The mentioned TLSdate isn't a NTP replacement.

It openly admits is roughly only good for a <1-5 second accuracy. That's crap. A typical NTP setup can easily maintain ~10-15 millisecond accuracy using public stratum 2 or 3 NTP servers from the Internet.

Sure, tlsdate is a simple, secure rdate replacement, and while many people without precise timing requirements it is good enough, it is simply not suitable for a huge range of applications that are time sensitive, or are timing / synchronization critical.

Well, really early telephones have terrible acoustic properties, from the simple fact that the microphone and speaker elements were quite primitive -- carbon elements (IIRC) on paper cones with Alnico (not ceramic or rare earth) magnets.

I think it may of been the 1950s or 60s, perhaps earlier, but Bell standardized on filtering audio to pass voice frequencies in the 300 to 3400 Hertz range. I believe this (or a 300-3k Hz simplification) became an ITU standard.

I agree the build quality of Western Electric (and Nortel) telephones, particularly business phones were impressive in how ruggedly build "office equipment" was built.

Here's an interesting look at audio quality of modern (digital) mobile phones, from IEEE Spectrum (free access), Why Mobile Voice Quality Still Stinks—and How to Fix It

The US's NSA (with NIST - US National Institute of Standards and Technology) and Canada's CSE(C) (with the Treasury Board / Public Works) publish guidelines for civilian government security policies and recommendations on their public web sites. I believe other (counter-)intelligence agencies do the same as well.

I assume that a high school teacher in any subject, that it still the norm to assume that children can write / print before being accepted, just as you expect they already know the alphabet and can tie their shoe laces.

As most teachers young enough to still be working have terrible-to-no knowledge on penmanship themselves, I think it is not reasonable to expect them to teach a subject they don't have moderate proficiency in themselves.

I also expect an English teacher to teach English, the language and its associated literary culture, not computer (and its applications) usage.

For the traditional in-person classroom teaching style, I agree.

Ideally language classes should focus on the language (and affiliated cultural bodies of work), not methods or pedagogies.

For most home / personal computing (including high end video games) diminishing returns kick in hard past 4 cores. The problem is that in the few cases where tasks can be easily subdivided so as to utilize more than 4 cores, the cores will normally be stuck waiting for memory updates which continues to lag (speed / throughput wise) behind processor compute ability at an increasingly large gap which spans orders of magnitude. Of course the only known way to speed DRAM is to utilize more power, which goes against the general IT development trends (greener computing, more capable mobile).

The processor to memory speed gap is one of the reasons why Intel is investing in novel memory technology (phase change memory, etc.). The recent XPoint memory announcement hinted at potential future usage as "page swap" memory, replacing virtual memory management swapping pages out to disk (mechnical or solid state).

I haven't read all of Intel's releases this week, but one area I'm interested in is seeing how eDRAM (embedded DRAM) aka Crystal Well technology is going to end up being available and utilized across the Skylake line. In memory intensive benchmarks eDRAM has already shown considerably improvement in memory constrained benchmarks in Broadwell mobile processors, wheere it acts as an additional level of cache.

Most people don't utilize more than 2 cores for more than 25-33% of the time, so the market for consumer-oriented many core processors just isn't there. People who really need the performance already just buy a Xeon.

Intel's "hyper-threading technology" is one of the biggest disappointments in many years, I wish they would let the branding and feature set die in obscurity like it deserves (IMHO).

Well 8-16 core processors have been around for what, a bit less than a decade now? They won't really happen in the consumer / desktop market, because the market isn't demanding it (with purchasing dollars, not wishful thinking). Look at the very modest take-up of the Haswell-E X99 (LGA2011) 6 to 8 core processors released last year (August-Sept 2014 IIRC).

I love fast computers, personally I have a 6 core i7-5930K, and the performance difference for most home/consumer applications is so trivial that I don't notice a difference over using a 4 core i7-4790K except for in parallel benchmarks.

There is plenty of reason to avoid the 2N3055, well actually to avoid the TO-3 packaging. The package flexes when mounted, which can cause poor thermal transfer to its heat sink. TO-3 are manufactured to be curved so as to help ensure good thermal contact, but the curvature isn't preserved if the TO-3 is removed.

References: OnSemi's Application Note 1040, and Burr-Brown (TI) Mounting Considerations for TO-3 packages.

You assume there is an editing staff that cares, let alone does copy-editing.

This was settle recently, monkeys cannot be staff.

I admit I've always heard it called the CRC Handbook(s). The "original" being their Chemistry and Physics one (the one at the link), though CRC Press does tons of technical, scientific printing in the US, they also have handbooks on topics in computer science, computer security and many others.

And my copy is I think 80-something-th edition.

Unsurprisingly, mathematicians. Many mathematicians use the OEIS frequently, heck experts and professionals from other disciplines like Computer Science, Economics, or Physics routinely use OEIS to identify numeric sequences or patterns.

I'd hazard to say anyone who calls themselves a mathematician has used OEIS (or the book version) at least once. In fact I'd be surprised if you could find anyone with a graduate degree in mathematics who doesn't know who Neil Sloane or OEIS are.

Yes, it is that important.

What is the pricing on these things? (base or standard configuration)

I would imagine they could be an attractive option for business continuity planning, but personally as a compact, tidy and suitable for global field deployment so that in the field operations don't have to be restricted by real-time networking limitations via cellular or satellite communications, where all requests are relayed back to conventional data centres.

So this device might be actually able differentiate between a block of cheese and an apple :-), (like suggested by the article photos), but expecting to be a smartphone CSI able to solve mysteries with a click of an app will lead to buyers' remorse.

That said, I believe the device producers are not trying to mislead potential buyers, but the media coverage of the device has been largely hyperbolic.

University of Toronto is an internationally regarded research university, the "Higher Education Ranking" by The Times (UK) ranks UoT at 20th in 2015 in "World University Ranking", and 16th in "World Reputation Ranking",

That's why the issue of the complaints, and the report are indeed newsworthy. It is not some obscure backwater university, but a school of medicine with a history of Nobel Laureates including Frederick Banting and J.J.R. Macleod who were the first Canadians to win a Nobel prize; for their isolation of insulin.

Exactly. I mean why the hell would we expect "[e]xperts in materials science at MIT" to be able to accurately calculate the manufacturing and production costs (and thus savings) for a novel battery technology? They are experts in material science, not process engineering or manufacturing.

I also don't assume they can find major cost savings in the US government's budget, cure cancer, or find Amelia Earhart.

That said, I do look forward to seeing if their idea does pan out for lower costing lithium batteries.

Yes, the grandfather post did forget to include SCM (software configuration management) / source revision control, where numerous tools are available including : rcs, cvs, subversion, sccs, git or one of the other widely available SCMs. Of course, RCS (1982), CVS (1990), and SCCS (1972) are 25 years or older themselves.

Keep your own backups of critical information (emails, files, notes, whatever), personal or project, in particular of your personal HR information.

Don't violate security policies doing this (i.e. Cloud services like Dropbox may not be acceptable for sensitive or classified information), but DVD-R / BD-R and USB flash drives make this cheap enough to do as an out-of-pocket expense if necessary.

Spend time organizing or keeping your information organized. Having lots of data / information "on one of these old hard drives" isn't helpful.

RAID is not a back-up strategy.