On a system that isn't a tablet, I DO NOT WANT A TOUCH INTERFACE, or even a hint of it unless I get a touch sensitive monitor and explicitly turn it on (a prompt asking me if I want to would be fine, too). For desktops and laptops, Windows 7's start menu is absolute perfection.

Don't try to improve perfection. I don't want to see any trace of the formerly-known-as-metro style interfaces anywhere on a desktop OS. Don't try to sell me a Windows tablet and think that shoving a touch interface in my face on the desktop is going to get me to buy. Android is where it's at for tablets. Trying to force that crappy UI on me will make me not even consider Windows tablets even IF you make it far superior to Android.

All you've done is alienate customers with Windows 8, and you're still trying to shove that loathed (loathed isn't even the word for it) abortion of a UI in people's faces. I'm going to be buying a bunch of Windows 7 licenses while it's still available because Windows 9's isn't shaping to be much better than Windows 8. If I have to run 9, I'll be installing classic shell on it, like I do on Windows Server when I have to work on Windows servers (who the FUCK thought it was a good idea to put a tablet UI on a server OS anyhow?!)

Oh, and while you're at it bring back glass. Knock it off with that Windows '80s flat look.

Stumble/dollar is one of the best descriptions I've ever heard to rate drugs, just FYI. ;)

I don't know about Acetaminophen, but I've heard compelling cases made that if Aspirin were discovered today it would be a prescription drug. Think of the side effects, the modern day "think of the children!" attitude, and pathetic need of the body politic to feel "safe" from any and everything.

It's not necessarily as bad as you make it out to be. Let's say that you have a hemispherical dome covering 4.3 square miles, which I think is what the summary is trying to say. That's a diameter of 3766 meters and an interior volume of about 14 billion m^3, which is something like 17.15 billion kg of air. It's around 1000 joules per degree celcius for each kilogram. So, if you start with a very nasty 45 degrees celcius and get it down to a comfortable 20 degrees celcius, that's 428 terajoules. Obviously Air conditioning is not perfectly efficient. We'll assume an EER rating of 13 for the air conditioning, which may actually be a bit low for a huge commercial system. That's about 38%, so it would take 1.121 Petajoules. Let's say we're powering by gasoline. There's around 120 megajoules per gallon of gas, which translates to around 24 megajoules of electricity per gallon at 20% efficiency. So, that's around 46.7 million gallons of gasoline. Gas is around $2 a gallon in Dubai, so that's around $93.5 million. That's not very much compared to the initial construction costs of such a structure.
That's just the initial cooling, of course, there's still the matter of keeping it cool afterwards. With such a large structure, heat transfer from the outside is almost negligible with proper design. It's a huge number compared to a regular home, but it's very small relative the the massive volume. Then there's the heat generated inside. A typical human puts out around 100 watts of heat just by being alive, then there's all the lighting, cooking, and every other use of power. Guessing a kilowatt of heat generated per person wouldn't be too far off. From the numbers I've found, I'm estimating that they're expecting an upper limit of about 4 million people continuously (180 million visitors per year, guessing they will stay for a week, plus some permanent residents), so that's 4 gigawatts of cooling, or 126 petajoules per year. Going by our previous figures, that's around $10.5 billion dollars per year. That seems like a huge sum of money, but that's only $58 per visitor if they have 180 million per year (and it obviously scales down somewhat if they have fewer visitors).
These numbers are all rough, of course, and use naive assumptions about the shape of the dome, energy consumption, design efficiency, source of power etc. Obviously powering by gasoline would be crazy from an ecological standpoint, but there's an abundance of solar power available there, and the gasoline cost is just a stand-in. The numbers I gave are skewed towards the worst-case scenario, and they're still reasonable. There's nothing impossible going on there. There may be plenty that can go wrong with such a project, but making out the air conditioning in to a near-apocalyptic problem is a bit hyperbolic.

It all depends on exactly which definition of "dinosaur" you use. Many, if not most, modern palaeontologists consider birds to be dinosaurs. Even if you use the traditional definition of dinosaur that restricts them to the Mesozoic, there were birds during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, so you would be saying that birds who didn't survive the era were dinosaurs, but those that did aren't. Which would make it weird for any bird species that survived unchanged well past the extinction. Would that single species be a dinosaur species up to the end of the Mesozoic, but cease to be right at the boundary? Would they just retroactively not be dinosaurs?

That's not really just an idea from xkcd. Modern taxonomists group birds within the clade Dinosauria. Also, birds have tails, even if they're short. The tomia of a number of birds are also very toothlike. A number of dinosaurs, such as T. Rex had all kinds of adaptations to make their skulls lighter relative to their bodies.

So chess is not a sport, but speed chess is?

> Let's start at $10000 per infraction.

That is just the cost of doing business to someone like Qualcomm. Let's start at 10% of the annual gross revenue, based on the average gross revenue of the previous three years, PLUS 10% of the revenue of the current year to date. Keep in mind we are talking per infraction, so in this case (>100 githubs) this fraud would cost Qualcomm over ten years' worth of gross revenue.

I had that same thought. This is SOP for any professional relationship. The language in the e-mail is very informal but polite, also SOP. Where's the smoking gun here?

"Pretty goddamn certain" != "beyond a reasonable doubt"

Can you tell the difference between 1,024 MB of /dev/random and 1,024 MB of Truecrypt container? I didn't think so....

Huh? Modern ciphertext is indistinguishable from random noise. Some implementations leave behind clues (i.e., Truecrypt containers are always divisible by 512 bytes), and of course the user can give it away ("KIDDIE PORN COLLECTION.TC" <--- Probably not the best naming scheme) but I'm not aware of any foolproof method to concretely identify an encrypted file as such with modern implementations.

My hard drives are encrypted simply because my entire life is on them and I'd rather not have everything you need to steal my identity fall into the hands of whomever broke into my house and stole my PC. I take similar precautions with physical documents that could be used to the same end. My SSA card and Passport are kept in the Safe Deposit Box except when needed, other forms of ID are always kept on or near my person, so they're not apt to be stolen in a burglary.

I don't know or care if LUKS and Truecrypt are secure enough to resist access by a well resourced and competent government agency. They provide ample security for the threat vectors that I care about.

This, along with other side channel attacks (social engineering, or even simply guessing the password, remembering that most people use easily guessable passwords) is the most likely explanation. If the United States Federal Government has ways of breaking modern ciphers they're not going to throw it away to secure mundane criminal convictions.

Uhh, he was a natural born American citizen, so how exactly do you propose we keep him out of the United States? I was referring to foreign terrorists, in fact I believe I even made a comment about would-be domestic terrorists having an easier go of it.

Generally they wait until it's dark outside to set them off. Unless you're living in Alaska I suspect you've got plenty of nighttime hours anywhere in the United States for fireworks.

My understanding is that it's not a public hotspot, the access is only made available for other Comcast customers, and that in any event the traffic is handled separately from the owner of the connection. It goes out with a different globally valid IP and does not count against the owner's bandwidth cap or otherwise inconvenience him.