It is a given that soap kills bacteria.

My understanding is that soap does not kill bacteria, but rather removes them from the skin so they can rinse down the drain. A quick search seems to confirm this, but I haven't found a quality citation.

The biggest problem with wind is that it doesn't adjust to demand. Even in reliably windy areas, you sometimes get a calm day. At least with solar, you get peak output during peak energy demand (hot summer days, although the demand is shifted more to the late afternoon. There's a time lag as buildings and the air heat up. Peak production is 10am-4pm, peak demand Is noon-8pm). Ultimately, if you don't want to burn fossil fuels, nuclear is a very dependable strategy. Wind is fine if your alternative source can ramp up and down very quickly (natural gas). If you don't have that, nuke it.

The maker definitely matters.

I've been using the same mouse for the past 5 years, when I replaced the Logitech 3-button mouse that I purchased in 1994. So, that's 2 mice in 20 years. And that old mouse was doing just fine, but I needed something that was USB, and the switch to an optical mouse was a nice upgrade. However, I'm starting to think about going wireless on the mouse and keyboard. Not sure if that will work well with my KVM switch.

No, I use Internet Explorer because that's the number one browser among my customers. Chrome is #2 and FireFox is #3. Those are the 3 browsers that we do most of our testing against. We also divide things up around the office with different people expected to use different browsers as their default. We don't test on mobile browsers as much as we should. Maybe we need to give everyone in the office a tablet for x-mas this year.

From a legal standpoint, no, the DOJ can't prosecute someone for publishing information. That was covered in the Pentagon Papers cases 40 years ago. But you have to remember the reason he's holed up in an embassy. The government can find an assortment of other bullshit reasons to prosecute you. Any minor discrepancies on your customs forms when you entered the country? Tax problems? Ever pirated an MP3 or movie? If they want to get you, they can and will find a reason. For all the crimes that Al Capone committed, he was convicted of tax evasion.

Begging the question that it is substantially more likely. As the volume of data increases, the signal to noise ratio decreases. Lots of data is being generated that no one is looking at. As the volume increases, it becomes that much harder to search despite the fact that something 'incriminating' is more likely to be in there to find. The practical outcome of this, I think, is that most indiscretions will still go unnoticed, but if someone is really looking for something to bust your ass, they'll find it. So some behavior modification is likely, but less than most people suppose. Furthermore, pro-privacy technology is likely to keep pace with surveillance, along with following best practices. Like if you're up to no good, turn off your cell phone. Disable 3rd party cookies in your browser. Block ads.

Back when I was trying to write games, 20 years ago, I figured out pretty quickly to write the important parts in assembly and the rest in C. But not before I wrote a full screen graphics editor in assembly. That was about 1200 lines of awesomeness that took me about 7 months to write. Fortunately, most of the graphic work carried over to the main game itself. Recently, I did a recreation of that work in C#. What took me over 2 years to do in 1994-95 took me a weekend to do now. My how times have changed.

Also, the teacher's union is calling for smaller class sizes and higher pay. It should surprise no one that a union is calling for something that would enlarge itself and create higher paying jobs for its members.

Also, it's a really dumb idea. I felt a lot less safe back in 2002 when there were soldiers, most not old enough to drink, at the airport with semi-automatic assault rifles.

Yep. Many years ago, I was trying to fix a TV from the 70s. Full schematic glued to the inside of the set.

And to a certain extent, hardware has always been open source anyway. A motivated engineer can remove and identify components one by one and follow the wire traces on the circuit board. It's easier to reverse engineer a circuit board than a piece of software. Still, it's a lot easier if they give you the schematic up front. So I'd like to give a big shout out to SparkFun (www.sparkfun.com) electronics, who have made my life a lot easier.

You're also at the whim of the masses. Development platforms benefit tremendously from network effects. Success begets success. On the other hand, it was arguably Apple that killed Flash. HTML5 combined with their refusal to allow Flash on iOS devices was devastating to the platform. The popularity of the iPhone meant that everyone had to support it, and because that could be done in a generic fashion, there was no reason to build 2 versions of the same product, thus Flash died as a platform in a very quick fashion. Compare this with, say, Silverlight, which was an excellent platform, but everyone looked at it and said not interested, mainly because of the proprietary nature. I could give my users a superior experience with less effort, but it's not ubiquitous, so it's just not an option.

