Don't joke! It leaves us only an inch away from shit for brains.

had a technique where he would pipe the audio from the recording studio down to a basement where loudspeakers played the audio and picked it back up on microphones and back to the control room. I always thought that it would be fun to try if I had access to a large warehouse or something.

Interesting, but beating a government at their own game by suing their interests simply isn't going to work. It takes arrogance to think you can beat another man's game when the other man gets to define the rules.

I think you need a bit of arrogance just to keep from washing out and having the balls to do some things in college that you might not normally feel comfortable with. Unless the source is from deeper seeded part of your psyche, it will temper its self once you've settled down in your job (or whatever you plan to do with your life) and don't feel like you have to prove yourself any more.

Reminds me of two things: A CS prof told us that we'll spend the first year of our career fighting to get 'root' and the rest of our career trying to get rid of it. Also, when I was involved in hiring I was reminded that a college degree doesn't necessarily mean you know what you are doing, but it does show that you can make a major commitment and follow through.

I was always a bit dubious of the infrared based wireless networking (like IrDA) for an office environment, but what about optical wireless in a data center? Seems like that would solve the potential security issues and you could isolate racks (or parts of racks) on their own wireless network and then do the traditional wired scheme to join those nodes together so that you weren't stretching the bandwidth too thin?

While, true, he is best known as an entertainer of sorts, he's an engineer that's worked in a number of fields (I won't bother posting links to various bios; you can google for those.)

I grew up watching Almost Live! Loved that show. I loved the Billy Quan segments... "Be Like Billy!" It was a sort of extreme spoof of fake looking staged martial arts fighting movies taken to the extreme.

Back but forgot to try hardwired ethernet, oh well. The Live Ubuntu works in a pinch, I would say, but I'd recommend using something like VirtualBox or installing on partition and taking the time to fiddle to get things tweaked out. No backlight on the keyboard and can't tell you about if the video was accelerated (probably not).

It was one of those quick 5-minute tests, but I'm willing to reboot and check some more things for giggles. I can tell you that audio worked, trackpad worked, keyboard, WiFi hardware was recognized but needed the firmware file downloaded and copied into place (been through that before with other Broadcom WiFi stuff), video wasn't horrible VGA res but I didn't try to up it. Let me reboot and post a reply in a few! :')

"Running linux on apple products is no longer an easy thing to do."

I just stuck in a vanilla Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 (32-bit) on a USB flash stick on a rMBP for the first time and it booted right up. I've also used VirtualBox with Ubuntu for years (which is probably more practical/useful in most cases).

Ubuntu is certainly easier and faster to run these days on a Mac than how I remember Yellowdog Linux was. (Ahh, those were the days.)

I call BS. I did a quick search here for "Amazon" on the iTunes Store and it comes up with a number of books related to publishing and marketing with Amazon including publishing eBooks for the Kindle.

I thought it was par for the course to have iffy WiFi on my MBP until I spent an afternoon testing each component. I found two culprits: A bad ethernet router which was effectively cycling one of its ethernet ports continuously, and elsewhere in the network, an old cat-3 cable that was trying to run at 100-baseT speeds.

Besides that, I used to have a wireless telephone that would kill the network each time I used it, but I have long since replaced that. Also beware that each WiFi channel spans two additional channels up and down (e.g. channel 5 is actually using 3,4,5,6,7) so beware of conflicts with other networks in the area.

In short, do your due diligence and find the source(s) of your problem. What you are experiencing isn't normal if everything is working and configured correctly. And I hate to sound like I am pushing Apple products, but you might be safest to use an Airport base station vs. a third party WiFi router. It at least is easier to configure with a Mac and gives the benefit of Airplay and printer sharing, if you need it.

I realize this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek news item, but isn't government by definition above the law? I mean, if it actually got serious, wouldn't the president just pass an executive order making it exempt from copyright law?

In any case, the government isn't distributing it, it is self distributing! ;')

I see what you did there...

It's obvious that the kid will need something age/experience appropriate, but don't discount buying a good college textbook or two. My parents used to let me buy the occasional college textbook while growing up and even though they were way over my head at the time, they turned out to be some of the most useful books I've ever used.

Also, BASIC and Pascal are still very good languages to start with. C might be a bit complex to start with, especially when dealing with pointers and such. Another language to consider is Javascript. A kid could have a lot of fun with interactivity working with JS (as well as sharing the work), although debugging can sometimes be a bit of a pita.

And for a medical opinion, at that! ;')