Is replacing the batteries illegal during a race? If not, why not just do that? Tesla previewed fast battery exchange a year ago as a model for fueling stations.

These are the reasons I use DropBox for my family. It's great to have it installed on their smart phones and not have to worry about them losing their phone photos. (That's about the only thing of value not synced to an otherwise easy-to-get-to-cloud.)

Now if they could only offer reasonable pricing alternatives. How about $5/month for every doubling over whatever amount you have in free?

I don't know about MBPros too old to run Mavericks. I do have a MacBook that runs Mavericks. In fact, I have one of the (very) short run of Aluminum MacBooks that was created in late 2008. Pretty much the oldest MacBooks that runs Mavericks. And the OS is slow as all heck. The system limps by, but I really need to get new hardware to make much use of it.

I can't imagine a hardware version older than that that's capable but Apple won't allow. Likely more pain than it's worth unless you're running only text-mode or headless apps.

No, undergraduate CS is to allow students to learn the algorithms and mathematics behind them. Languages should be an afterthought at that level. It's all big O notation and knowing which algorithm to pick.

Or at least that's what it was when I did undergrad CS 20 years ago. Now get off my lawn!

Jumped the shark when Kothrapali started talking to women when sober.

You seriously want to put this to jail time?

Two million people jailed a year for downloading Expendables 3? Who's going to man these jails? Who's going to pay for them.

Let's be fucking realistic please. Make it 10 times the retail cost of the copyright infringed item plus court costs and call it a day. But the person sueing has to prove that you're the one that infringed copyright. Not just a blind IP address.

My friends don't hang out on Google+ and I sure as hell don't post to the site... But it's a nice social stream to get info about my hobbies and people I follow. Heck of a lot better than FB. Not sure where I'll go if G+ shutters down.

Yes. Almost all my media is streamed ... from my basement. It was a pain to set up, but now the kids can watch whatever they want without the pains of going through DVD or BluRay menus. A plus is that the home videos are easily accessible as well.

Speaking to a medical doctor, there's apparently a belief in the medical field that complications from LASIK procedures are under-reported.

Are there any short term and 5 year followup studies of the procedure?

Less of a problem than men killing other men, statistically.

I stream from my basement. Buy the discs (or, more recently, rent them from Redbox or borrow them from the library) and rip them. A NAS in the basement holds everything, and xbmc on computers in the livingroom and bedroom for the streaming.

Total cost $1000. Being able to stream whatever movie I own within 15 seconds of turning the TV on? Priceless.

Best part? The NAS accepts ssh connections from outside the home. I have a similar setup in a friend's house and my parents, both of which do a 'rsync over ssh' every time they turn the system on (with logs stored on my NAS so I know the syncs are occurring). Now I get distributed remote mirrors and they get streaming from their basements.

#1 - You're not that interesting.

#2 - Connected devices can have interesting power management solutions. It's not just adjusting the home temperature when it figures out no one's going to be home for 8 hours. What about adjusting when the fridge uses the most power during times when electricity is the cheapest? Or sending you a text message if the motion detectors go off but your car is not in the driveway/garage? Or have lights go on just after dusk (regardless of time of year) and go out at a random time between 10 and 11pm (unless motion suggests people are home)?

The upfront cost of these devices are a bit more. To be absorbed by early adopters, of course. But when the prices come down and the kinks straightened out, they can be quite useful.

OnTopic: My neighbor showed me the app he had on his phone to monitor his pool. It allowed him to monitor temperature, pH, turn the filter and heater on, etc. The installer gave it a default 4 digit passcode, which was apparently the same four digit passcode that every other installation had. Since the ID number of the pool was adjustable, my neighbor joked that he would sometimes log into random people's pools and flash their pool lights (and had others do it to him as well). Fortunately no one's raised the pool temperature to 90 degrees or something like that (yet).

Presumably he'll get some sort of mandatory time in front of a psychiatrist to make sure he's fit for active duty.

What they should have done is lease or sell the boxes to their subscribers and charge a monthly service fee to keep their boxes from being attacked by viruses, etc.

That way they can't be sued for anything but installing commodity software at the owner's request.

More and more I only believe Consumer Reports. They don't accept donated items for review. They purchase their own from a normal middleman to make sure what they get is what a normal person would get.

That being said, it's remarkable they're still in business.