I didn't buy it, largely because the gas mileage was lame, but the last time I bought a car I thought seriously about buying a Nissan Cube to replace my nearly-dead van. It would have to be blue, not only because it really does appear to be "bigger on the inside", but because for many years there was a building in Silicon Valley called The Blue Cube that was Spooky Satellite Control System Headquarters. It's gone now (looks like they've even cleaned up most of the rubble from dismantling it.)

If I'd actually played Portal, I'd probably have voted for Companion Cubes, though.

Finally got around to putting my landline on the Do Not Call List. The robots still call me, but half of them don't connect me to a recording, just sit there silently, and if they do play a recording and I hit "1" or whatever to speak to a live agent, half of them hang up on me. (One even plays an announcement saying "1" isn't a correct extension.:-)

I don't know how much of this is because their robots are broken, how much is because they don't have enough call center workers at the times they're calling me, and how much is because they're just trying to harass me.

I was ok with Google ads, because they were just a little box with some text links, no bulky images, no animation, no Flash, and if there was any Javascript in it, it was well-written and not a resource hog. (Eventually I gave up and let AdBlockPlus block them too, because collateral damage was easier than special-casing them.)

But Zedo, the folks with popunder windows? Kill them with fire, put all their domain names in /etc/hosts as 127.0.0.2, tell Firefox to block images from them, and block Javascript and Flash from anybody I could identify using a Zedo ad. (Same for X10.)

Doubleclick was an early ad company, and as far as I could tell, before Google bought them their slogan was "Be Evil. Buy Ads from the Dark Side, We've Got Cookies!" so I'd been blocking them in /etc/hosts for a long time.

So if Bad Guys were putting even more malware into Zedo and Doubleclick, that's just a reminder that blocking aggressive advertisers is a good idea.

Exactly my reaction.

Space launches by private companies potentially include his own launches, and good luck to him. And yeah, Moore's Law is usually your friend.

There was a while, though, that the most effective business models for satellite communication, underseas fiber cables, and terrestrial fibers were

• 1. (Send underpants gnomes to collect all the underpants)\\\\\\\\ Send Powerpoint Gnomes to distribute lots of Powerpoints.
• 2. Other companies spend billions on capital-intensive implementation of Powerpoints.
• 3. ?????
• 4. Buy their stuff at pennies on the dollar at bankruptcy sale.
• 5. PROFIT!

There are lots of ways to get right angles with simple tools that don't require knowing the Pythagorean theorem (including the use of 3-4-5 triangles, which work fine even if you don't know that they're one solution of a large class of problems.) Back when I was taking drafting and wood shop in junior high school, the way you got a right angle was "Use a T-Square and #2 pencil", not "Calculate the area of the square on the hypotenuse."

And ~2500 years later, when the condo I live in was built, Pythagoras's theorem was very well known, but the builder still thought of straight lines and right angles as generally good ideas, not actual strict requirements.

Coworker of mine was on a drug trial jury (back in ~1990 in New Jersey.) The (Hispanic) defendant had bought some airplane glue at the hardware store, and was carrying it home in the plastic bag from the store. The cop claimed that obviously he was intending it for glue sniffing, and the plastic bag was the drug paraphernalia he was planning to sniff it in, and was obviously Guilty Guilty Guilty. Joe was not only appalled that the case was brought in the first place, but that he and one other techie were the only two jurors who thought there was reasonable doubt there (actually, thought there was no doubt at all, the guy was buying glue to fix something at his house.)

But yeah, I think that Ulricht's lawyer claiming that "This isn't the Dread Pirate Roberts you're looking for" is going to be a tough sell. Might be all he's got to go on, though (especially if he actually was DPR.)

Docker seems to be the new version of what people used to do with BSD jails. But VMs can give you more flexibility, if you're running hardware that can handle them (as opposed to running your home router/firewall/server on the old PC, and using your newer box for gaming or your laptop for work and browsing.) And there are router-oriented VMs like Vyatta out there.

