There should be a "Delete Account" mod option, which kicks in if every moderator selects it. It would be great for tired old jokes that just won't die!.

I don't think fearing death and not wanting to die are the same thing. I certainly don't want to die either, but if I were to be diagnosed with a terminal disease, I don't think I'd be afraid of the actual event. I'm reasonably certain it will involve going into a sleeplike state, some vivid dreams, and then nothing. No biggie.

The FPGA's I've worked with lose their programming when the power goes out, and are reflashed by software on every boot.

Personally, I don't care whether the writers have the whole series planned out or are improvising, so long as the result is good. Of course, shows are usually better when they are planned out, but BSG worked out very well, in my opinion.

It's not a browser plug-in. It's HTML/Javascript code that you place in your page where you want the video to appear. It will try to use HTML5 first, and then use Flash if it fails.

I was under the impression that with the wear leveling algorithms these drives use, and the higher quality chips used for SSDs, the lifetime under typical laptop usage is expected to far exceed a spinning platter drive.

Makes sense, really. Most disk access is reading (booting the OS, opening applications, loading libraries, viewing images/videos, listening to music), and this doesn't wear out the memory cells. Unless you're doing heavy disk work like video editing or serious photography, or running some sort of highly accessed write intensive database, I'd bet on SSDs to outlast HDDs. After all, an HDD is usually spinning and thus being worn out, even when no files are accessed.

I'm pretty sure a few months ago at some conference, the Android team did Q&A with the audience and this came up. They explicitly said that this is a feature they are working on.

Then again, when we're talking at the "survival of the human race" level, city busting asteroids aren't really that big of a concern. Most likely, it would hit an ocean, or some piece of rural land with limited population. Even if it hit a city, humanity would go on. Of course it would be preferable to deflect it, but I think efforts should be directed at detecting and diverting extinction scale asteroids.

Even with some manufacturers locking down their phones (in futility), your analogy still seems backwards. Even on a locked Android phone, you have the ability to install any app from any source, which alone makes it more open by orders of magnitude compared to the iPhone. If you really care about a phone which you can flash with your own ROM, there is always a set of phones that are capable of that right out of the box; just buy one of those. If anything, iOS is the WW2 concentration camp, and *some* Android hardware is the poorly guarded jail.

Good thing they can't, then, since all Sync data is very strongly encrypted, and only you get a copy of the encryption key.

The modern day Newtons and Einsteins aren't spending their time vegging out on the couch, don't worry. I'm sure they can't even conceive of why anyone would want to. The people who are vegging out now (ie: most people) are the ones who would have spent the evening drinking at the local pub back then. Nothing has changed.

I would argue that Sony did bring all this hacking on themselves. Sure, the first PS3 hack made use of OtherOS, but it was very impractical and required hardware modification. Very few people would ever have done it, but Sony overreacted and took away OtherOS. That pissed off a lot of people and suddenly there was intense motivation to hack the console properly. Lo and behold, there are now two separate ways to bust the console wide open and piracy is practical for all users. Good job Sony.

Data caps have nothing to do with net neutrality as long all data within that cap is treated equally, whether it's torrents, VoIP, websites, or streaming radio.

Hahaha!

Oh, wait, that was the lamest joke I've ever heard.

This has what to do with network neutrality?

People need to stop confusing the issues.