And, even if it did, where does it say that the military must be the size that it is?

Conservatives love to talk about cutting government, however they always seem to conveniently forget to include the military in those cuts. It doesn't matter that we could halve the military budget and still be spending more than any other country. If we did that, we might actually be able to pay our firefighters and we'd also have enough left over to keep Social Security solvent and pay for universal health care like every other civilized nation on earth.

When will the anti-tax movement wake up and realize they can have every one of their desired tax cuts if we just bring the troops home, worry only about defending our own country and employ a little of the conventional diplomacy that other countries engage in rather than our heavy handed intimidation strategy? This is how all of the most powerful empires die...drowning in debt from the cost of conquering.

But no...we need to strip funding from Planned Parenthood and the NEA so we can have tax cuts. Never mind that that works out to a little over $1 per taxpayer while defense related spending works out to over $10k per taxpayer.

A 4G SD card won't be much cheaper than an extra 4G of RAM, which would be the best solution in all regards. It sounds like a lot of the problems come from trying to minimize the cost of the devices...put 6-8G of RAM in each box and the power issues become fairly simple to solve. You wouldn't even have to have the HDs spun up constantly while recording, since you could buffer to RAM and flush to disk periodically.

If these devices are costing people an extra $10/mo in power costs, perhaps some government pressure to spec the boxes correctly could lead them to at least offer low power options for ~$40 more that would pay for themselves in ~6 months and let consumers have the choice.

That was the point...BitCoin is great for people who got in early and mined a lot. But for everyone else, adopting it means essentially giving those early adopters stuff for free.

With BitCoin limited to a pre-determined amount and the difficulty of mining new BitCoins, it seems that this gives a huge advantage to people who got into BitCoin early and have already amassed a considerable amount of BitCoins. Is this true and, if so, do you think this disincentive will undermine BitCoin's ability to become more popular since the majority of the population will have to work so much harder to obtain the currency?

You're reaching the wrong conclusions from the data you've presented. Apple has publicly stated that they're trying to take the best from iOS and add it to OS X. The key word there is 'add'. It's entirely reasonable to say that, since you've got 2 OSs, you can take knowledge gleaned from one of them and apply it to improving the other.

When you may start to have a point is when Apple starts removing things from OS X to make it more like iOS. They haven't done this, nor have they shown any indication that they will. Lion still allows you to install apps the traditional way, the App Store is just an additional vector for software installation. Lion still allows all the flexibility of a Unix computer. Nothing has changed in that regard, they've just poached what they see as the best features from iOS.

Just because they're adding things that make OS X more like iOS doesn't mean they're making it like iOS in every way. There's no evidence, as of yet, to support that conclusion. The only conclusion I can see from the Lion presentation is that I'd bet dollars to donuts that the post-Lion Mac computers will all have touchscreens. I expect the September refreshes of the MBPs to support all of the gestures detailed yesterday on both the trackpads and the touchscreen.

Of course they're not going to kill it off. The only people suggesting as much are paranoid Apple haters. If nothing else, Apple will need OS X to enable developers to build applications for iOS devices.

I knew as soon as I heard Steve Jobs say those words about demoting the PC that they would be taken entirely wrongly by some people. But all that he meant is that they're extracting a feature (the storage hub and interconnect of all iDevices) from the PC and moving it to iCloud. He only meant that iCloud sees the PC as "just another device" that isn't given special treatment above and beyond what iOS devices are given. But even then he went on to contradict that statement by revealing the particulars of the implementation. iOS devices will not store all information (songs, photos, etc) that OS X computers will.

In shortthere's nothing to see herejust a misinterpreted phrase from a 2-hour presentation that mistakenly confirms the paranoid beliefs of people who want to see Apple in a negative light. There's no logical reason to believe what the story claims. Apple knows that it needs OS X to maintain its developer community. They know that without the developer community, people would abandon iOS. So until developers can do everything they need to do to create apps for iOS on iOS itself, OS X isn't going away.

Yes, because there's no concept of continuous use when it comes to a device like the Kindle...it would all depend on how fast you read each page. Devices like the Kindle should have their battery life measured in page refreshes rather than hours. The only thing that uses power continuously is the wireless, which kills battery life anyways.

