The news article said it would be 2.5 megatons of TNT, which I would equate to a 2.5 megaton nuclear bomb (which AFAIK, uses the same explosive yields).

While that would be, well, a disaster if it hit near something occupied, it seems too small to wipe out the earth.

I'd be more than a little worried. If he does that with the computer, what the hell will he do with the car??

If he's finding his stuff when you have taken it away, how do you punish that? If it was my son I would be inclined to take them away on a more long-term basis, up to just getting rid of them or making sure they were totally inaccessible (like leaving them at a friend's house or another place).

The issue isn't his technical ability, it's his absolute lack of deference to parental authority.

Why does Apple get to lobby the government or expect the support of the government when they won't pay for it?

Maybe the next time Apple has a patent dispute, the Chinese authorities embargo their product at the docks, or the EU starts making demands the US government should tell them to sit down and take a number.

I love how corporations and the rich hate the government and won't pay for it until they need it to do their bidding.

I'd love to see something like this. Clearly it wouldn't work for everyone, but it would be fun to have the ability to encrypt -- even if it was a basic substitution cipher -- postings and messages that would automagically be decrypted by anyone using the add-on (and having whatever the key was).

I'm not thinking of "hard" encryption, but scrambling that would totally defeat Facebook's analytics and the desire by Facebook to turn off privacy settings to enhance their search, etc.

Really, it is.

There's lots of reasons not to -- power, network connectivity, etc.

I suspect that actual commercial server hosting happens by accident, a small consulting or partnership that just needs basic access to get off the ground (FTP, test web site, etc) and it just grows from there.

Although considering I pay $79 per month for Comcast business class internet with unlimited throughput, I don't think there is any colo option cheaper than that that's not a grossly oversubscribed low-budget VPS.

Even so, were they inclined to smash stainless steel boxes on the wall in the head?

My sense is that knocking those things off the wall would require tools of some kind, at the very least something like a hammer or a tire iron. It's hard to see any place staying in business where the patrons can literally rip things off the wall.

How do you contain the flywheel? I would imagine a flywheel capable of accelerating a 3000 pound mass would also be highly destructive if it got loose.

Because they have had these here for years and the closest thing to vandalism I've seen happen is that one bar quit using the advertising service but kept the displays and started piping ESPN to the screens instead, so you could have a piss and keep up with sports while you did it.

I can only imagine its a code/safety/insurance thing, but the active displays I have seen in bathrooms all use stainless steel boxes with high-impact plastic fronts and behind-the-wall wiring. You could destroy it if you wanted, but it would take pretty serious effort.

What does this have to do with the environment?

Every iPhone comes with a lightning cable with a plain old USB-A connector on the other end. There would be no material difference if they shipped with a micro-USB cable.

The same is true with "extra" cables -- presumably, most people who wanted an extra cable would go buy a micro USB cable. I suppose some small minority of tech fanatics would have a bunch of micro USB cables already and never buy any additional cables, but this is really a trivial difference which wouldn't likely affect the number of Apple-branded cables they made anyway.

As for thinking different, as you can tell most people who have used both vastly prefer the lightning design. I'm glad there's something of a standard for USB devices generally (which is commonly micro-USB on small devices), but really the most important factor is durability and usability and the lightning system works better.

I just bought the latest iPhone and didn't need to buy any new cables to have spare chargers. Why? Because I already had them from my iPhone 5 and I'm just guessing that this will be the case for several years to come.

The original dock connector cables were proprietary, too, and eventually I had so many of them I started throwing them away when they showed any evidence of wear.

The lighting cable works well and I'd rather see Apple license this than switch to microUSB with its tiny, hard-to-see connector and difficult to see orientation.

For instance, do you think things would have been much different under Hillary than under Obama? I don't think so. They're both establishment figures who's real masters are the big corporations -- that's where they get most of the money for their campaigns.

They might have been different.

For one, expectations. Obama campaigned with a really progressive message, which, coupled with his race, I think fooled a lot of people into thinking he was somehow really different, when in fact he really wasn't. I think a female president might have ignited some of the same wishful thinking, but perhaps not as much as the racial differences. Plus she's something of a known quantity from her time as First Lady and Senator.

I also think Obama, with very little Senate experience, came into the office relatively weak in terms of political leverage. Hillary Clinton would have come into office with a ton of political leverage, after decades of political involvement with her husband, her senate experience and a ton of points where it really counts, fundraising for the Democratic party. The Clintons have a machine of their own.

Hillary may have had a lot more IOUs to call in and could have been able to set a course of her own more easily; Obama clearly has been weak in this regard and often has trouble engaging Democratic legislators.

My sense is that the best things to have are water and food.

I figure if I can make fresh water, the food situation will solve itself as after about a month as the people who can't get fresh water will die off or become noncompetitive with illness.

Their actual value is what someone will pay for them and this is basically what their *market* value is.

They have a hard asset value (real estate, buildings, machinery, cash minus debts & obligations) but it's probably not all that much.

Most of their value is in the brand, the technology and most importantly their patents, but I don't know how they value these and they're very "soft" values subject to interpretation.

I'd have to guess that there are no existing devices that actually infringe on Blackberry's patents (at least not enough that they could be sued for) and if they did, there may be a cross-licensing deal which probably has all kinds of riders that say that the deal goes with the patents, making the "value" of the patent more strategic than cash.

Right after 9/11 I asked our electrician if he had been experiencing more difficulty getting into buildings to do work. I figured with security on everyone's mind it would be more challenging to show up and gain access to sensitive areas of downtown office buildings.

He just laughed and said no. He said if I took one of his work uniform shirts (company logo polo) and carried a bunch of tools with me I could walk into any building security office downtown and check out master keys merely by handing them my driver's license. No questions asked.

My guess is with the right employee uniform you can get away with going a lot of places you don't belong. You could probably do some serious mayhem in the local telco uniform as this would probably get you into any wiring closet in the building, and often they have patch panels and switches for local networks.