Isn't making the elevator go faster a job for an engineer? Does one really need to be a mathematician to know that a faster elevator moves people faster?

If the elevator can make stops along the way, it probably refers to mean travel time, and it's an entirely different problem.

That being said, the "surfboard feature" is really, really, old. A lot of elevators have on-demand overrides which prevent intermediate stops. So the article might just be an infomercial for the elevator company after all.

Sure, you have to ignore the decline in violence (simply looking at absolute numbers would help in a few cases). But there could still be periodic patterns against the general backdrop of decline. However, there is little evidence for that.

Now all kinds of things could go wrong and lead to rising violence levels in the next years (global financial meltdown followed by a drop in international trade, countries trying to collect on their debts by military force etc., which would eventually have an effect on personal violence as well), but if these things happen exactly in 2020 (and not earlier or later, or not at all), it will be coincidence, and not related to some recurring societal patterns. Our world is already very, very different from the 1970, and no matter what happens, there are so many things which are quite irreversible, at least in the course of a decade or two (the global rise in English literacy, for instance).

The guy isn't a mathematician, he's an ecologist. And I find it hard to believe that by 2020, social acceptance of domestic violence (say) rises again to mid-20th century levels. The reporter's suggestion that the precise moment in time of the Egyptian revolution was predictable is likely based on a misunderstanding of Turchin's work.

By the way, the field isn't as new as the article suggests. Steven Pinker's recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, collects quite a bit of quantitative research in this area, most of which does not support the existence of stable cycles.

What % of buyers run windows/OSX vs linux?

Pretty close to 0% for their Tegra CPUs with integrated GPUs.

I think the ending was fine at the time it was written. Nowadays, selling AV software doesn't seem a better job than high-speed pizza delivery, but that's not Stephenson's fault.

The leak has already happened. Most countries lack the notion that something is still classified even if it's been printed in newspapers, just because the government hasn't officially declassified it yet.

It's not about containing the leak, it's about punishment. In this regard, it would be like any other copyright case. Just because something is brought up as evidence in court, no one receives any copyright-related rights, and certainly not retroactively. (See the Oracle vs Google case for an example.)

I'm amazed anyone DOESN'T rip their discs. Who wants to be forced to wade through stupid menus and messages that you can't skip?

The two are unrelated, actually. There a players which offer unconditional skipping and which use the disc directly.

And most Android devices have their own equivalent of Secure Boot, limiting consumers what kind of operating systems they can run on the hardware.

Browser don't disregard TTLs, they never see them.

Good point. There are APIs that provide TTL information (such as res_query), but Firefox does not seem to use them. Interesting.

Does this really help if ELB misdirects requests? Or would this setup result in stable ingress IP addreses, so that ELB worked perfectly?

Browsers are sometimes forced to disregard TTL values to prevent certain type of attacks which involve quickly changing DNS records.

Why doesn't Amazon use a reverse proxy which performs additional checks and routes the requests to the right customer? (With Server Name Indication, that would work for TLS, too.) Without that, it's simply not possible to switch IP addresses quickly between non-cooperating targets.

That depends on what hardware you've got. Nowadays, there is PCI and USB pass-through, and video and 3D acceleration in guest systems.

In general, you'd lose hard disk sharing because the disk partitions have to remain consistent over sleeps. It's also far from instantaneous.