he trouble with CloudFlare is, if you want to stay anonymous on the internet using Tor, you're SOL, as they serve you captchas every 3 pages when they see a connection coming from a Tor exit node.

This feature can be easily turned off in their settings. It is part of their security features.

I'd love to see more people using Tor, but the experience has to change a lot before we can do that.

Being anonymous and secure on Tor is not easy. It's a major inconvenience to disabling browser features like Javascript, and it requires firm behavioral changes from the user.

Putting a mainstream user into the same environment is simply not going to work.

They tried, but were having trouble finding a 458 that could transform into a 360 and back in the blink of an eye.

(The dash they flash to while accelerating was a Ferrari 360, not the 458 he was driving)

A thousand times this. It's been shown that ~192K VBR from a modern encoder is transparent to our ears, so these 256K or higher bitrates are the worst of both worlds: it's not lossless AND it's a waste of bandwidth.

I've seen kids wearing Minecraft backpacks and shirts, said something like "hey cool! what're you building right now?" only to discover that while they've heard of the game they haven't actually played it.

I suspect these paraphernalia stand to make a lot more money than the game does.

As far as coming out with sequels, I'm not sure how well that would work anyway. Minecraft prides itself on being extremely basic, letting the player provide the creativity. What could a sequel possibly provide that didn't do away with that premise?

Anyway. Worth 2.5 billion? Highly doubtful, especially looking at the lackluster response to anything non-Minecraft they've brought out.

But it sounds like optimizing left turns is what actually improved traffic.

Bitcoin itself doesn't have any known security flaws. One usability issue is that you can't instantly guarantee a transfer of coins -- nobody is going to be buying coffee with it directly.

It's not so much about problems with Bitcoin, but with Bitcoin "banks" that turned out to be incredibly insecure. The banks were created to exchange paper money for Bitcoins, and to facilitate instant transfers. They just happen to be incredibly bad at it, and because there is no regulation like an actual bank, are pretty much free to be as bad as they want.

Paypal is actually a good fit, as Bitcoin is essentially a decentralized Paypal. Paypal is also pretty well known for the same evils as they aren't regulated like an actual bank either, but they've got a lot of infrastructure and experience that could make them a far better Bitcoin bank than what's available right now.

Car franchise laws were put in place to protect dealerships. Car manufacturers did not want to put in the heavy local investment to sell cars in every area, and dealerships did not want a manufacturer swooping in to steal the business with lower prices once the areas started booming.

AviSynth is extremely versatile and often leads in state-of-the-art filters long before any other video editor gets them, including professional ones. The trick is that there's no UI for it -- to edit videos, you write scripts.

Office Automation is problematic -- because it literally opens up a hidden window of your Office app and simulates clicking around the UI to do what you need, if something unexpected happens it can unhide the window to show the user a message. This might be good enough for a desktop app, but if you're running it on a server it'll just freeze up your process with noone there to click it.

For Office->PDF conversion of word docs, Aspose.Words has a fairly easy API and generally very accurate rendering. I highly recommend it.

At least on the C# side of things, the three libraries I've used (iTextSharp, PdfSharp, and Aspose.Pdf) are all a bit of an unintuitive mess with inconsistencies all over the place and very little documentation. In the case of iText, their revenue stream is putting all their documentation into a book for people to buy, so it's not uncommon to get an intentionally vague response when asking for help.

I cycle between each depending on what I need to do, because they all have their own quirks and supported features. I've even piped from one to another to get certain parts of the process working.

Good luck.

Well, I never said Bose actually had quality, only that people perceive them as having it. I carefully worded it like that because while I agree with you, it was not the point I was trying to make. I'll stick to my Mad Dogs and DT880s.

Bose and Beats are both highly brand-focused. Bose targets the more mature quality-seeking crowd, while Beats targets the bass-hungry and fashion-conscious youth. There's some overlap, but generally I'd say their targets kept competition to a minimum, and they've pretty much cornered those targets

Apple has the best of both worlds being viewed both as high quality and a status symbol. If they start using their monster marketing teams to align peoples' view of Beats with that of Apple, Bose stands a chance of being pushed out of the market by a frightening direct competition. They've got good reason to try to stall the acquisition as much as possible

It seems they've got quite a lot of bark, but not enough bite. Unless it comes to boobs on TV.

Umm, is that per 100,000 65-74yo drivers, or just per 100,000 drivers in general? I imagine, you know, death, would skew that quite a bit if the latter.