If you can identify frameworks that clearly don't have a future, you can improve your odds substantially. Just ask yourself, is it proprietary (Flash)? Is it ubiquitous (HTML/JavaScript)? Does it have a reputation as a clumsy and flawed platform (PHP)? Is it popular (jQuery)? If your answers are No, Yes, No, and Yes, you stand a pretty good chance of long term success. In my own shop, we've gone with C#/MVC and HTML/JavaScript/jQuery. Honestly, HTML and JavaScript is a pretty shitty platform. But sometimes popularity and ubiquity win the day. Meanwhile, it can safely be assumed that as long as Microsoft is around, C# will be well supported. Silverlight is a far superior platform, but it's a dead end and we want to be certain to avoid dead ends.

Luckily, TFA has a handy chart that also contains that information. The Nexus 10 and Surface 2 have similar specs and both are managed by the OS provider.

Nexus 10: 8.17 hours of battery
Surface 2: 8.07 hours of battery.

The Nexus 10 gets 1.2% more battery life than the similar Surface 2. Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for being so far below the industry norm. Just think of all the things a user might want to do with that extra 6 minutes of battery life.

While I do write some stored procedures, everything in the application is done through a data access layer like EntityFramework (we're a visual studio shop). Now, XSS attacks, escalation of privileges, and any number of other web based attacks are still a big deal. But SQL injection is the least of my worries. Is this different elsewhere?

I've found the start menu to be a complete non-issue. Where the damn thing totally breaks down is switching between the classic desktop and Metro apps. There's 2 competing UI mechanics going on that don't play well with each other. This isn't a huge problem right now because there are so few Metro apps, but it's going to get worse.

The bigger news today is that Windows Server 2012 R2 and Visual Studio 2013 are both out today as well.

Why can't companies pay better wages? Because that's the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Fundamentally, this is a question of economics. You have an oversupply of labor, particularly in lower skilled positions. Increasing the market price of labor can not and will not ever solve that problem. It is an economic impossibility.

Before we can solve the problem, we must first understand what exactly the problem is. In western countries, we have several issues going on. Wealth is concentrating in the hands of the already wealthy. Productivity gains are outstripping both the demand for labor and the demand for goods, or so we suppose for the sake of argument.

The traditional response to this situation is an increasing demand for socialism or communism, which, frankly, does not work. Subsidizing the poor has the perverse effect of making them poorer by limiting their access to work. Central planning is inefficient and ineffective. Top down communism does not work. However, Austrian economics suggests that bottom up communism should work. What I suggest is a multi-part approach. Scrap the current income tax system and welfare system. Switch to a flat tax with a prebate. This provides a subsidy to the poor, but without the welfare trap. Next, replace Social Security with personal investment accounts. Accounts should have the following characteristics: no set retirement age, principle can not be withdrawn, but dividends are paid out. Account should be funded equally. This decreases the pressure for an individual to work. And, of course, an inheritance tax, with an individual lifetime deduction limit. (i.e., you aren't taxed on the first $500k you inherit, after that, it's a 20% tax)

Now, some people are going to make bad decisions with their investment account, and there's not much you can do about that. However, when reconciled against alternative scenarios, the benefits should be vastly superior.

I should write a book on this.

No, the problem is that IBM would need to build search market share. Microsoft has built a search engine that is nearly identical to Google, but Google beats them in terms of market share by about a 4 to 1 margin mostly due to inertia and the fact that people just plain like Google more than Microsoft (2:1 if you figure that Yahoo is essentially just a Bing front end). Together, Google, Bing, and Yahoo constitute 96% of the internet search market. IBM would have to convince people that they have substantially better results, and I don't think that's possible. TFA's argument that people have no loyalty to Google is completely wrong as well. No matter what search engine I use, I usually find what I'm looking for on the first page. Meanwhile, IBM doesn't have the other parts of the ecosystem that they need: local, shopping, email, news, etc. Ultimately, I just can't see IBM being able to lure customers away.

Furthermore, I don't think Watson would scale very well. If you look at the server overhead and electrical cost, I would bet that it's an order of magnitude higher than the Google search farm. Please note that I have no actual figures on Google or Watson operating costs, just a scientific wild assed guess.