It'll never come, but the year of the Linux Palmtop is upon us.

Institutional memory... hmm.

I once stayed on a farm where livestock is raised for organic pork and beef. The farmer's view was that, in order to eat healthy in this day and age, a relationship is necessary between the consumer and the farmer.

I agree, and think relationships are beneficial in other domains too -- healthcare, education, law advice, between employer and employee, even packaged goods...

All good, except....

> don't borrow money... not for a house
That depends - a home is a *secured* loan. You can always 'give it back' and rent. A *humble* home is better than renting for decades.

> You don't need to drink, to ..., to have a spouse or to have children.
No. (Almost all) people *need* a spouse. For love, for the work of life. On the purely economic side, its efficient to have 2 (or 1.5) incomes to pay one mortgage, two people to share household goods, groceries, cooking, cleaning...

> ... you *wlll* have money unless your health significantly fails.
Your health will (almost certainly) fail if you strike it out without a spouse.

he thinks upto 180% is reasonable

'Better engineered' != 'deserving of patent protection'

A drone-finding unit that combined radar (to detect small airborne objects), with auditory recognition of drone-propeller noise signatures (using microphones distributed over the prison boundary) would be cheap and perform quite well.

The auditory component prevent false positives caused by birds, flying debris, etc.Radar could help detect helium balloon drones, or even the 'ballistic' lobbing of contraband over prison boundaries (either manually, or using catapults). The only thing it'd miss is carrier-pigeons or a new generation of flapping-wing drones in development. However, pigeons are unlikely to land in prison yards. That is, unless a creative prisoner raised pigeons in the prison. Of course, he'd have to arrange to have the pigeons smuggled out or somehow trapped outside so contraband could be 'attached' to them (perhaps by tracking them by radio transmitter foot-band previously smuggled into prison).

The alternative is steel-mesh netting.

Or conscientious prison guards.

Now that I have your attention with my crude joke*, here's the real tip -- coconut oil. virgin. cold pressed.

Greenie article:
http://undergroundhealthreport...

Clinical trial:
http://health.usf.edu/NR/rdonl...

(*My get out of jail card - a family history of dementia)

You can't bequeath your ITunes account - it goes when you do.

Most of the big digital providers are very clear on the subject of ownership - it doesn’t belong to you. Purchasing electronic media doesn’t give you the same rights as buying the equivalent books, DVDs and CDs - because you’re buying a lifetime licence to use these digital files rather than a hard, tangible asset.

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/prosp...

Er, not really. The real reason is not 'shit happens' but the cozy arrangements that boards and management have put in place; traditions solidified by mutually-beneficial remuneration contracts. Members of the board used to be 'management' in their previous life, and management aim to be board members in the next.

> Here's the thing: dollar-for-dollar, most senior executives are better off quitting ("retiring"),
> unless some divorce, gambling addition or coke habit has eaten away all their savings.

How true, I am not sure. Maybe you are right about older CEOs. But most CEOs are not willing to retire. MBA schools meanwhile, pump out dozens of whippersnappers. With pay differences being huge between CEO and 'CEO-2' levels , there are ample alternatives to highly paid CEOs -- 'cheaper' CEOs (as in the past), governing councils instead of CEOs, co-CEOs, even rotating CEOs. Now to be sure, not all these are good ideas for all companies. But one - 'cheaper CEOs' - for certain is an idea that worked quite well in the decades past.

Not really, you give the toddler a walker. Giving a newbie a modern IDE is akin to giving a toddler a small Ferrari.

Where there is fire, there is smoke. Where there is smoke from an oil well fire, there are carcinogens in the air

Good. My favourite is a human failsafe -- a Russian officer who refused to classify radar anomalies as an American ICBM launches, hence preventing WWIII.

Now I ask - are these really 'great towering achievements'? Or rather, are these just accounts of near-disasters narrowly averted by the failsafes that they sorely needed.

My point is simple - when the incremental risk is out of all proportion to incremental benefit, its best to scrap that technology.

In my book, that includes nuclear power (with the failsafes on offer now), nuclear weapons, and now... 'laser headlights' on cars.
The reasons:
  incremental benefit = 30% off on the small fraction of gas which powers headlamps, doubling the range of headlights.
  incremental risk: dazzling other drivers, blinding accidents (when lenses break), ubiquitous availability of technology that can be used to permanently blind large crowds of people

The sun doesn't tailgate you at night.

Repeat that to the first person blinded by these headlights.

Hmmm... Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island. Your turn now -- tell me three great towering achievements of "safeguards and cutoffs that fail safe." :)

Pleased to meet you! You must the laissez-faire capitalist. :)

And besides all this... I'm tired of all the rich kids with ultra-bright headlights making it unsafe for the rest of us to drive at night.

For the Audi system:
"The lighting system works by using a blue laser beam to back-light a yellow phosphorous crystal lens;"

And what happens in an accident... when the lens is smashed open, when the blue laser beam accidentally shines into a first responder's eyes?

This is an accident waiting to happen.