Yep, once we hit 6 Mb per screen we should be all set... that's the speed compressed HD video moves at at most. Anything that moves faster than a 1080p screen can't be represented by humans that fast, until we get to 4Kx1080.

That's something that hit me quite recently: with an 80/20 Mbps VDSL2 line, I can honestly say it's "fast enough" for everything I do. My satellite STB has a semi-streaming mode, where it downloads a whole show and will start playing once it has enough to play through without pausing for buffering - and it always starts in seconds. Big downloads, I'm almost always limited by the far end anyway; they tend to take longer to install than to download anyway - so if I had the option of a faster link, would I actually get any benefit at all? Previously, I jumped on every increase: from dialup (pricey, even a 30 Mb download was an ordeal) to half-megabit cable modem (yay, I could grab hundred meg files overnight), to ADSL, ADSL2+ (nothing big enough to leave downloading overnight any more), 50 Mbps cable modem, getting a big improvement each time. (I even have the option of upgrading to 330/30 if I want, for a price ... and it really isn't tempting, in the way I would have jumped at any chance of better speeds before.)

The funny thing is, I recall a Labour MP here in the UK saying something comparably dim back in 1998! At that point, all we had was expensive metered dialup; I was in a group campaigning to change that, and happened to meet him at some event. His reply was that he "didn't think the Internet was a good idea". One of those moments I really, really wish I could have recorded!

I wouldn't touch WD.

WD basically invented the hard drive and used to be awesome. Then they started selling garbage. After having a number of their drives fail and seeing online reports of the same, i no longer consider them an option. Same story with Epson for printers. It make me wonder why these great companies decided to destroy the one thing they had: A brand that stood for quality.

What a pane glass can be.
Luckily, you had she.
Broke the phone unknowingly,
Now you're happy as can be.

The choice [of a Broadcom SoC] by the RPi-team was utterly stupid and can only be attributed to incompetence.

Well, Eben Upton's job working for Broadcom was probably a factor there... Personally, I'd trace the idea back before he had that job - I recall a discussion about the Gameboy Advance developer kit in the summer of 2002, and the lack of affordable programmable devices at the time. I suspect he'd have had a real struggle getting anywhere close to the Pi's target price without getting discounted access to the Broadcom SoC he used, though. I haven't spoken to him recently, but my impression was that far from "RPi Foundation pressed Broadcom to stop selling BCM2835 to competing projects" as claimed, it was more "Eben twisted arms and got Broadcom to give RPF a special cut-price deal so they could afford it".

If anyone were to bring out a rival device from a "significantly superior" competitor, I'd be delighted to see it - and I suspect most if not all of the RPF people would too, since it wasn't about making money by selling lots of systems. (Of course, Broadcom didn't buy up the remains of ARM's parent company for nothing, so I'd be surprised to see something much better from a rival!) I was happy to see the Pi being ARM based, as a fan of ARM as far back as the ARM2 I first programmed, but I'm also happy to see rivals like the MIPS32 one mentioned recently: I like ARM, but I also like having a choice of platform, both hardware and software!

But acting like they don't, or even loosing a minor case might set other criminals at ease about the security of their data within the Microsoft infrastructure.

Which, of course, could be exactly what the NSA want - police and FBI priorities may differ, but I suspect the NSA would rather have access to more information, thanks to a false sense of security, even at the expense of not being able to use it in court easily. If they "win", they get to use evidence this time - and they just warned the next hundred criminals to avoid MS servers, because of this case. "Lose", and they can keep reading it all in secret, using the information behind the scenes instead.

That was my first reaction too...

Been a long time since I've gotten any as well. I'm not sure, but I think a long time ago I opted out of modding, and it looks like the UI to flip that flag is gone now, so I can't opt back in. You might be in the same situation...

One single drug run^h^h^h^hdive and the thing has paid for itself.

How long can it dive? What mods does this thing need to lengthen the dive+travel time to a few days or even a week or two, depending on its speed? Extra Oxygen, toilet substitutes, extra battery packs, stronger motors to tug the drugs, etc.

Could maybe be done, but it's not easy. Truth is, I think by now it's actually more feasible for the cartells to get their hands on decomissioned subs and their former crew. Or something along those lines.

... consider this:

How many people and projects use PHP? How many use another PL? How many fixes and updates would be in line for that other PL if it would have the same userbase. ... When did Ruby finally become UTF8 safe again?

Make it work, then make it beautiful.

If any PL incorporates this philosophy, it's PHP.
And AFAICT they're doing pretty well following it, don't you think?

My 2 cents.

With good reason. It's obvious by this that Wikipedia isn't doing enough to attract women to contribute. Such a small representation among women is shameful and certainly something must be done to address this glaring example of gender bias.

I'd say Wikipedia isn't good enough for *anybody* with more than two braincells to rub together to contribute to. Pseudoexperts deleting content without any explaination at all just because it was posted by anons, flat out wrong content, political scirmishes, lack of seperation of concerns and distribution of power, etc.

Wikipedia might be useful, but it is measurably worse than it needs to be. Try to do some useful contribution as anonymous to see what I mean.
I've stopped contributing to Wikipedia about 10 years ago.

host OS (Mavericks)

Have you looked at 10.10 (beta) yet? Looks like the community is split over whether it's ugly or beautiful.

Does the adapter being passive or active have anything to do with it?

How do you fuck something like that up?

All too easily it seems; my first MacBook Pro power lead caught fire a few years ago as well. This was the low-voltage (hence high current) end, though: in their quest to make everything thin and light, the cable was thin and flimsy, so one of the braided conductors frayed after a while. More current going down a thinner wire meant more heat - which softened the remaining copper and made the problem worse, until arcing started and I got a micro-firework display on my desk. (One of is successors managed to melt the plastic in the plug, that didn't make me happy either!)

On the mains end, even a hefty (for laptops) 300-odd watt PSU is only 3A from a US outlet, half that on the higher voltages elsewhere - usually easy enough to deal with, but one sloppy connection and you can get a tiny point getting very hot indeed. It's worse on the low voltage end: a single cable possibly carrying 20 or more amps, while getting rolled up, folded and stood on in transit, designed to be very light weight - yet also done on a budget. As soon as you start trying to shave weight and cost, I suspect it's all too easy for a wire to be just slightly too thin for the current, or a connection to be a little bit too weak for long term mobile use.

If you were building a high school or college electronics project and said you planned to run laptop currents and voltages through such thin wires and tiny connectors, you'd probably be told off or marked down - but commercially, thin, light and cheap trump safety margins and robustness.

>The proper file format for that purpose is usually PDF.

I know that. But the customers want editable copies, and do not want to go through Adobe or anyone else for a PDF editor. The customers want Word files. Now, tell me how to educate the customers, when the competition will do exactly what they want and so my client loses business to that competition, and your comment will be reasonable.

Absent that critical step, my hands are tied. And so are my client's hands tied.