I want to experiment with mesh networking, which requires it.

As for mass storage, I meant as a USB host, I should have been more clear. Most devices have support for this, but vanilla android doesn't.

Nonsense. I adhere to the fantasy that we could be convinced (as a society, species, etc.) to lower the penalty for failure by changing the rules of the game. The truth is that there will always be failure. It's part of attempting to succeed. Some fail, some succeed, some fail and then succeed, some succeed due to learning from the failure of others. That's going to happen. How we handle these situations is up to us.

CM has ad-hoc wifi and usb mass storage support. Will I get that with this new version of Android, or is Google still ignoring those issues?

Maybe it's because I tend to play old games, but my perception of it hasn't so much been costly as explodey. Or sometimes it just draws stuff wrong, but I can mostly live with that.

The more tightly you cling to Atari nostalgia, the more landfilled copies of ET will slip through your fingers...

1: Cisco didn't hire all the people who work for them. They made acquisitions.
2: How many good engineers do you think there are in the world, and how many of them do you believe is it feasible for Cisco to have hired? Because I'm suspecting a massive dose of arrogance on your part, here.

Competition from competare, which I am probably misspelling, everyone running together to go faster. Competition is a sound management principle, but only if the penalties for failure do not include incarceration and death. And the risk of that goes way up if you fail in the corporate reality and become homeless. Then you get stigmatized, and society can do anything it likes to you. Ironically, only Utah seems to be figuring out a compassionate solution.

Competition helps us achieve more and helps us decide on the best solutions. But when you combine it with an artificial scarcity society (which is rapidly leading us down the path to a real one) then it becomes fear-driven, rather than the desire to excel, and fear makes us make poor and short-sighted decisions.

Well, let's look at how important the identity of the capital component can be: it can make or break a company. Depending on the identity of known major investors, you can attract or repel other major investors. So clearly you have agreed that the identity behind the labor component is critically important.

No. The only reason that is the case is because of mindless chasing of the bottom line. In the real world, we know that while individuals can be replaced, no individual is a perfect replacement for another. Even identical twins have their own unique proclivities, and the rest of us are less identical than they except by astounding happenstance which you statistically cannot depend upon.

The truth is that companies change (and sometimes fail) based on loss of specific talent. You don't tend to see the results instananeously because the failures are gradual and accumulative. Eventually they become too great, and they topple the organization. When you lose specific talent, you lose knowledge you didn't even know you were depending on in most cases, and you lose business-enabling shortcuts in the organizational structure which can take in some cases years to build.

Well, no. Everyone knows that shitting on employees and causing them to leave (or just firing them when they are necessary) produces inferior results. The actual problem is the chasing of short-term profit. A CEO can do something that they know will harm the company in the long term in order to produce a bump in profits in the short term, and moreover, their interchangeability means that they can do that and get away with it, come out looking like a winner to investors, and then move on and do it to another company. And this in turn is related to the modern idea that a corporation must serve the shareholders' every whim, but this is nonsense. The corporation must serve its charter, and shareholders who don't approve of that charter should invest elsewhere.

Of course, one way to stop this would be to institute better laws for protection of employees of absorbed corporations. That would make other corps less likely to cannibalize them, since their value in an acquisition falls sharply if you can't simply sack all the employees you don't like in short order.

A better way to stabilize society might be a COLA/MGI, which would eliminate people's need to go to work for corporations which should be allowed to fail anyway, either because they don't treat workers well or frankly for any other reason. Most corporations shouldn't exist, but in our modern make-work system we must preserve them so as to preserve jobs so as to preserve economic prosperity. Meanwhile, many are stacking up numbers in bank accounts which will remain untapped until their death. You can't take it with you, but you can deprive someone who needs it right now.

Well, here's a statement that's even more better, a different set of tasks will be better or worse (or more better, or less better) for a given employee.

Congratulations, you just summed up the problem with Apple devices succinctly. They did not design them to be general-purpose computers. They designed them not to be. But there's no technical reason why they can't give you the option. Therefore, anyone paying Apple money is a dirty fucking liar if they claim that they want computing to be transformational. Apple has been pivotal in preventing that future.

