If your mother only uses her computer for Facebook and Turbotax but draws 100W while idle, then your mother needs building advice. Nudge her into moving to Ivy Bridge Core i3 (and use the integrated graphics; don't add graphics card) when they come out in a couple months.

(Actually if that's all she does, maybe even an Atom or Bobcat system will be enough, but in 2012 I don't recommend going that way.)

This makes as much sense as Facebook announcing they're going to build a PC.

Actually, when you put it that way, as strange as it seems, it sounds less insane. The phone market is already twisted beyond belief; many people buy their handheld PCs from their ISPs. Why not buy phones from an advertising middleman .. or from a cement mixing company or from a haberdasher or from religious iconography and spell component shop? Those are some bizarre and senseless ideas, I'll admit, yet they are no more bizarre than the status quo! Phones are a fucked-up market which can't possibly get worse.

Wait a minute, are you suggesting that having spiders run my javascript x86 emulator which runs jruby scripts which mines bitcoins, isn't practical?

How do you, as a reader, judge whether a journal is real or not?

Move that decision (however it is that you're implementing it) from the journal to the paper.

Or not. What you mind find is you judge the validity of each journal using an amazingly weak and vulnerable algorithm. Solve that problem and you'll solve the paper problem.

As I'm getting older I'm realizing more and more that the hobbies I find intellectually satisfying are rarely something that can be plugged into a social component.
..

I'm finding that I have to divorce "intellectually stimulating" from "social interaction" more and more every day.

You're already half way to finding the exception, when you go out for drinks. Ever thought of making the drinks? Brewing is social and (somewhat) nerdy. Ok, it's not going to be as intellectually stimulating as programming (what ever could be?) but don't knock it.

What are you smoking??? Care must be done to do this correctly....the Federal Way!!

I was smoking ObamaYesWeCan. I saw "90 days" and thought maybe he had ordered them to not do it The Federal Way.

I was wrong. Whoever modded you troll, was wrong too. Turns out there is no (real) 90 day deadline. The president isn't serious. Again.

Everyone knows it, but few people acknowledge it: Mobile web browsers absolutely suck.

I didn't know that. I do share the concerns about the amazing shittiness of the dominant mobile OSes, causing mobile browsers to stagnate. But even when (yeah, it's "when" not "if") that happens, I thought at least it won't be as bad as what happened a decade ago. Back in the day, I would have agreed with the (then) contemporary version of the above statement: Everyone knew MSIE6 and NN4 absolutely suck (even by the standards of the time), and all the good browsers were niche or off the beaten path. But in 2012 I really don't agree that the most popular mobile browsers suck. Mobile Safari and Android Browser both seem pretty good to me.

(In fact I'd say the web browsers are the only thing that makes those two platforms be tolerable at all. They're otherwise garbage and the fact that you can so easily web-browse on them is what saves them. But that's another topic.. not that I'm averse to topic-drift, as you'll soon see.)

No? What don't you like about the current mobile browsers? They sure seem pretty up-to-date on standards and rendering capabilites, if nothing else. (Nobody would have said that about MSIE6 or NN4.)

BTW, totally different topic. The Axis demo movie thing, the presenter's voice was doing something funny. When they were just showing screenshots, I heard a woman's voice. Then they occasionally shift back to the dude and it's a man's voice. But it's the same voice. Without the face, it's a woman. Anyone else hear this, or is it just me?

To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months.

Shit! Oh well, never mind what I said here then; it really is a boondoggle after all.