Mounting things to light poles is 10,000 times more practical.

For years, we have had a cut-out in ITAR 121 that applies to Open Source, it is due to a lawsuit that Phil Karn brought against the Federal Government. Thus, you can implement with impunity, and export to anywhere, as long as it's Open Source.

Rather than an encryption gateway, having your email client handle encryption avoids the problem of man-in-the-middle attacks between the gateway and the client.

I don't have much reason to encrypt, but Thunderbird has my certificate installed and does my digital signing. This is not unusual for a modern email client.

Yes, the German one looks a lot more impressive, with a real person in it (piloting using the remote control) rather than a mannequin.

I had a customer who thought I was crazy for suggesting that all they really needed was chroot for their particular task. In the face of VMs people don't realize that simplicity often works better.

Xen's biggest obstacle right now is KVM. I am no VM expert, but I've been impressed with how well KVM runs, supporting non-VM-aware versions of Microsoft Windows among other things. It's really fun to put that Windows screen on the face of someone's iPad and watch them freak out when they see it's not a screenshot, somehow their iPad got Windows 7 installed on it!

Yes, I find that more than half the time I am charged the tax rate for the city in which the post office that serves my address is located; which is about triple the tax rate that actually applies at my address. I put this down to the use of some database somewhere that uses 5-digit ZIP codes instead of 9-digit ones to determine the tax rate.

And the vast majority of the companies that overcharge me in this way simply ignore requests to fix the problem. I vote with my dollars, and tell them that I'm doing so, but none of these companies (i.e., the ones who don't immediately respond and correct the tax on the order) has ever cared enough to fix the problem even after my complaint.

I have to wonder if it's even legal for a company to charge me tax that I shouldn't be charged. What do they do with the money? One assumes they send it to the city in question, but in any case the whole system seems remarkably free of any checks or chances to correct errors.

 

Although I have not installed CyanogenMod on my Nexus 4, as I have on my Asus Transformer Infinity tf700, the option is available and I will probably eventually do so. I am installing nightlies every other day on the Transformer. I have the option not to use Google's services since I have control over the OS. IMO Google is selling the unit at parts cost, that's why it's from the Play store rather than another retailer. Obviously, not being locked in is always considered in my choice of hardware.

I bought an LG / Google Nexus 4 a while back. They're less than half the price of other top-end smartphones, unlocked and with no contract. I put a Platinumtel SIM in it with the $10 for 60 days GSM plan, and set it to restrict background data. The network is T-Mobile. After a month I'm still on the first $10, having of course made extensive use of wifi.

As far as I can tell, I have all of the smartphone benefits without much of the cost.

I've never been a fan of LaTeX, but I use TeX for novels, and have done for about two decades now.

Actually, if you look at Fox over the past few weeks, they've run a series of anti-solar articles. I guess somebody wants to sell more oil.

I'd want single-eye correction. The uncorrected eye will see spectra that are filtered by this lens.

By the way, I've been told by doctors for at least 20 years that a magenta tint sometimes helps. This isn't really new art.

If I understand it correctly, the defective sensor is sensitive at a spectral peak that is different from the value in normal individuals. It is through mutations to this sensor that color vision evolves. Theoretically, some rare women have four operative spectral bands rather than three.

Well, the only implementation so far is floating-point. I suspect the fixed-point performance would be a lot better if we ever get that written. It can keep up with real-time on a Raspberry Pi or an old Atom laptop.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the technology we are talking about here is merely splicing some reconstucted sequences into existing human cells.

You don't have to synthesize the entire cell. Only the nuclear and mitochondrial chromosomes matter. If you can replace the ones in a normal cell, what you have after division is the primitive cell reborn. You have to do this to a lot of cells, and grow them for a while, to get one without significant damage.