Next it's not that hard to develop mathematical techniques to analyze text and language in posts ...

Budget projects much? "Doable" and "easy" are not the same words. I'm guessing one person out of a hundred in the general population could take a reasonable stab at developing such an algorithm, and only one person out of a thousand could be considered a natural talent.

The first 20% of the work gets you to sqrt(sqrt(7e9)) as your mean perplexity, which is simultaneously impressive and yet not terribly actionable. And then the difficulty curve shoots off into the exponential regime.

One of the reasons I live where I do is because I'm close to work, about 4 miles away. Lets me bike in. That way I don't have to deal with the expense and clusterfuck that is parking on a big campus. 4 miles is a very easy, short, ride so it is no problem. You don't need to change or anything, you don't work up a sweat.

You discover Apple software sucks way less on OS-X. The fanboys will tell you this is evidence of how much better OS-X is, of course, but the real reason is Apple doesn't do a good job on their ports. They really half-ass their Windows ports so they end up not being good software. It is possibly something to try and make OS-X look better but more likely simply laziness and a lack of good Windows developers.

There's a big difference between not going out of your way to support something and going out of your way to prevent it. Windows doesn't have a native POSIX interface (it used to have a basic one) but you can add one if you like. It can be done higher level via something like Cygwin, or it can be done directly in the executive just like the Win32/64 APIs. There is nothing stopping you from adding it, they don't care.

Same deal with DirectX and OpenGL. A Windows GPU driver has to provide DirectX support. It is just part of the WDDM driver. Windows provides no OpenGL acceleration, and no software emulation. However you can provide your own OpenGL driver if you wish, and Intel, nVidia, and AMD all elect to do so. Windows does nothing to stop this and they work great (if the company writes a good driver). Indeed you could develop your own graphic API and implement that, if you wished.

There's a big difference between saying "We aren't going to do any work to support your stuff," and saying "We are going to work to make sure your stuff can't be supported."

My impression is the regret in taking these drunken pictures happens years after the fact, when the drunken college scene has been left behind, and the poster now has a family and a 9-to-5 job and they want to distance themselves from that past.

It shocks me how rarely the cultural underpinnings are made overt in these scenarios. What you depict might actually be the case in America, but I suspect it will be different in France, where when a search pulls up no college revelry whatsoever, cultured individuals might begin to seriously doubt your breeding and character.

Whether posting photos of regular drunkenness counts as bad judgement has a circular basis case. If you get yourself photographed draping and drooling over some chick who looks none too impressed with the group grope, there might be some legitimate flags raised. Multiple binge-ups during school session might also raise eyebrows, even in France. It sure won't accentuate that embarrassing C- you received in Economics 101 because of the "family crisis".

Daryl Hannah's distal indecency. In America, s/irony/context/g.

(I had forgotten that this clip also contains some good geek humour, though slightly dated and with just a hint of cheese.)

Artists practice drawing nudes for a good reason: the human eye is exquisitely sensitive to the normal shape of the human body, so you can't draw or paint badly and not have it noticed.

Of course, we have a good evolutionary reason for having developed this proficiency, along with a taste for keeping this proficiency in good working order.

Porn doesn't happen until the rest of the brain takes a holiday (our visual sub-system is by far our biggest neurological subsystem according to a Levitin book I read recently). Big chunks of the human brain taking a poorly planned vacation is endemic to the human condition. That's why I keep a list of twenty different types of cognitive porn, only one of which involves obsessing over the female body. I'm pretty sure "PC porn" must be on my list somewhere.

A general ergonomic rule-of-thumb is to adjust your monitor's vertical position so that the top edge is level with your eyes and you don't need to look upwards.

Do you go around believing every lazy-ass statement you've ever read?

My gut estimate is that I actively view the 20% of my portrait monitor above my horizontal line of sight about 2% of my total working time. What's up there, anyway? A menu bar, a window title bar, a bunch of FF controls, a bunch of FF tabs, the Slashdot header, some junk about DEALS NEW, "Reply to: Re: Have Both", then the Slashdot story header which repeats "Re: Have Both (Score: 3)", then there's you user information / date / perm-link. Everything else on this screen is below my horizontal line of sight, including the entirety of this input form where my gaze is normally focussed.

That lazy-ass statement almost certainly originates from an era where devoting 20% of a monitor to menu/window/media cruft left you with a painfully small working area.

If you bother to read articles where researchers are interviewed decades later about lazy-ass statements they tend to say: "well, yes, of course we knew that at the time, but at that time hardly anyone had even heard of ergonomics, so we chose to make the message as simple as possible, so as to get 80% of the benefit from 20% of the yammering". Last time I ran into this it concerned one of the BMI formulas (there are several body mass formulas in competition). And then they say, "if you go back and look at my original paper, it actually warns against expanding the mandate of this tool beyond our narrow focus of study". Did you really expect people would respect that warning? "Oh no, but what can you do?"