If nerds couldn't jailbreak then there would be less of them running iOS and less recommendations that people run it because less nerds would be familiar with it. Of course there are a bunch of fake-ass nerds out there who are afraid to use a computer as a general-purpose computing device, so yeah, there's always the douchenozzles who stuck with Apple even through the Performa era because they are brainwashed dipshits. Enjoy the new Microsoft, dildo.

There is an excellent theory to explain the "excess heat" measurements: the people doing the research are some mixture of dishonest and incompetent. This theory also has the nice features that:

a) it is consistent with the spectacularly incompetent work we see whenever anyone attempts to carefully document an experiment, such as the one on the Rossi device we have seen recently

b) it is consistent with the litany of results that require well-established phenomenology to be turned off, for example the need to magically suppress neutrons and gamma rays that would otherwise be produced in any nuclear reaction or its aftermath, regardless of its origin.

After a quarter of a century with no reproducible results and no "positive" experiments that do not require the magical suppression of other laws of physics to account for the lack of radiation, no other theory is close to as plausible as this one.

Cold fusion has been heavily investigated. There is one striking thing about all of the supposed "positive" results: they are physically impossible.

Suppose I said I had invented a car that ran on water, and that my claimed proof was that I had driven this car along the streets of a distant city. I give a talk on my results and show a map of the route.

A person in the audience interrupts and says, "Hey, I know that city! That's my home town! The route you've shown is impossible: you say you drove it between 4:30 and 5:30 PM on Tuesday June the 6th, which is in the middle of rush-hour, and you've shown yourself going the wrong way on half-a-dozen one-way streets! Why didn't you collide with anything?"

I reply: "This car runs on water! Weren't you listening? It doesn't collide with other cars, because it is propelled by water!"

You would be correct to suspect that you need not take my claims very seriously after that, and this kind of exchange is typical of cold fusion talks.

I saw Pons give a talk at Caltech, where one of my colleagues interrupted with the question, "Where are the neutrons? You say you don't see any radiation because all the energy comes out in high-energy alpha particles, but if you make alpha particles move with that energy through the palladium lattice you will get neutrons? Where are they?"

Pons answered: "New physics."

But alpha particles don't care what made them move, and more than a car cares what fuel it runs on. You can't just invoke "new physics" and say that the lack of neutrons or gamma rays doesn't matter, because you aren't really invoking new physics, you are throwing out old physics: you are saying that high energy alphas don't produce neutrons, even though that would require all of nuclear physics to be wrong.

So while I agree that new phenomena are often difficult to reproduce and we should be cautious about dismissing them on that basis, cold fusion, after twenty-five years of testing, has proven to be:

a) impossible to reproduce (there is no reliably reproducible experimental setup)

and

b) what experiments that have claimed positive results have always (to the best of my knowledge) required almost all of nuclear physics to be wrong to explain the absence of radiation.

I cannot think of any other phenomenon that eventually proved to exist that shares anything like this history of failure. Maybe Lister's work on sterile technique in surgery, which had a decade or two of rough handling? But even it was frequently reproducible, even if not universally so, and it didn't contradict any well-established, empirically founded, reasonably comprehensive theories of the time.

Even setting the balance of government powers vs individual rights aside, the problem is that there's no such encryption. If it has a backdoor, it's vulnerable. For example, if it has an extra "NSA key" that can be used to decrypt it, then that key will be leaked eventually (Snowden is a living proof of that0, and at that point all existing data is vulnerable.

What he is asking is to compromise security below any acceptable standard for the sake of his convenience. The only correct answer here is, "fuck off". There's no balance to discuss.

Can you quote that right? Because all I see in the 4th Amendment is that they're not allowed to arrest or search unless it is reasonable; it doesn't say anything about being granted a right to search things successfully.

So far as I can see, 4A is not relevant to this discussion at all. It does not grant people the right to be completely secure from any search (as it specifically excludes reasonable ones), nor does it grant the government the right to force people to make said search easier.

Alas, you only get the prize if you manage to curve spacetime either more or less than what would ordinarily result from your particular fatness.