Approximate length of a movie: 90-120 minutes (1.5-2 hours)
Length of a Series Episode: 40-45 minutes (0.67-0.75 hours)

Two movies and three to four episodes a week is sufficient as an average to hit that number.

Thank you, you made me stop and have to read the last line three times to figure out which letters were swapped. It gave me a good laugh at myself - and I needed that.

Slysdexics Untie!

So his kid has to reinstall each and every addon to the games he uses every time he wants to play? And he loses all of his profile data (WoW does save some locally)? And now he has to also know how to safely update the image with the weekly WoW updates and patches?

I think that kind of misses the point of a gaming machine. It's supposed to operate as an appliance: boot, play the games, shut down, done.

Unlikely when applied to billions of chances means very, very likely to be more than a few.

Or phrase the question differently -

Would you like unmonitored strangers sitting in an office in {foreign_country} to know that you enjoy {product} so that they can aggregate you with other users of {product} and attempt to sell you related products?

How about this novel idea: ALL advertising should be opt-in by default.

I know, without advertising the advertising industry would die. Meh.

I keep a D10 handy for just such mundane decisions - those where the outcome really doesn't matter - and it makes life interesting. It's actually fun not knowing what you are going to do all the time.

It is also a bit relaxing to know that I don't have to waste any time on those thoughts; just roll the die and get on with life. I can't say I apply it to getting dressed, but choosing what to have for breakfast falls into that category. We don't keep anything I won't eat around, so a quick roll, count, and eat and I'm off to the parts of my day requiring thought. It's fun.

The same applies here in NC - cyclists have all of the rights AND responsibilities as motor vehicles. Passing is supposed to be done by giving a full lane's clearance, just as if passing a car, in a legal passing zone.

And I regularly see cyclists who know the rules and obey them, and cyclists who don't seem to know left from right; I also see drivers who know the rules, and drivers who don't seem to know right from left.

We have a licensing process that in theory filters out those who don't know how to drive, but the criteria are so low that pretty much anyone who can breath can pass. So I don't think that the government intervention is helping at all either.

I don't know what the solution is, but the presence or absence of helmets does not appear to be the problem - unskilled drivers of all types of vehicles seems to be a much bigger issue.

what you gotta do.

No stick out your hand so I can insert your career chip.

For men, military style tactical boots, kept polished, can be almost indistinguishable from dress shoes, and are an order of magnitude or two more comfortable. In addition, the type with steel toes and non-slip soles are approved footwear for any place I have ever been that required safety boots.

Add a set of comfortable gel insoles to those and you will have foot nirvana all day.

For women, stick with comfortable shoes over pretty/fancy ones. Even sitting at a desk all day, your feet have a major impact on your overall comfort. Low heels or flats that match a variety of clothes can be life savers. And don't forget that you too can use the lovely gel insoles to improve comfort.

In either case, it is also nice to be able to sneak the shoes off under a desk and stretch your feet out while you work. Just keep clean feet and no one will even know. (Except the support monkey checking your Ethernet cables)

If you are sitting for longer hours than standing and moving around, wear a belt that is slide adjustable instead of one that has pre-punched holes. Remember that the longer you are sitting, the more your spine compresses and the more your girth temporarily increases (no matter how fit you are).

If you end up having to wear dress shirts and find them uncomfortably hot or cool, Under Armor and similar companies make thermal regulating undershirts in a variety of colors, including black, white, and neutral/tan that work well enough for desert and cold weather troops. They are well worth the investment in my opinion. They also allow you to slip off a dress shirt if you have to do a desk dive, dust yourself off in the appropriate restroom, and return to full dress without missing a beat.

In other words, programming through a thought based interface will use a language based on Ada?

I suggest that we all start putting down our "race" on those forms as Homo Sapiens Cogitans (Thinking Knowing Man). Everyone else can use the rest of the entries.

Of course, the long-winded way of saying it obfuscates the arguments:

1. Things change and adapt.
2. God, our all-powerful creator, changes and adapts things.

Since in this telling 1 does not require the addition of God, 1 is the simpler.

Just give me a shirt treated with something that reacts to the radiation at different levels, similar to how flourescing materials react at different wavelengths, and tickets, and I'll gather your readings. You can stand in line outside the checkpoint and use your personal recording device (cell phone, camera, etc.) to film the reaction of the materials. All you have to do is pretend to be taking video of, say, your son about to take his first flight before you let him go through the checkpoint you can't, since you don't have a ticket. Oh, and since they won't let you, as his parent, accompany him to the gate, hope he doesn't get kidnapped or worse.

Or use something that retains changes after exposure to radiation. Lots of easy ways to get measurements without asking permission from the TSA or violating their rules.

So then I propose the following experiment - while noting the time delay will need to be on the order of milliseconds most likely to make it work.

1) A statistically significant number of photon pairs are generated, e.g. 100, and measured by Alice and Bob.
2) Alice and Bob compare all of their results, under the following rule:
a) If the results are coordinated in a statistically significant portion of the measurements, say 80%?, then the bit is read as a 1.
b) If the results are coordinated in what statistically is random chance, basically random, then the result is a 0.
3) Victor then decided to send a 0 or a 1, and if sending a 1 entangles all the pairs. If sending a 0, Victor entangles none of the pairs.

While the number of photons required and the delay would have to be calibrated such that random chance is distinctly differentiated from correlation, since they already have established that the correlation is statistically significant, that is just a matter of the volume of photons required.

While this comic is accurate in the basic calculation, there are several assumptions that a password hacker can use to simplify even a semi-brute force search.

* The US keyboard layout only has 94 symbols (~7 bits).

* Unless the site is completely non-English, there are probably some US users.

Applying those criteria, the base search would be 7^Length for the initial scan, with a very high probability of finding the password in that pass. That is n-(floor(n/8)) actual entropic bits. A 1024 bit password reduces to 1016 bits. Further reductions in the initial scan can be made by only scanning for common substitution characters, and removing the lower 19 ASCII codes from the space (which are not easily used in a password. That leaves behind 5 bits per character. The remaining space for the 1024 bit password is now n-(floor(n/8)*4)=~n/2 or 512 bits of entropy. A brute force search can be conducted on that space in mere seconds.

So our attacker manages to obtain more than one password, possibly an entire file. Since one vulnerability is usually all that is required to gain further access, they only need one or two successes. They use the above methodology, in all reality gaining more than one or two passwords. Game, set, match.

In theory, salting the passwords is only effective if they are performing a man-in-the-middle capture. If they obtain the list of hashed passwords directly, salt does nothing to help.

There are ways to mitigate this threat, such as multi-factor authentication. But thinking that passwords are going to do more than slow a determined attacker down is subscribing to the illusion of security.