Long ago, in the days of Netscape 6/7/8, the mail client of what was later Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) was absolutely fantastic in terms of performance. The "new" standalone Thunderbird as introduced was horribly slow by comparison, and has only gotten substantially slower over time, even on the same hardware with roughly the same level and rate of messages. I haven't tried SeaMonkey recently, but several years ago it seemed an order of magnitude faster than Thunderbird. Does anybody know how Mozilla managed to make the standalone product so slow?

You can already use gzip to compress the transport stream.

SSL is a pretty good standard, although a better technique for certification of keys would be nice. TBH, though, most content does not need to be encrypted because you are serving up the same content to whoever asks for it.

I sometimes buy through Steam, but their sales aren't very good compared with, say, gogamer.com. Every so often, Steam'll have an amazing sale, but it's like once every six months at best.

It doesn't help that Steam frequently has pricing errors, and won't give you the sale price, and there's no way to report pricing errors in their retarded awful support system.

Thereby increasing the idea that there is no market for commercial games in Linux. I, on the other hand, only purchase and play games with a native Linux client. This means largely supporting indies over big studios, but BioWare got an extra sale they wouldn't have otherwise when they released a Linux client for Neverwinter Nights.

In any case, the idea that there is no Linux market has been disproven on several occasions. 2DBoy reported 17% of purchasers during their birthday pay-what-you-want World of Goo sale were Linux users, vs. 18% Mac users and 65% Windows. Not only that, but we paid about a third more than Mac users and almost twice as much as Windows users.

All games. I said all games. I meant all games. The "My Games" list went BLANK during the server outage, even if you disconnected your net connection.

Offline play is entirely dependent upon the game. Half-Life, for example, will let you play without a connection at all. Dragon Age, on the other hand, will not allow access to any of the premium or DLC content without an active connection.

From TFA: "He plans to sell it for about 2 or 3 cents -- comparable to the cost of an ordinary plastic bag."

While I agree that a recurring revenue model isn't necessarily the best way, his solution is the best proposed so far, and a relatively inexpensive one at that.

What can't Carbon Nanotubes do?

No, of course not. I'd expect that some kind of SWAT team would be summoned the moment they refused the search in the first place. I'm not at all suggesting my proposed reaction would create anything less than a highly volatile and dangerous situation.

In fact, they'd probably simply be arrested on the spot. They would not be given any opportunity to contact their attorney, or even their child, to explain the situation. I'd guess that upon being arrested for something like "suspected support of a terrorist" that their house could then be legally searched despite their lack of cooperation. Perhaps then the "fuel for the mower" (noted in a sibling comment) would be used to justify the actions, to counter any potential claims of false arrest.

Again, it's rather easy (for any of us) to make such a decision as a thought experiment, when there aren't actually real police knocking on the real door, and a real innocent child isn't involved. But it would have been great to see the parents assert/defend their legal rights. I personally don't fear terrorists nearly as much as I fear that each time we don't stand up for our own rights, we risk their further erosion.

Yes, that's the most shocking part of the story to me as well. I'm not sure I'd be very cooperative with the authorities if I were the parents. I think I'd turn it into yet another learning moment, showing the kid how not to bow unquestioningly to authority. I'd have called an attorney, and politely declined the search until a proper warrant was served.

I'm guessing the parents were horrified to learn of the inconvenience imposed by the morons in charge, and wanted to get it over quickly and prove that their kid was good, so I don't fault them at all for cooperating. But they weren't responsible for the hysteria, and they shouldn't have been pressured to comply. It's as if the authorities allowed the administration to hold the entire school hostage, until this unfortunate family was forced to prove its own innocence. It's quite insane.

I have no inside details on AT&T or Facebook, but what you've described is almost certainly the problem. AT&T very likely use fairly aggressive caching proxies, especially lately to help mitigate their infamous capacity issues. I'd say that what happened here is pages are being cached without proper regard for cookies. That's fine for sites that don't have custom accounts, and only use cookies for tracking various page view statistics. But Facebook (like nearly every other site in the world that requires a login) issues a cookie to identify you, once you've entered your credentials. So that cookie is how the server knows it's you, and not somebody else. If AT&T's forward caching proxies ignore this cookie, and just give you the most recent page served from Facebook, you're sure to hijack somebody else's session. And, since your first request sends your new credentials, the person you've hijacked (if still online) will now have passively hijacked your session, explaining the last scenario from TFA where sessions appeared to have been swapped.

For the same reason you don't teach astrology.

Almost by definition, they are not.

Except atheists don't believe in heaven or hell, so how can you threaten them with going to hell? That's like threatening me with sending me to the Phantom Zone - since I don't believe it exists, why would I be afraid of you trying to send me there?

The 80-column limit is based on the human visual system's ability to track lines of text, not the width of the terminal. A better constraint would be that a line can't contain more than 66 non-space characters, but 80 columns is a good rough approximation of this that also ties in prevention of excessive scope nesting.

When you have an entire team of scientists having prolonged discussions about the best solution to such a simple problem as getting a small vehicle out of a sand trap, you know your methods are pretty limited.

If we had people on Mars, problems like these would be trivial to solve. The human body is a tremendously versatile instrument and you don't fully appreciate it until you try to do things with robots - especially if those robots are located several light minutes away. Sending humans to Mars would simplify exploration by leaps and bounds. All that has been discovered so far in 35 years of probe landings could probably be done in a few days with astronauts present.