I looked at the "Getting Started With Digital Logic - Logic Gates" part. Anybody who has actually built something with TTL on a breadboard should know that 7400 series gates can sink a lot more current than they can source. Connecting a logic output to ground through a LED may not draw enough current to turn the LED on fully. The right way to do it is to connect the LED between the logic output and the Vcc rail in a pull-down configuration (with a current limiting resistor). Of course, that gives you inverted logic (LED on means logic 0, LED off means logic 1), but you get used to that. If it bothers you, use an inverter.

I graduated from a pretty typical suburban NJ high school in 1977. We had an HP 9810 (http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=51), and also a ARS-33 connected to a time-shared BASIC system a few towns away. I got to play with them my junior and senior years. That was my first introduction to any sort of computer. It was, or course, also my first introduction to computer games (hunt the wumpus, lunar landrer, and some kind of Star Trek thing where you got to explore the galaxy and blow up klingons with photon torpedos.

I was also lucky to spend the summer between my last two years of high school at a program run by Stevens Tech, where I was exposed to FORTRAN and PDP-10 assembler (both via punch cards).

Actually, 7 ring binders. They look like http://www.pooleys.com/prod_detail.cfm?product_id=843. Why 7 rings? So pages that get used day in and day out don't tear out of the binder.

I've made several attempts over the years to use Linux on the desktop. Every time, I end up running back to OSX. What I've got now is the best of both words. All of our servers are linux. I have a linux box locally I use for development. I also have a Mac Mini on my desk and use that for my desktop (and a MBP I use from home or when on the road). With a trivial amount of work, you can configure profiles in Terminal.app so you just click on an icon and you've got an ssh window open to whatever host you need to work on. I can export my linux file system and mount it on my Mac using NFS. It's all completely seamless.

The extra hardware cost is hardly worth mentioning (you can get a Mini for $4-600, depending on how you configure it). For the one or two times a year I need to get to the real linux desktop, I just hit the "input select" button on my monitor, and swap where my USB keyboard is plugged into. In theory, I can fire up X11 on my Mac to run linux X11 apps, but I can't remember the last time I bothered. At one point, I experimented with desktop sharing (Chicken of the VNC, gotta love that name), but that's far more pain than it's worth.

I wouldn't worry about it. If it's a legitimate hurricane, the Republican party has ways to try and shut that whole thing down.

In some cases, the product is the company, sold to the stockholders. That's the only sale that matters.

I've made several attempts over the years to run Linux as my desktop. I inevitably give up. Most recently, for about a year, running some relatively recent Ubuntu release. As a server, it's an excellent platform, but the desktop tools just suck. Every X11 app is just a little bit different in how it handles basic things like window management and copy-paste. It drives me nuts. I think I've found the sweet spot. I run a OSX on a Mac Mini for my desktop and do all my work on a Linux box. I get the best of both worlds.

Personally, I think it's great that carriers rip people off for SMS. I probably average 2 or 3 texts a month, and that only to respond to a very few people who text me. I'm happy that there's millions of other people out there forking over obscene amounts of money to the telcos to subsidize my voice and data usage.

Insurance is all about sharing risk. I'm unwilling to risk my house burning down. I know it's not likely that it will, but if it does, the loss would be devastating to me. Most people feel that same way, so we all get together and share the risk. In return for a promise that none of us will ever have to suffer the catastrophic loss, we all chip in a small fraction of our home value every year and create a pool from which to compensate those who are unlucky enough to have their house burn down. What the insurance companies do is essentially act as a market maker for these risk pools. Rather then me have to go out and find 1,000,000 people to share the risk with, the insurance company does it for me (and takes a small fraction of the pool as their profit)

Now, the insurance company doesn't want risk any more than I do. To avoid that, they need to make sure they charge enough in premiums to pay off all likely claims. And to do that, they need to be able to accurately evaluate the probability of a claim. For open-ended liabilities (i.e. a replacement cost homeowners policy), they also need to be able to accurately estimate the maximum size of a claim.

For things like fire insurance on houses, there's tons of history to base these estimates on. They've insured hundreds of millions of houses, and have been doing it for many years. They've paid off millions of claims. For a given location, type of construction, age of house, etc, they know exactly what the risks are and can price the policy accordingly. Ditto for group health insurance, automobile insurance, and so on.

But, bitcoins? Insurance companies have no clue about bitcoins. There's essentially zero history establishing what they're worth, and likewise there's essentially zero history establishing what the risks are. How often do bitcoins get stolen, lost, destroyed, etc? What best practices exist to reduce the risk of these losses? What types of fraud might exist in bitcoin loss claims, and how can the company determine if a claim is fraudulent or not? For the most part, there are no answers to these questions. At least not today. Thus, it's unlikely that you would be willing to find an insurance company willing to accept any bitcoin risk. And if you did, it would probably come with a very high premium, fixed liability limit, and onerous conditions. For a large insured value, you might also find that the only way a company would take the risk would be if there was a consortium of companies which all took a part of the risk (this is what places like LLoyds of London are all about).

Tell me about it. I used to work in a hospital (not as a member of the medical staff). I had a labcoat that I kept mostly to keep warm when the air conditioning got too cold. If I put it on and wandered the halls, there was pretty much nowhere I couldn't go. I'll bet if I hung a stethoscope around my neck, I could have walked into the OR and nobody would have said "boo".

Adjust the costume to fit the venue. Hardhat at a construction site. Trial case in a courthouse. If you saw a guy with a pitchfork and covered in manure walking through a stable, would you stop him and demand to see his ID?

I'll go along with us not knowing a whole lot more about aerodynamics today compared to 60 years ago, but materials have improved. Carbon fiber has trumped the aluminum-titanium-unobtainium alloys they had then, both for strength/weight ratio and the ease of making complex shapes. Obviously, the avionics are a whole different world, but I assume you were talking airframes.

Consider, for example, the Russian Soyuz rocket. It looks like something out of the 60's, because it *is* something out of the 60's. And the Russians are still flying them for the much the same reason we're still flying the U-2. Because it still works. Maybe it's not perfect, but after 1700 launches, they're pretty much got it figured out. The Space Shuttle was a lot sexier, but when it came to putting mass into orbit cheaply and reliably, Soyuz won hands down.

Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.

I could, but there's no need. The title says it all.

I had to read the headline a couple of times before I realized it wasn't "LDAP cameras".

When I worked for <Fortune 500 Tech Company>, we spent a lot of time making sure this didn't happen. Every single release involved an audit for new open source code and the lawyers had to sign off on each and every one. This was both to ensure that we were complying with the license and to give them a chance to reject license they felt were too onerous (i.e. GPL-3). Still, it's not hard to imagine something slipping through the cracks. I'm sure there are companies which don't care, but most places do try to work within the rules.

That being said, isn't after your code has already been released a little late to start trying to understand the license under which you released it?

That sounds like a reasonable plan only if the existing cabling is Cat-5 or better. Most dedicated phone cabling (especially if it's more than about 10 years old) is almost certainly not Cat-5.