Always my number one rhetorical question when I encounter something totally brain damaged in a Microsoft product -- "They hired the best and brightest they could find with almost no limits on salary or benefits and this is the result they got?"

It kind of reminds me of the William F. Buckley quote -- " I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

I think the principal value of fixed probes over these is that you get a picture of the entire data center's heating and cooling environment at once.

It's a lot easier to forecast the weather if you have N weather stations with simultaneous reporting than one guy driving around taking measurements.

I would imagine a real-time whole-datacenter heat map could be used along with automatic HVAC management to allow colder sections to warm and cool warmer sections with less overall power than a more manual fixed temperature system.

The robot idea I think is worthwhile as an adjunct, sanity checking existing sensors and possibly even providing real-time video and audio monitoring.

My experience has been that the low current power adapters will charge the iPad with the screen locked. It's glacially slow, but it will charge.

I don't know about in use.

You can get a bunch of guys that are really good on their own teams all together on the same team and end up with a team that's worse than the "lesser" teams they came from.

Sports history is littered with this phenomenon.

Hey, obesity moves at a pretty rapid pace yet there's an awful lot of girls out there who thought they were going to have a lifetime "enter here" tattoo that's turned into a "wide load" sign.

Failure to abide by the decision may influence the court's decision to extradite him.

It sounds strange, but maybe the answer isn't a swappable battery but a swappable passenger compartment.

My dad has had a bunch of dental work done in Mexico. He had crowns done for $500 where my dentist wanted $2000.

Now admittedly it wasn't the same product -- my crown was a CERAC done same day, his was a lab-made porcelain done over more than one day.

So far he's been happy, but he's also the kind of guy that would be happy buying a used car that runs poorly simply because he got a cheap price on it.

I asked my dentist about dental work done in Mexico and he wasn't very complimentary, which I kind of expected although not because it's bad but because (a) he has to justify his prices and (b) the stuff he sees is what's done poorly and the people need it re-done (possibly with some sense of urgency).

My guess is there's a lot of "average" dentistry done in Mexico that's just cheaper because of labor and other costs.

I'm pretty sure that people who demonized gays, blacks, Jews, etc also demonized pedophiles and people who fit the functional definition of terrorist ("kills innocent civilians to pursue political agenda") in whatever time period they lived in.

The implication of your post indicates that as we progress we will advance our thinking such that we no longer demonize grown men who cornhole little boys or people that blow up things in public in order to scare people.

I'm fairly certain that this is not an advancement of humanity but instead a sure sign of its decline.

There's a lot of 3 to 5 year old iDevices out there that are still perfectly suited to what their owners actually need,

You are either that guy with the latest of everything who thinks he knows what everyone else needs (and it is always less than what you "need") or you are that guy with a prepaid flip-phone who sends emails to webmasters because there aren't enough ALT tags to keep Lynx usable.

Speaking as someone with every iPhone since the 3G still running at home, this statement can only be true for very limited definitions of "actually need".

We use the iPhone 4 as our home phone and streaming source in the kitchen. Updating InstaCast on my iPhone 5 or my wife's 4S is pretty seamless (more so on the 5). On the 4 it works but gets really sluggish and non-responsive and the overall UI experience is much slower than the 4S or 5.

The 3GS is usable as a basic phone but the entire experience is sluggish and slow. It's basically usable as a video watching toy for airplane rides.

The 3G is kind of dead-ended. Many apps won't run on it at all due to the lack of a modern iOS release. I use it for testing email access once in a while but basically it's not usable.

I think there are (and always have been) meaningful performance differences between Apple phones -- it's not just new tail lights and fenders. Now, that being said, I think Apple could do something more interesting than they have over their product iterations, but they have delivered meaningful performance boosts.

Sometimes it seems that SDN is just a new dress on an old pig, sometimes it starts to make sense.

When I'm feeling enlightened or charitable about the concept I envision it as an encapsulation system for layer 2 on layer 3, allowing layer 2 networks to be created independent of the physical constraints of actual layer 1/2 topologies.

I imagine the goal is to define a layer 2 switching domain (ports, VLANs, etc) and connect systems to it regardless of how the systems are physically connected or even located. This all seems fine and dandy -- draw a network diagram, connect systems, voila!, you have a SDN.

But when you start to actually think about it seems kind of problematic...

