I sailed past Peleliu in 1994, the 50th anniversary of the battle. It was horrible to see that insignificant hunk of rock where so many young men died for... what, exactly? It was dubiously important in the first place and looked an awful lot like other rocky islands I'd seen, which drove home the utter futility and waste that it represents. It was a very emotional experience and I'm getting choked up now remembering it.

I'd be perfectly happy never seeing another battlefield in my life.

or a feral possum.

For a while, tablets provided superior portability at a low cost to laptops. Laptops in the same cost range as tablets were either flimsy or bulky or just plain crap all around.

Google seems to be doing a good job of ensuring that their hardware partners do a good job with Chomebook build quality. As a result, they've created laptops that are cheap, highly portable, and reasonably durable. My 10" tablet has been relegated to "alarm clock".

Cost is not the only consideration. It also by and large doesn't matter - environmental damage does. And build time.

Nuclear power plants can only be built so fast...I believe the chief restriction at the moment is how fast the containment vessels can be manufactured, and there's already a backlog.

What's frustrating is that we're pouring billions into fusion research with virtually no evidence of payout, instead of going with the solutions we have today, and then working on fusion once we've stopped fucking over the planet quite so quickly.

That's not entirely true, you have to have a 64 bit boot loader to be able to run the latest and greatest OS X. The first generation of Intel Mac Pros had a 32 bit boot loader and are thus officially unable to run anything post Lion(there are workarounds however)

Oh, please. How many people are paying to run Skype on a system that can't or won't be upgraded to Snow Leopard? Supporting Leopard means that Microsoft can't use APIs released in the last 5 years. They probably have to support x86-32 or PPC processors (which is the reason most people on Leopard are still on Leopard). They have to use relatively ancient tools to compile the packages.

All that, or they can just decide to never, ever upgrade the underlying protocol to handle new security requirements or additional features.

I can't for the life of me figure why MS would want to bother to keep supporting that old code. What's the return on investment for keeping someone's PPC Mac limping along? Or perhaps that's it: they want to make it easy for people to stay on stone age hardware to try and compel Apple to have to support it. Sounds conspiratorial, but I'm hard pressed to think on a non-conspiracy explanation that satisfies Occam's Razor.

Also, Microsoft is killing support for their own WP7, whose last release came out less than a year and a half ago. So much for your assertion, huh? Maybe they've just decided that supporting a 5 year old OS X version has a better business case than Windows Phone 7, which is very likely true.

The homeopaths would lead you to believe that this is roughly 10^98 times too concentrated to work. Oh, and that it would make you immune to paint.

Oh, that weird-ass thing that Miguel invented to try to drag the Linux crowd away from multi-vendor, vetted languages? Yeah, I've heard of it.

That's a crude way of wording typical funeral rites over there, which apparently involve washing the deceased by hand.

So who does a prostrate exam? Sticking your fingers in your own ass?

Well, if you fork the feed then you may just be able to pay for the medical exam while performing it.

I was about 100 km from Fukushima when it happened, the reason they didn't flood the reactors with seawater right away was that the president of TEPCO, who before the earthquake was famous for being a cost cutter, wanted to save the reactor because if they flooded it it would never produce power again. He only reluctantly agreed to have it flooded after it was clear not doing so would result in an even bigger catastrophe. The dude should be hung for what he did.

What the story doesn't mention is that, compared to Skype 2.8, the Skype 5/6 user interfere sucks. Users have been complaining ever since it was rolled out, and Skype's answer has always been to use 2.8.

Fortunately, there's a way to make the old version not check for updates: use your local DNS or hosts file to address ui.skype.com to 127.0.0.1. The update check fails, and Skype 2.8 runs, fat, dumb, and happy. I'm pretty sure this works for older versions of 5 or 6, as well.

Haruko Obokata was the lead researcher on those, and also the person responsible for fabricating the research results. Sure, his name was on it as a co-author, but that sounds more like the result of office politics than actually believing what she was publishing.

"Who's listed as author and in what order" is full of politics and bargaining. It's extremely common for first author to be a PI (faculty member or head of a group/lab) simply because the research happened in their lab and the actual primary researcher did most/all of the work.

Sometimes one researcher gets "scooped" and in exchange for providing help/data, gets authorship on someone else's paper as a sort of last-ditch attempt to get something out of their work.

Especially in a country like Japan where suicide is a huge problem, the note's contents will never be released.

Reporting on suicide has serious ethical consequences, and revealing the contents of the note means others will see suicide as a valid way to bring their ideas, grievances, or innocence to public light.

In most cases suicides are not reported, and even if they are newsworthy, generally the suicide nature is downplayed as much as possible.

It's one of those really sucky problems that's hard to deal with. Few really realize how much of a problem it is, but bringing awareness often makes it worse. One of the many things insidious about mental illness.

It has a huge Wife Acceptance Factor, for one. We have iPhone apps that let you select any of the movies I've ripped onto it and play them back directly to our Apple TV (or any of another of settop boxes). Throw music onto it and the songs show up in iTunes for people on our LAN. Save a file to a certain folder on our laptop home directories and it gets synced to the NAS (ala Dropbox), made available on our iPads, then backed up to Amazon Glacier.

In short, it does everything you'd ever want a NAS to do but smoothly and nicely. My DS412+ replaced the FreeBSD system I'd assembled and installed from scratch, because there's other stuff I'd rather be doing and because I couldn't possibly make the experience as pleasant as Synology has.