Are you routing on custom hardware (e.g. a cheap router running OpenWRT)? Old Low-End PC? A basic current Intel box? Removable disks? USB Flash Stick? Mikrotik board?

Some hardware makes it really easy to switch operating systems. For instance, if you can run your router from a virtual machine (because your hardware is new enough), if you don't like it, or want something new, just shut down the VM and fire up a new one. If you only want to buy $50 worth of hardware, a Raspberry Pi has the advantage that the disk drive isn't built in, it's just an SD card, so if you want to change OS's you just pop the old one out and put in a new one.

Booting from a USB flash stick is probably the easiest choice for most Intel-based hardware. You can get 8GB for $5, set it up, boot from it, and if it's not doing what you want, remove it and reboot your old OS. Many Linux distros are quite friendly on USB sticks, and some BSDs are, though OpenBSD seems to be a bit harder to do that with (maybe that's a just problem with documentation, but it seems like Theo doesn't trust VMs or booting from USB instead of CD and hard drives.)

Some conferences are good work material. Some of them are an excuse to have the people you'd like to talk to all show up at the bar where the important conversations happen. (Back during the 80s, a surprising number of Unix-related companies started as conversations at the bar at Usenix conventions.) And some conferences are of course opportunities for networking, i.e. for finding your next job, so they might be "work" related, just not for your current employer.

Good luck to Branson - I hope he actually gets this off the ground, or at least makes major advances in practical rocket design while he's trying.

But the last few projects like this - Teledesic, Iridium, a couple of other important ones I forget - all ran into problems with markets, with costs, with technology, and with government regulation (both censorship and spectrum-control.) One of the cool things about satellite phones and data was that you could access them from anywhere in the world, even places without much infrastructure, but the problem was that they cost a lot more than terrestrial infrastructure in densely populated areas (so you couldn't make much money where there were lots of people), and sparsely populated areas are mostly poor farmers (so you couldn't make much money there), so what you really had was a niche market that cost you billions in upfront infrastructure. It's also hard to get high bandwidth from solutions like this (though lots of applications don't need to be that fast.)

Governments were also a problem, because many of them didn't want unregulated speech, not subject to wiretap, competing with monopoly or ex-monopoly local telecom providers. Remember when Blackberry was only allowed to sell their phones in India if they provided a nexus for wiretapping?

There have also been half a dozen announcements over the last decade or two about balloon-based projects, with blimps or weather balloons or tethered balloons or whatever providing low-altitude radio towers, which can deliver a lot more bandwidth (because they're close and can carry a lot more power), but somehow none of them ever turn into reality. (Good luck to Google and Facebook on those.)

Cruz was born in Canada, his mother was American, his father was Cuban. Obama was born in Hawaii, his mother was American, his father was Kenyan.

Cruz's father only became a US citizen a few years ago, and Ted was at least talking about giving up his Canadian citizenship because of all the right-wing ranters, though I'm not sure he followed through.

"Actually, I was born in Canada, I just *work* in outer space."

It's not ill-gotten data at all. Uber is a database service - you tell it where you are and where you want to go, and they charge you for the trip, and they know when your request was made, when you were picked up, and when you were dropped off.

All perfectly reasonable, by itself - it's what they do with the data that's sensitive, and how well they anonymize it before giving it to governments. Zip Code is a reasonable granularity for most purposes (assuming it's 5-digit ZIPs and not 9-digit); hope they'll anonymize the times as well (e.g. rounding to the nearest hour.)

One of the real values of Euclid's Elements is the insistence on proof of everything, which is part of what differentiates it from much of Classical Greek "science"; assertions like Aristotle's claim that heavy objects fall faster than light ones weren't good enough. And it's not like the Pythagoreans weren't mystics either; there's a story that one of their deep dark secrets was the irrationality of sqrt(2), which really annoyed them because it showed that their mathematically perfect universe wasn't.

Knowing that a 3-4-5 triangle has a right angle isn't the same as being able to prove it, or as knowing the general principle behind why it's true. It's the kind of thing you can find by trial and error, and that (both the successful and unsuccessful trials) may be a starting place for reasoning about the general principles.