But when will they upgrade my 4Mbps down / 256Kbps up DSL connection that I pay through the nose per month for? Cuz really, I keep reading about those marvelous link speeds but in the past 10 years, I haven't seen much of that reach the average Joe Blow internet user like me...

You use KiB instead of KB, don't you?

Unless you can download a better performing driver for OS X, this is an argument for using Linux.

...on a particular set of hardware. Notice they're compiling and testing on Apple's low-end machine.

And honestly if your Linux vs. OSX decision is based on a narrow difference in performance, then you probably aren't considering cheap desktop hardware to begin with.

All my life I've learned with "pirated" material: throughout school, my teachers copied all kinds of materials regardless of whether or not it was copyrighted - including my primary school teachers hand-copying entire pages of grammar or math books and giving away dittoed copies, photocopies of of all kinds... whatever was necessary to learn. Learning was considered "fair use" when I was young. Nobody in their right mind thought twice before copying something for education purposes.

Then when I started dabbling in computers, I started "pirating" software all by myself. I knew what I was doing was illegal, yet it didn't feel wrong. I learned C with an illegal copy of Turbo C. I learned CAD with an illegal copy of AutoCAD. I learned everything I know with an illegal copy of something.

Sure I shafted Borland, AutoDesk and all the others, but then I bet they made a whole lot of money afterwards, when I and all the others like me hit the job market and started using their products professionally - on seats paid by the companies I worked for to the tune of many thousands more than a single user seat.

I don't know how I would have gotten an education without pirated material. I don't know how kids today get an education if their teachers should fear jail when they use pirated material. What a sorry state society is in...

The moon isn't always at the night side of the Earth.

To extend the reverse-car analogy, the correct analogy is the use case of wanting to transmit a large movie to a USB stick so you can watch it on your TV. Doesn't matter if you have the best-of-the-best USB stick and USB 3.0 in your computer. The bottleneck is still the internet connection. So what you do is that you set your computer to download that large file while you're out doing whatever it is you're doing all day, and copy it over to your USB stick quickly when you get home. (You could even conceivably automate this process or remote control it from your cell phone.) In this scenario, having USB 3.0 *will* help since it'll cut down on the time on getting the movie from your computer to the USB stick.

Analogously, the way you'd do it for a residential charger, is that you'd have the power grid trickle charging a supercapacitor that you have at your home (ideally under some kind of control from the power company, so that they can manage the load on the electric grid) over the course of a few hours, so that when you need the power, you can just plug it in and almost instantly get your car charged up.

Although while we're on the subject of analogies, a better reverse-car analogy would be that of a flush toilet, slowly building up a reservoir of water to then quickly release it when required.

The original trek does have the reputation for taking an idea about humanity and throwing it into a fantasy scenario where we could see the idea evaluated.

Funny, every episode that I've seen that does this seems preachy and forced (especially Kahn). Much like in TNG when Wesley falls into a planter bed on the perfect planet, or DS9 where the religious authority is corrupted by her religion's demons, etc, etc, etc.

I welcome a serious exploration or issues, but it doesn't happen with Trek. Instead it's usually boiled down to the simplicity of what you see in IRobot the movie (AI = bad) vs. I Robot the book (AI = complex). The best episodes in Trek are the ones where Picard has to truly defend humanity and our cherished value against the onslaught of tests by the omnipotent Q. But that's too "deus ex machina" for people. Guess what? "Deus Ex Machina" is a term coined from medeval morality plays where the message was the point.

According to the article:

The team concluded that the presence of meters upon site registration, for example, is not as effective as when the meters are not associated with a registration,

Soo... the summary sentence actually says nothing. What was the result? It also sounds like they're reporting on whether people noticed the meter, not whether the meter was successful in getting people to use better passwords.

This is rather interesting I'd say: considering that BG has vowed to give away 95% of his wealth to charities, and already does give away a shitload of money every year, I find it interesting that his net worth should increase rather than decrease.

Me, when I give money to a charity, I find myself poorer afterward. Not him. That seems like a nerdy enough phenomenon to be worth mentioning.

Sounds like QT isn't leveraging hardware decoding for some reason, most likely because they're doing their own screenwriting instead of leveraging DirectX calls. I remember older versions of QT on windows having buried preferences, but they probably aren't there anymore.

It's very similar to e-ink, the way LCD is similar to the same technology that's been powering your clock for 30 years.

"Color e-ink" is a good shorthand way of thinking about it.

Samsung just bought Liquavista in 2012.. interesting.. How will that work? I mean Samsung is more than likely going to use this technology.

Well clearly they're not planning to use it and instead are selling it Amazon.

Yes, this is a company with color e-ink technology.

One of the challenges in reading The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success is figuring how to classify it. Amazon has it ranked mainly in applied psychology, but also time management and inexplicable personal finance. In some ways it is all of the above and more.

The category you are searching for is "Self Help". Just because it involves computers, it doesn't make it something new and different (just like patents).

stdio functions often lead to stack overflows. News at ten...
What next? Null pointers are bad, m'kay...?