A rule of thumb is that one page of a screenplay is about one minute of screen time. Interestingly, this works whether the page is dialog, description, action, or some combination. So if a 120 page screenplay means a movie of about two hours, most novels need to be drastically cut to be turned into practical screenplays.

I believe this counts as a law. Was her server certified to FIPS 199 and NIST standards? Who did the certification? Were the results sent to the OMB?

Oh, she's got that covered: she just claimed that she never used email for anything secret or confidential. If you can believe that. I don't.

Next, the server admin will be discovered in Fort Marcy Park with a "self-inflicted gunshot wound."

Thank you. And in addition, computer systems that store and process US government are (and were when she was SoS) required to be certified according to the requirements of the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002. My understanding is that complying with that is not a trivial undertaking. So who did that for her? Who were her server admins? I guess they'll be getting some Congressional subpoenas, once we know who they are.

But this isn't a MacBook Pro. It's a MacBook. The MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are separate lines of laptops. If you want all the other ports all the time, get a MacBook Pro.

I'd love this to be true, but it seems unlikely from the point of view of the Gaia hypothesis. Life tends to transform its surroundings, hence the Earth's oxygen atmosphere that we depend on. This is why James Lovelock predicted, back in the '70s, that the Mars probes would not find life there: if Mars had life, we'd be able to see unambiguous evidence of it from here. The fluctuating methane levels on Mars are intriguing, but given the billions of years that Mars (and Titan) have been around, it seems like any life would have had plenty of time to evolve and make an unmistakable impact.

Did Bush’s Broadband Deregulation Upend His Own NSA Wiretapping? Now that the regulations have changed, the situation is different.

I predict that all of you net neutrality supporters are in for a nasty surprise. Your hatred of Comcast and fear of what it might do has lead to the biggest restrictions on freedom since the Patriot Act, which at least had the excuse of 3,000 dead people.

But what’s the excuse here? Ooh, Comcast might charge Netflix more money? There might be “fast lanes” that cost more? Do you think George Soros spent $196 million on NN because he’s worried about Netflix? Of course not. You don’t need 300+ pages of regulations for just that. This whole thing is a Trojan Horse so that the government can get it’s fingers deeper into the internet. As soon as the regulations are available, search them for terms like “hate speech” and "disparate impact." This will be a mass of restrictions, requirements, taxes, subsidies, and pay-offs to favored groups. I'm sure trial lawyers will be happy, because there will no doubt be lots of new things they can sue about. I’m sure the FCC will administer this with all the fairness that the IRS has brought to regulating political advocacy non-profits.

And now that the regulations have changed, the NSA will have a freer hand with wiretaps.

Get ready for a shitstorm once Silicon Valley finds out what’s really in this.

Nonsense. Look at the history of most monopolies: they got that way due to deals with government bodies that prevented competition. See the Bell System, railroads in the 19th century, municipal cable franchises, etc. There are cases of monopolies achieved through purely technological means: for years Alcoa had a monopoly on the only cost-effective means of producing aluminum, but even then they were kept in check because manufacturers could often substitute other materials.

The creative destruction of capitalism makes it hard for even giant players to stay on top. Remember 15 years ago, when Microsoft was king? For years now, Apple has made more from iPhones alone than Microsoft makes from everything. 50 years ago people worried that GM and US Steel would grow too big.

Finally, regulation has downsides, and is often used by big players to squelch small ones. See regulatory capture.

I always love it when defenders of Cuba portray the US boycott as a negative for Cuba. Have you forgotten that you are the one claiming that capitalism exploits people, and that communism is more efficient and fair? So what if we're not exploiting Cuba with our evil capitalist free trade? That should be a good thing for them, according to leftist economic theory, and allow them to become richer, right? But the fact is, in the 1950s, Cuba had the highest per capita income in Latin America. Now it has the lowest. If you want to blame that on the fact that we aren't practicing capitalism with Cuba, go right ahead!

As for their supposedly wonderful health care and education systems, according to what? Cuban government statistics? LOL.

Don't worry about that. The "unibodies" of MacBooks (both Pro and Air) are CNC machined out of solid billets of aluminum. They are quite robust, despite their thickness.

Where I complain about excessive thinness is in cellphones. I wish Apple would stop making iPhones thinner, and just use any extra space for the battery.