I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, on Slashdot of all places. How many times have you seen a shitty submission here and comments correcting it? It's practically Slashdot's unofficial slogan: "yeah, the stories are awful, but I come for the comments".

Apparently, there is a C-64 emulator written in Javascript? (I don't know enough to try it)

On the other hand, I've recently been playing Sim City 2000, an ancient DOS game in a DOS Box, provided for free by EA....

Everyone knows that the military airplane became obsolete once radar was invented. (Sarcasm?)

The SR-71 was shot at too many times to count. Never once shot out of the sky. RADAR? Sure, they may have known she was there, and wasn't nothing to be done about it, as nothing could catch it.

The only reason why we parked the SR-71 is that satellites could do the same thing, cheaper, 24x7.

I would like to know about how smoking pot compares to smoking tobacco.

I don't *want* fancy electronics my car that doesn't adhere to some standard interface.

I want music to adhere to a standard interface, EG: RCA connectors. I don't expect navigation in the dash - I'm perfectly happy using my phone. I'd be good with it playing through the soundsystem via a standard interface, EG: bluetooth.

If you take care of them, cars last a long time. I'm *still* driving a 2001 Chrysler convertible, and it not only has a CD player, but also a cassette tape! I can't imagine using CDs or tapes - all my music is in my phone. The car only has 120k miles, I'll probably get another half decade out of it, at least. (And yes, I'm aware that the Chrysler convertibles have a bad reputation; emphasis on take care of them )

I want my car to be a car, and not try to include technology with a life cycle of 3-5 years. I don't *want* my car to have a built in cellular wifi, because the cellular network will likely be upgraded well before the car dies, making the feature worthless at best, but more likely a security or reliability concern. I don't *want* my car to have built-in navigation, as whatever system it has will be hopelessly obsolete long before I'm ready to turn in the drivetrain.

Instead, I propose that cars can have an in-dash screen that may (or may not) have it's own "smarts" but is also usable as a simple screen via something like HDMI with touch feedback so that later, I can use some new whiz bang thingie that hasn't been invented yet.

I thought reverse engineering the server protocol was perfectly legal.

In theory, yes. In practice, the DMCA can be used to squash interoperable implementations. Look at bnetd, for example. Despite it being a completely separate implementation of the protocol, Blizzard used the DMCA to successfully sue the project maintainers.

It's somewhat true that there's a bell curve in taxation, peaking with the middle class.

1) The poor have nothing to tax. They are generally on welfare or just off it, and struggling. The "freebies" a la "welfare" is not so much about the welfare receiving parents as giving their kids a chance to break out of the poverty trap, which they can't do if undernourished or uneducated.

2) The middle class has something to tax, but don't have the resources to defend themselves adequately. This is where the peak begins.

3) The upper middle class has a lot to tax, and is just starting to have enough resources to start to defend themselves, This is where the taxation peak starts to drop. (pretty much: between the 2% and the 0.5%)

3) The super wealthy hold all the cards. They can hire legions of lawyers and bankrupt countries if need be. This category controls or directly owns 50% of the world's wealth. Taxation doesn't even make sense to this class.

10+ years ago, I used to log all packets that didn't "fit" in expected services. It really was an eye opener, there are perpetual and constant probes of all sorts, all day long. We're not talking actual attacks, just the equivalent of walking around, trying doors to see if any are unlocked or even present.

At that time, I was logging well over 1,000/day on a *home 1.5 Mbit DSL modem*. Today, I would log that many actual attacks against our small-ish website every few minutes if I cared to log them. The Internet is an incredibly hostile place, and it's only because the routers, servers, and networks etc. are actually rather good at their job that we manage to make it such a useful tool.

Somebody had to see these notes, decide that they were worthless, and actually roll them up to make insulation. I want to punch that guy. How does this happen!?!?

Although Apple has never officially acknowledged issues surrounding Yosemite and Wi-Fi connectivity, the company is clearly aware of the problem: Leading off the improvements offered in the update 10.10.2 update released Tuesday was 'resolves an issue that might cause Wi-Fi to disconnect,' according to the release notes.

So basically, you said that Apple haven't acknowledged the problem, then quoted them acknowledging the problem?

Please stop with the "sky is falling" routine - it only makes the problem worse and the stakes are too high to just throw your hands up in the air and give up in blissful ignorance.

I suspect that, at a basic level, you have a fundamental misunderstanding as to what a "certificate" is and does.

1) A cookie is an identifier that allows you to tie numerous http(s) sessions together by domain. It can thus be used to track you by having many sites contain images or content from a common domain. (EG: doubleclick.com)

2) A certificate is used to negotiate a private session with a single domain. It's provided by the server and validated by the client to set up an encrypted connection. It allows you, the user, to verify that you are connected with the correct domain and *not* a nefarious person. The use of HTTPS and certificates foils the Verizon "supercookie" as they have no meaningful way to pierce the encryption provided between you and, say, Google.com.

It is broke though. Look at the SendFile bug, for example. It's been there for years, it bites a tonne of people who try to virtualise web servers, and there has been seemingly no attempt whatsoever to fix it. Its kernel drivers on OS X and Linux aren't particularly stable either.

the functionality of the devices is about the same

It's very different. On Android, you have to decide whether to grant permission before you've ever run the application, and it's all or nothing. On iOS, you run the application before deciding whether or not to grant it permission. You have the ability to deny permission while still running the application. You can also allow permission for some things but not others.

This functionality is partially available to Android users who root their phones and install the right tools, but that's far from the common case.

It's true that the majority of the profits in App Store sales is focused at the extreme top, but it's not true that 99.999% of the rest make "near 0". This analysis estimates that the top 3,175 applications earn at least the average annual income for a US household per year, and applications that rank about number 6000 still earn $25K/yr.

And that's only counting App Store revenue. I've earned a lot more than average since I started developing for iOS, and most of the applications I've worked on are free. You don't see things like banking applications earn revenue directly, but the developers responsible certainly profit from it. The Facebook application is free, but you don't think its developers are working on it for free do you? I've been paid to built plenty of enterprise applications that will never appear in the App Store.

There is a huge amount of profit in the "app economy" that will never be accounted for merely by looking at App Store profits. The "app economy" is much bigger than the App Store.

I'm probably going to lose some karma for this...

I, too, could come with a half-dozen answers that would be "far superior" to what 100+ years of the finest minds in the industry could come up with. But in reality, I really, seriously doubt that my designs would hold up because there's a *reason* that things are done the way they are.

Mechanical engineering is a *very old* industry, and any radical, new design would have significant hurdles to pass before it could be accepted and used in a real scenario. The cost of failure is very high and there are real lives on the line.

My first thought was to use something like a caterpillar drive along the sides of the shaft, each of which would operate like a mini elevator for perhaps 10 floors. But, very quickly, I can see that this type of system would have many, many more moving parts and consequently many more points of failure.

So, I think it *might* be best to trust that 100+ years of experience are, in fact, at work, and that we should first understand that there is *real knowledge* at work before assuming that our half-baked and thoroughly unproven ideas hold any merit in reality.... ?