FTA:

The scoring method as stated is only useful for evaluating lossless compression. One could also take into account the resemblance of the output to the input to allow a modified version of the score to evaluate lossy compression.

It sounds more like an IoT prototyping board. The RJ-45 and wireless are for the "Internet" part of that, and the USB and GPIO are the interfaces to the "Things".

Bags still went through X-Rays then, and a determined person can still get weapons through security *now*. I'm more worried about someone coming into a school with an AK and grenades than I am the same thing on an airplane. Before, the assumption if someone showed up armed on a plane was that they were going to have it flown somewhere to ransom the passengers, and that you'd be best off staying quiet and giving the hijacker what they wanted. Now, you'd have a crowd of people tackling the guy, and there'd be no chance of a hijacking anyhow with the reinforced cockpit bulkheads. Those changes alone would mean that there are many more-attractive targets in the country.

You can believe what you want, but a tiger-repelling rock is still a tiger-repelling rock.

If true (I don't keep track of which phones are available through whom and do what), I don't see what bearing that has on whether it's a good idea or a bad one to make it easier to force carriers to unlock the handsets that they sell. Even if there were *no* dual-network phones, you'd be able to move between a choice between two carriers (and the MVNOs of each), and that's better than being forced to buy a new phone.

Well, I can't argue with that; if you don't have physical access to a device, then you can't judge it first-hand based on its physical attributes. In my case, I went to the store of my chosen carrier, tried out their phones in the store, and bought a variant online that the store didn't carry. Having the opportunity to handle a phone before buying it varies on a case-by-case basis so much that I'm not quite sure why you mentioned it.

I never said that an airplane was a public place; I said that an airport is. 13 years ago, I could walk off the street up to a gate without a ticket. If it weren't for the current security paranoia, I'd still be able to do so.

Defaria's comment, which I was replying to, seemed to badly confuse ownership, privacy, public access, etc, and was basically verging on being a conspiracy theory rant. I was trying to bring them back down to earth and temporarily ignoring the question of who, if anyone, was behaving reasonably in the situation.

The concept reminds me of a reverse-Vac-Man, where the dimples go in, instead of out.

Denver International Airport is owned and operated by the City and County of Denver Department of Aviation. It's public land. That aside, your comment doesn't make sense. Privately owned property can be operated as a public place, without affecting the ownership of the property. If I owned a restaurant, it would be my private property. By opening it for business and inviting customers in, it remains my privately-owned property, but it also becomes a public place, since I'm admitting the public to it. At night, when I close for the evening, I'm denying access to the public, and it's no longer a public place. That changes in the morning when I open the restaurant again.

None of that has anything to do with privacy, government regulation, government taxation, etc. Further, if you've let someone into your house, you haven't lost ownership of anything. You haven't even lost ownership if you open your house to the public; you've just made it a public space, until you say otherwise. If you invite specific friends in (rather than the public at large), not only does it stay in your possession, but it's also still a private place.

It's an IT-managed machine. Not my call.

The version I'm running is numbered 29.0.1, which makes some sense (major.minor.patch). Do you mean "Is anyone keeping track of which versions break the API (maj), extend the API backward-compatibly (min), and fix bugs (pat)"? I don't think anyone is, in those terms.

Ah, so you count addition/subtraction on your fingers and do multiplication by iteration? Or do you mean that you didn't bother to learn the operations the way that school taught you and learned them piecemeal as you needed them? If it's the first case, I'd say that you're an idiot. If it's the second, well, to each their own, but I'd say that you still rote-memorized the tables, just in a less-structured way.

In general, I agree that rote memorization doesn't lead to education in a useful sense, but you're deluding yourself if you think that it's absolutely avoidable in all cases.

RTGs are commonly used for interplanetary satellites. That was the first use that came to mind, for me.

If you expect not to be tied to a calculator for life, then there are some facts that need to be memorized. The three things that come immediately to mind: the addition/subtraction tables, multiplication/division tables, and the order of operations (i.e. PEMDAS). The concepts for each of those topics are simple, but I get daily use out of the tables that I rote-memorized in grade school.

Beyond that, I'd agree; generally, rote memorization is harmful, and when you get into real mathematics, those facts aren't as useful. I don't see math as the real reason that we teach arithmetic, though. It's useful to be at the grocery store and easily know how much you're going to be paying total if you're buying 4 items at $6.49 and 5 at $2.37. If you disagree about the purpose of memorizing those facts (for most people), or the usefulness (in daily life) of having memorized them, then I'm not going to try to convince you. Your replies sound like you're just trying to be contrary, anyhow.

What are you talking about, specifically? On every Android device I own, connection to Google services is optional (if you're willing to flash the OS), and an internet connection is no more necessary to use the functions of the device than it is on iOS devices.

I suspect that the article and summary are inaccurate. There's a factory reset button on the Chromecast, and it from the description of the device, it's just de-authing the CC from the network it's connected to, configuring it to connect to the Pi, and sending a command to display a link. I've used that button to delete the config and set up the CC at a friend's house, and none of the text descriptions on this story make it sound like the Rickmote is doing anything else.

And then someone comes up with some kind of outlier use case that exceeds the requirements of "good enough", and sometimes that use case becomes more and more common over time. "Good enough" is constantly redefined.