which where completely useless when his house was burglared and they stole all his computer equipment. He lost everything, and those files were invaluable to him, he would have paid any amount of money to get them back. Anything can happen to a single physical site, from a fire to a direct lightning strike which fries all your equipment. Use a fire-and-forget off-site backup solution to mitigate those risks.

I use Crashplan to keep off-site backups at a friend's place as well as the cloud, but any service that enables you to keep a complete off-site backup is probably OK. Crashplan enables me to keep backups of everything, not just "critical files". Oh, and test recovery as well.