It's true.

Think you own your house? You don't. You are renting. If you don't believe me stop paying your property tax. They can call it a tax all they want, but it's rent.

As for your other possessions, you are subject to forfeiture at any time for pretty much any reason they can dream up. Have a pile of cash? You don't own that either. Anyone carrying a lot of cash is suspicious and the money will be subject to forfeiture as well.

Eminent domain, bankruptcy court...the list goes on and on.

You don't own anything.

Some people look at things quarter-by-quarter. These types will NEVER see the benefits of any long term projects.

I worked at a company that had a compile process that would take a half an hour to complete. We were running on ancient computers.

So, I made a spreadsheet. I showed the cost of a new computer. And through a study on my home computer, determined that it would cut compile times in half since my home computer wasn't bunk. Then used my salary as an average engineering rate for time. Showed that you compiled 4 times a day (typical) you would save X dollars per week, and the computers would pay for themselves in however many days. Then all the engineering time saved would be pure profit. Multiply that across an engineering team of a few dozen people and it would be like getting a new employee for free, in terms of hours saved.

It was a great idea.

It was completely ignored.

It is painful to work for people with such a total lack of vision. Not only was it painful to work on these slow (but hey! they're already paid for!) computers, but it was painful knowing that a good idea wasn't worth having there. And that not a single bean counter could see the logic in my proposal.

My point is, companies often times see things by quarters. Expense, money in, bottom line. Anything - even something simple and efficient - falls outside those parameters. You might as well be yodeling in Swahili.

Hah! Show me a place without crooked cops. I'll wait here. But I won't be holding my breath.

'Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period. ... Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming. Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games."

Translation: It's not DRM, because we have a number of customers that don't hate it enough to leave!

No, DRM is DRM. It doesn't matter if some people can put up with it or not. It is what it is, popularity contests notwithstanding.

You can't open the paper without some story of a crooked cop, on the take, murdering off the clock, raping a suspect, running over kids because they wanted to drive fast without lights on.

You're missing the point. This happens everywhere, but only in a free society do you have the ability to open a newspaper and read about the ones that get caught. Oppressive regimes like North Korea do not report their failures.

A... robot. May not... InjureA human BEING or... through inaction, ALLOW a... human being to.. ComeToHarm. Mister.

We take it as a matter of faith that the unicorn is pink. And since you can't see him, you cannot prove me wrong.

This is why nobody wants to debate this fellow. People who argue from a faith-based viewpoint have different definitions of logical debate. A scientist trying to debate one of the faithful would be very much like showing up for a game of golf armed with a cricket bat. The two sets of rules are not compatible.

A combination of white noise from a fan and earplugs to dim out the high frequencies works for me.

Oh, and be sure to find a high quality fan. Cheap ones will have a rhythmic noise or squeak or wobble every time, which ruins the effect.

If the US decided right now to nuke NK the bombs would be falling within the hour. Everybody knows that. And NK surely knows that if they somehow lobbed one of their weapons at us the response would be, well...excessive.

All this over sanctions. NK would rather try to make bombs and force the world to feed its citizens than figure out agriculture.

Crazy. North Korea is fascinating.

No, really. This is a law professor explaining why you should never, EVER talk to the police. Watch this. It's almost an hour long, but worth every single second.

Don't Talk to Police

It's harmless, possibly even beneficial. Here are the reasons why.

1) It doesn't mean they intend to use it. A lot of patents are defensive, a sort of financial mutually-assured-destruction plan. If they say they have no intention of using it, that probably means exactly that. The patent system being as silly as it is results in these types of ploys. Sort of like the man who goes to the dentist and when the dentist grabs the drill, reaches out and lightly grabs the dentist by the balls and says "let's not hurt each other". Patent portfolios are very much like this. It doesn't mean you intent to harm anyone. It just means you can if provoked.

2) This means the Xbox can't block used games without paying a royalty to Sony if they press the matter. So at the very least your next Xbox will play used games. Which would be an unacceptable state of affairs for Sony. If they lied and blocked used games anyways, you would have the Xbox-next playing used games and the PS4 not. Which would you buy? I'm sure Sony has thought of this.

Exactly. Why go through all the trouble to make an automated control system for something that might not even work? Making any control system would almost certainly have taken longer than a week. Why not just have grad students babysit the thing? More efficient use of time.

This was an experiment. The only point was to answer the question "Is this worth pursuing?" Now that we know it's possible a control system would make sense, but certainly not before.

Oh, and this is what grad students do. They are grunts for professors. Coffee and tedium are in the job description.

From TFA:

His entire staff of grad students manned the thing and kept feeding it coal for a week and it ran nonstop the whole time, and could have kept going. So this appears to be a solved problem.

No, really.

Fire up WinUAE on a usb stick. Download some old RPG or strategy games. Bards Tale, Phantasie, Ultima, Civilization, Nuclear War...whatever. Play for 5 or 10 minutes. No need to get back to the inn or some other save spot to stop playing - just use the Save State function (F12 - miscellaneous - state files) to save your spot. Works like a charm and it's just the thing to burn a quick ten minutes.

Remember to use the End-Break key combination to emulate at maximum speed to reduce your load times and skip through intro screens. You've only got 10 minutes, make the most of them.

That's actually a really good point. I never owned a Defender cabinet but I still want one. And I'm still thinking about buying an Amiga 4000, just because of the sheer amount of geek-lust I used to direct at that machine when I was a kid. Damn but I wanted one of those. So yeah, good point.

And my "cool stuff" list is pretty lame, IMO. Nothing you can't get on ebay for a few hundred honestly.