And the whole argument is foolish to begin with considering the non-wireless battery life for these devices tends to be measured not in days or even weeks but rather months. Does it really matter that one device lasts 1 month and the other lasts 2? Next up, let's argue about which e-reader holds more books...the Nook can only hold 1000 books while the Kindle can hold 3,500.

It's not hard to find a place to charge your device every few weeks and 1000 book storage is more than 99% of users will ever need. Both devices last long enough and hold enough that users shouldn't care about these specs. This is just a petty squabble between two marketing departments that the rest of us should ignore.

This ruling, of course.

Oh...you were referring to the arbitration...my bad.

They've explained why...:

So, yeah...it has nothing to do with it.

It looks like the random element could be introduced in the RsaKey.getInstance() call as that could be generating a new key each time, though I don't see that class in the BouncyCastle API documentation and RsaKey is an interface in the JDK, so I'm not sure what code that's calling.

How do you know it's not a natural response to over population or other challenges? What if, at a certain point, it stops being advantageous to pass down your own genes and starts being advantageous to become part of a community providing for children? A quick search turns up a study that claims that for each older brother, a male child is be 33% more likely to be gay...something like that could be explained by positing that, under certain circumstances, having more providers for each child rather than more children with certain genes maximizes the chances that a child will reach childbearing age and successfully pass down their genes.

Whatever the cause, whether genetic or the result of child rearing, there's ample evidence that by the time a sexual identity emerges, it's not a choice. If a phenomenon is this widespread, how is it possible for it not to be natural? The answer is that it isn't possible...it's a behavioral trait that we've evolved to deal with certain situations that we don't yet fully understand and, judging by the fact that it's survived to this point, it provides some advantage in successful procreation. Whether that advantage is still applicable to today's society is another matter, but that has no bearing on whether it's a natural occurrence.

Simple, because green card holders are equally able to donate to political campaigns.

What? You think voting is in any way linked with representation anymore?

The most popular response may have been marijuana reform, but that doesn't mean that the reform is popular. California, which tends to be pretty forward thinking and marijuana friendly, put it to a vote and it failed. I'm fully convinced that it was partly due to voter apathy (the 2010 midterm elections skewed toward an older demographic than we saw in 2008), but it went down pretty convincingly.

I'd be willing to be that it's even less popular on a national level.

FWIW, I happily voted for legalization. I'm all for people being able to decide what they put into their bodies, but I primarily feel it should be legal for fiscal reasons...the decreased prison spending and the increased tax revenues from taxing legalized sales would have all but eliminated our budget deficit.

The key word is likely sustained. You might be getting 2-3MB/s the majority of the time and may not be noticing the minute or two that the transfer speed drops significantly because you're either not watching it closely or not downloading anything at the time. But when streaming, if transfer speeds drop at all and you exhaust what little buffer there is, you've either got to adjust to the available bandwidth or stop and refill the buffer.

My personal experience watching Netflix on Comcast and Charter bears this out...it's quite common for the vast majority of a movie or show to be very high quality but have short periods where the quality level dips or the streaming stops for a bit. So while I too frequently get big-Bs/s on downloads, the sustained transfer rate is lower because they can't keep that level of performance over the 2-hour period that I watch the movie.

I don't think this is about Netflix specifically since I see the same dips in quality when watching espn3.com as I do with Netflix on both providers. And considering that both providers have paid espn to allow me to use espn3.com, I find it unlikely that they'd do any type of throttling to discourage using it as it would be much easier (and cheaper) to just not pay for it.

It's for the same reason that people who know better buy lottery tickets. It's not because they think they can win, it's because they enjoy fantasizing about what would happen if they did.

Similarly, the appeal watching the Oscars and paying attention to the Hollywood lifestyle is in the fantasizing about being part of it. The vast majority of the people in the world are not pretty enough, creative enough or otherwise talented enough to make it in that world. But nearly all the jobs are relatable enough to imagine yourself doing them, which makes it easy to imagine yourself living with all the perks of that life. You can imagine what it would be like to live in their expensive houses, drive their expensive cars and date their gorgeous girlfriends/boyfriends. And those fantasies, however improbable, are pleasant to have. So people tune in to live vicariously through those who are able to live that way.