It seems hard to separate SDN implementation from virtualization, though. If I have a SDN, how do I connect VMs to it if the SDN isn't part of the virtualization environment? Do you install a virtual network adapter in your OS to configure SDN network membership?

Or is it a switch-level system? I feel somewhat less enthusiastic about this as a concept as it just seems like more configuration for the same basic product (VLAN or VLAN trunk membership), with benefits only to really the largest and most complex networks with maximum bandwidth trying to re-solve problems sort of already solved other ways (like LAN bridging over WAN links).

Since encapsulation appears to me to be an inherent part of it, I also worry about performance but I suppose everyone in the SDN world are go-fast, low drag operators on fully meshed, aggregated 10 gig ethernet end-to-end and doesn't care about encapsulation penalties.

And then there's my inherent skepticism about the value payoff relative to the level of complexity added, as well as asking isn't that why we have layer 3 protocols? To define networks above and beyond their layer 2 memberships?

Yes, utilities are monopolies in the sense that there's generally no way to pick and choose among different utilities at a specific address (with the exception of rare addresses on the edge of two different grid segments served by different utilities).

But no, in the sense that utilities don't have a monopoly on power generation. Nothing is preventing someone from generating their own electricity. Sure, at many scales it isn't competitive with the cost of utility power.

My guess is that in the right location, self-generation is viable at small scales where renewables like wind and solar could power small setups. At the large scale, natural gas generaiton may be competitive with utility power.

I think there have been a number of articles on slashdot highlighting private data centers trumpeting their use of fuel cells or other "green" power generation on site.

I think that we'll probably see an increase in self-generation of power both at home and commercially as the grid gets less stable, prices increase and conservation-driven efficiency grows.

Close your eyes and imagine its around 13 years ago. There are no smart phones and no SMS services. You have a magic device called a Blackberry that sends and recieves email.

You keep using this device for a while and it develops the ability to send short messages to other Blackberry users. You keep using this service, even as others get SMS and smartphones and the capability of BBM is essentially duplicated.

The only "advantage" this provides is a touchstone to long-time Blackberry users who don't understand that other phones have a short message system, chat apps, etc and who think they can't communicate with other Blackberry users withouth BBM. And maybe they can't.

AFAICT, the entire Blackberry universe still pretends its 1999 and carriers don't offer mobile IP service and the only way to send data wirelessly is with this cumbersome Canadian network.

And the bad part about more arrests is that it dilutes the stigmatization effect of drunk driving arrests. When half or more of the people you know have a DUI, it's only a hassle, it's not embarrassing and carries no social stigma causing you to be less likely to avoid it in the future.

It's similar to the problem when people want the police to "get tough" in poor neighborhoods. It's nice rhetoric, but so many of those people have already been arrested before they just don't care outside of the headache. And for many it's a badge of courage for standing up to the man.

With the deterrence effect of stigmatizing DUIs diluted, all they can turn to are draconian laws -- soon we'd probably have a 3 strikes law for driving. Then we'd have a new problem of people driving without licenses, insurance, an increase in stolen plates (because you can't get your tabs without a license...).

What responsibility are they evading?

Neither myself nor any of the other gun owners I know have ever had a problem dealing with the factory on defect issues (and for me this includes ammunition manufacturers, too).

Rule #1 is a gun is always loaded.

Rule #2 is not to point at a gun at something you don't want to shoot.

It's not "...if you think the safety is off" or "if you think it is unloaded" or "if you get wasted and wave it around" or "if you are depressed" or any of the other excuses people make.

The liability tack is *always* used to claim that gunmakers are avoiding making guns "safe" and that somehow people are getting shot for reasons other than the fact that someone pointed one at them and pulled the trigger. And it's always about a back door route to gun control.

I've had a very wide exposure to many, many guns and a lot of experience at gun ranges and I'm only aware of one way to innocently get injured by a gun defect and it's tied to ammunition deficiencies -- overcharged cartridge or excessive bullet setback, creating pressures beyond the chamber's ability to contain it.

Usually this is a result of bad handloading, but I've bought ammo with excessive bullet setback (caused by inadequate crimping). This can result in catestrophic failure, but it's not going to kill you and at worst might maim your hand. Gun barrels, though, are proofed usually at 2-3x normal pressures, so it takes something unusual to blow them up.