What typically occupies the bottom third of this screen, below where my gaze is the most comfortable? A tilda pop-up console bound to my Windows keyboard menu key.

I have a custom user style that adds white space to the bottom of every web page so that I can maximize FF on this monitor, pop up the Tilda window over top of the bottom third, and still scroll the bottom of the web page high enough to not be covered over.

And then I have my landscape monitor to the left, all within the optimal attitude wedge. In fact, the combination of the two is much better ergonomically than having them both in landscape mode, which was so wide that I used to sit tilted to one side or the other, putting strain on my back (also pushing more of my pixels into the far margins of my vision). I never been happier with any previous monitor setup, though it did require switching from Ubuntu to Mint with extreme prejudice.

In my opinion, most people persist in using fonts that are much too small, I suppose so that they can crowd more stuff onto their desktops. Small fonts would be a problem with this setup as it would cause me to lean forward sharper reading, and also creating sharper viewing angles toward the edges (my input box is presently displaying three lines per inch; I can read what I've composed without difficulty from six feet away).

A portrait-orientation of your monitor makes that objective difficult to achieve.

I suppose if the sum total of your ergonomic wisdom comes from a fortune cookie ("Eyes level with bezel last a lifetime.") and you have no capacity to think for yourself, portrait mode just won't seem terribly appealing. When one's approach to ergonomics is more holistic, one quickly comes to a different view.

The court can't just jump up and say "We don't like that, it goes out." They have to follow procedure which means a challenge has to appear in front of them. That challenge can also only be brought by someone with standing, meaning that this law had a negative impact on you somehow.

That's one of the reasons the government loves the secret gathering so much, makes it harder for it to get challenged. If you can't show this harmed you, then you can't fight it in court.

So someone has to be impacted by this, challenge it, and it has to be appealed up to the SC. Then and only then do they rule on it.

It is called Software Assurance. Been doing it for quite some time.

Write endurance is not an issue for desktop SSDs, even in power user setups. Slashdot had an article on it just a few days ago. Seriously, writing logs is not an issue, at all, with regards to the endurance of your drive.

And if you're writing that way because that's the story you want to write, or because you truly believe it's important to the integrity of the story that the culture be very different than our own, and you're OK with selling a few thousand copies or less, then that's fine.

If you don't write that way—with integrity and determination—then what you're writing isn't SF, it's what I call GSF, or genre science fiction.

Genre is primarily a form of entertainment. SF is properly a form of deep enquiry. I pretty much won't read genre anything. Of course, people lump much of what I do read into genre, but I don't support them in this activity (and none of Vonnegut, Le Guin, or Atwood would—or did—so far as they could get away with it).

One or two pieces in Stanislaw Lem's Microworlds (circa 1986) were very much to my liking. He shit on genre, too, and in a big way.

I write a lot more to my SSDs than most do because of lost of application installs, playing with audio, etc, etc. 6TB to date, drive was purchased about 20 months ago. Ok well assuming I maintain that rate of writing (3.6TB/year) it would be 13 years before I'd hit 50 TB of writes, on a 512GB drive which can probably take 1PB or more.

Even if you hit it harder than the norm, you still don't hit it that hard. It really has to be used for something like database access or a file server or the like before endurance becomes an issue.

Meaning the money a company takes in. The difference between revenues and profits is vast, and varies by company and company type. Some companies take in a lot of revenues to make very little profits. Target would be an example. They took in 73 Billion dollars in revenues the last 12 months. However on that, they only made about 1.5 Billion in actual profit, or 2% when put another way. Retail doesn't make a lot of money, particularly discount retail. So once you add up all their costs (buying the merchandise, payroll, buildings, taxes, power, insurance, etc) there isn't a huge percentage left over.

Compare that to Apple. Not only do they make more money, but they have a much higher profit margin. They took in 182 Billion, and made 39 Billion on it, a 25% margin. Because of the nature of their business, they make more profits per dollar of sales than a place like Target.

This is, of course, only talking about profitable businesses. There are plenty that don't make money. My parents ran a small quilt shop for a number of years. Did about $750,000 in sales per year, yet never made a profit. After they'd paid rent, taxes, insurance, salaries, replenished merchandise, and so on there was not only nothing left over, there was a deficit they had to cover.

Are you saying that my phone can't unencrypt my device when I enter my password now?

Hence why they'd pay so much. Not because it is worth that much, you could have a gold medal made much cheaper, but because it has historical significance and they wish to have that.