TV and movies and other forms of media you consider to be passive entertainment frequently give life to interesting discussions and debates

No shit. Every human endeavor, from knitting to skydiving, frequently gives life to interesting discussions and debates.

The apparently subtle point I was making is that if passive entertainment is the basis your interactions with other people to the point that you think that giving up said passive entertainment would make you a social outcast, then you seriously need to get a life.

Sure, I could forgo films and television series completely, but there's that social aspect of being a part of conversations at work and at gatherings that I would miss out on. I already don't give a damn for sports, might as well drop out of society completely.

Not really. There's a fairly simple solution to this issue.

1. find a hobby where you actually do things yourself rather than having entertainment fed to you by someone else
2. do that hobby
3. find people into the same hobby
4. talk to those people

Speaking from experience, a shared interest pretty much eliminates any awkwardness due to lack of shared media culture. It's also extremely effective at shutting down undesirable conversation. Someone talking to you about the latest sporting media event at work? Start talking about your hobby (unless it's NSFW; we don't judge your predilections here on /., but the folks at the office might get a bit weirded out). If nothing else, it reminds people that while they sit on their asses in front of a television, you actually go out and do things. If your hobby keeps you fit, it's even more effective.

Shouldn't the RNG tap into the device's accelerometer?

The Linux kernel has has the ability to push device input into the random number entropy pool for a long time (/dev/random and /dev/urandom). If the device drivers aren't pumping accelerometer events into the pool, someone really missed an opportunity.

In this case, it sounds like something went wrong with the Java/Dalvik random number generator. It's not clear to me from glancing at the various write-ups whether it's a failure to RTFM on the part of the Bitcoin wallet writers (or maybe whoever wrote a common Bitcoin reference implementation) or if there's something broken in the Android implementation of the RNG class.

Get several cats. Vocal ones, like Siamese, work best.

Feed them once a day, in the morning.

In about six months, you'll be getting up at 5am to feed them.

Dogs can be effective as well, depending on the breed and age. A young lab or border collie is good. An older hound, not so much.

Doctors should be paid MORE. Yes I said it, more!

Whether they should make more or less isn't quite the issue at hand.

The real problem is that there's essentially no sane way to understand health care costs.

You say doctors work 12-hour days? Well, what if Medicare says some are billing for 26-hour days, and a hospital maybe says they're only spending 6 hours in surgery (that's a wild guess)? So, what's their hourly wage? How much of it goes to medicine, and how much of it is administrative busy-work? Can it be made more efficient? How?

If we haven't really got a clue how much doctors are being paid for the work they're actually doing (versus, say, the base costs needed to run their practices, hospitals, etc), then how in the hell can someone come up with a rational argument about whether or not they need to be paid more or less? And the same point applies to virtually every aspect of health care. Drugs, medical procedures, hospital costs versus billing, lab costs, technology costs, nursing staff, admin workers... you name it, and there's virtually no well-understood relationship between what it costs and how patients pay for it.

That's the real problem. Not how much doctors are paid, but the fact that health care is basically a big fucked up black box which nobody really understands how it works or how to make any part of it better.

Can we send these Senators, the NSA/CIA/DHS/DOD/DOiJ fascists, and anybody who opposed Justin Amash's NSA-limiting amendment ... to Russia and get Snowden back?

What kind of idiot would agree to a deal like that? It'd be like trading a blurry Polaroid of a garden gnome for an original Picasso.

So when the thefts and such start occurring, you have zero recourse and absolutely no hope of resolution.

I've been missing a lot of sleep lately, and maybe this should be obvious, but if valet parking works in Rochester like it does in most of the rest of the world, the driver hands his or her keys to some guy in a fancy vest, gets a piece of paper, the guy in the fancy vest drives away with the car, and the no-longer-a-driver wanders off to do something. At some point in the future, the process reverses and the driver gets his or her keys and car back.

Sound about right?

So, I guess my question is how, exactly, does the involvement of the TSA somehow significantly increase the theft risk? Wouldn't it be reasonable to believe that having a bunch of wannabe-law-enforcement people standing around the parking lot might possibly discourage the theft of personal items by parking valets? Don't thieves generally prefer to work when there's a few other people around as possible watching what they're doing?

I mean, I could believe that the theft rate might increase if the TSA folks were doing the searches themselves (the more people with access to your stuff, the more likely your stuff walks away), but if it's the exact same people who already have unfettered access to everything in your car, I just don't see a theft issue.

Now, the part about people not trained to look for threats being the ones searching your vehicle is definitely a problem. But theft? I don't see it.

Do you really think that Google is going to be fetching your phone backups, hoping for a wireless password, then driving to your house and connecting to your wifi so that they can... sniff your traffic? Impersonate you on the internet?

Whether or not someone thinks they want to, the question I have is that if you're running a Google O/S, with a good chunk of your stuff available using Google software via Google products, why in the world would Google ever need your wifi password to access your wifi network?

If Google wants to fuck over an Android user (and I'd bet that even Kindle users aren't 100% immune), they almost certainly can. It might be via internally-identified Chrome exploits or something, but I have no doubt they could come up with something.

I'm making that number up, obviously

Ah, the RIAA approach to arguments.

Well, except for the part about admitting it. And maybe being somewhat close to reality. And not bribing politicians to believe my number. And...

He'd rather get zero dollars from them than $5000, because he deems the deal to be "unfair". Um, OK. I'd take the "free" $5000, myself.

If it's a free $5000, sure, it's a no-brainer. The problem comes when your "free" $5000 displaces $15000 (I'm making that number up, obviously) that you might have earned from another more lucrative streaming operation if Spotify hadn't stomped all over the market.

If it comea down to a choice between $5000 and $0, well, that's a bit harder to call...

I just came back from a trip to the Boundary Waters up in Minneosta and let me tell you, if you are one of the unfortunate 20%, be prepared with 40% DEET spray, a head net, and long-sleeve shirts and pants. Otherwise you're miserable up there.

I grew up in northern Ontario. I'm not sure we have any of the 20% left in the gene pool anymore. About the only good thing I can say about the mosquitos are that they don't carry the diseases they have in the tropics.

I always thought of inventing a mosquito trap using some sort of machine.

It's been done.

They do work pretty well, covering approx a 1/2 acre area without too much trouble.

How many people actually make calls nowadays anyway?

For personal use, I'd wager not too many.

I'm texting and/or using data most of the time when I've got my phone out.

I don't have a landline, and my personal cell gets maybe 10-15 minutes per month of calls.

My work phone, on the other hand, probably racks up a few hours a month. I telecommute a couple days a week, and while I use data for most communications I still have conference calls and other discussions. Eventually that stuff might go to VoIP or something, but we're not there yet.

And yes, I use a headset most of the time. My work cell is, ironically, a bit too small to hold comfortably for the length of a call.

But arguably he can't be worse than the slate of directors who got them to where they are.

True, unless he convinces them to pull an Elop.

That meme pretty much bit the dust with the advent of decent bluetooth (or even wired) headsets, or integrated vehicle sets.

If a device is too big to hold comfortably to the ear, you're pretty much an idiot (or, to be redundant, a hipster) to stand there holding it that way if there's a better solution.

At this point, the only significant difference between "tablet" and "phone" should come down to pocketability and how well you can hold it.