It is the Dread Pirate Roberts, after all.

Good night Wesley -- good work, I'll most likely kill you in the morning.

Oh yea of little faith in California:

http://www.acc.com/legalresources/quickcounsel/UCCTR.cfm

http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/landfills/landfills.htm

All part of AB32.

Unless you are Neil McAllister, it would be nice if you'd signify that you're quoting his article in The Register rather than just plagiarize it.

Compare http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/30/microsoft_surface_sales_disaster/ for all but the last sentence.

Yeah, that sounds much more efficient. Nothing like letting the developer work through the (bad) optimization design, code it... get the test failure and then waste more time debugging it instead of just warning them off up front.

Belts and suspenders -- test your corner cases, but document the pitfalls.

Because the government is the servant of the people, not the determinator of "societal costs" or the enforcer of "how some bunch of elitists think the rest of us should live". Most especially, the Federal Government is supposed to have limits (that pesky 10th Amendment which is clear to anyone with basic reading comprehension but just gets ignored for folks who want to use the Fed to push *their* agendas, whatever those are).

If the government can tax/fine/penalize [read: FORCE by however they name it] you to do this by virtue of merely existing because of a hypothetical future cost to society, then they can similarly "save society money" by enforcing what you eat, how much you exercise, where you live, if you have children and how many... pretty much every decision you make as an adult citizen. While I know that's a dream for some (the California Air Resources Board and Mayor Bloomberg's Health Board off the top of my head), that is directly antithetical to the concept of a free citizen of a country.

We are not the children of the government, we are not the serfs of the feudal lords of Washington DC. Micromanaging our lives by wrapping it up in arbitrary taxes is still taking away our freedom of choice.

The opening paragraph has to be the most rabid bit of product love I can recall, especially compared with the actual content.

"upend the video games market"... Really? Just because the screen (if you have a laptop [aka can use the computer anywhere near your sofa] and the AppleTV box) can be wirelessly mirrored to the TV? And using hypothetical controllers that don't exist? Uh-huh.

"For the consumer market ... may be the most significant OS release since Windows 95". A fairly bold statement, given there's nothing in the article that even tries to back that up. Is the new security model supposed to be that big of a paradigm shift (for users, not for vendor lock-in)? Is it the "ooh... you can post to a blog quicker!" stuff? It pretty clearly looks like a point-release to an existing OS that is mildly interesting, but hardly redefining the consumer space.

Why anti-grav? I would think a reasonably heavily armored (which a lot of it has to be anyway) Orion drive craft would suffice. Yeah, you'd get whining about the emissions in the atmosphere on the way up -- but balanced against all space programs shut down and presumably loss of the existing satellite capabilities, you could credibly believe that at least one country would get over it and just do it.

You just don't want those danged Duke boys to keep going in the middle of that canyon jump, Sherrif Coltrane.

Optimally, yes. Sometimes that isn't an option, unfortunately. [The other adult may not be able or willing to drive, after all].

Ok... now I'm really curious. What coasts are you referring to, and if they're the US Atlantic and Pacific coasts (not Gulf Coast to Atlantic or something silly) -- just what train did you find that only takes 2 days?

I'm seriously asking - since every one I looked at ended up going through LA then up to Chicago and back down (to Atlanta -- maybe Chicago to NY is somehow faster). If you have a link to a 2 day train which is reasonably priced (say $1k per person tops), I'd love to consider that for our next trip.

Depends on the number of people, really.

Sample annual trip just made (CA to GA): 2438 miles.

Airline cost per-person, cattle-class [not adding in taxes, fees and per-bag costs or whatnot they stick you with now] started at $450 per person round-trip.

The 2005 Impala got between 29 to 30 US mpg on the highway, call it 29 to be generous (to your claim).

Similarly, gas ranged from $3.459 to $4.759 per US gallon, but generously use $5 assuming rising prices. That's $420.35 one way, $840.70 round trip.

Since this was 2 adults and one child (not young enough to fly free -- and even if it was possible, who would take a 4+ hour flight in cattle class with a squirming/upset infant on their lap... assuming they had any confidence in said infant not taking a tumble in turbulence), that $450 starts at $1350.

Car has to tack on hotels (depends on how aggressively you push it -- 2 days is possible with 5 hour sleep breaks or so), airline has to tack on transport to/from airport [either mass transit or rental car or long term parking], etc.

The big wins for me are having the trunk of the Impala available at no additional charge, no hassle with rental cars -- and most importantly, no getting handled as if I'd created a felony. The last point frankly would keep me driving even at a 2x cost factor, but you can't claim that "you're paying more for gas by driving" as that simply isn't true outside of lousy SUVs and driving solo.

And before someone brings it up -- the trains were *more expensive* than the car, and took a week to get there by routing through Chicago. Get Amtrack to get a reasonable continental train going somewhere between airline and car prices but taking 2-3 days tops and I suspect a lot more folks would choose it.

Posting to cancel moderation click-error.

Pretty sure you meant the YF-12A, not YF-2.

Different news article, perhaps -- but really the same as:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/01/25/019201/Universal-Memory-Aims-To-Replace-FlashDRAM from yesterday, I would think.

Mea culpa. Or -- don't do math just before sleep, it doesn't work out well. Brain switched decades to millenia in there somewhere. I'll accept the dum-dum for that one, certainly -- though an option to mod your own comments "danged stupid, don't look at this" would be nice right now.

I'd make a comment that more than that matters (does the potential damage outweigh the cost of what's needed to prevent damage, or are we better off just dealing with the damage in a longer scale transition?) -- but given the egregious stupidity above, I should shut up while I'm behind. Thank you for only mocking slightly.