I've got my mom visiting all the way from Chile the first 3 weeks of June, so all the obligatory stops if you live in the Bay Area: Yosemite, Napa, Mendocino and the North Coast, and of course the majestic Redwood Fores. What a great place to live. For a geek is not only the hub of all that matters, but also as someone born with the Pinguins in the Chilean Patagonia, it's the absolutely most perfect place in the planet, where everything you want to see is ether a few hours drive or a short few hours flight.

I had the chance to eat deep fried crickets and ant eggs when traveling in Mexico. They were both surprisingly good. Once you forget *what* are you actually eating, it's not bad.

The folks at Mini Live Stock have been doing this for years, and there are several other underground movements on ths subject. Remember, they don't have to LOOK like insects. Some of these folks will make patties that will look and taste like hamburger.

IBM X-Series are fantastically well-built systems. I work with a lot of Fortune 100 companies and most datacenters have either HP or IBM for their tier-1 applications. The problem is that as apps become more stateless and more capable of tolerating downtime in different layers, the robustness, stability and even manageability of the server platform becomes less relevant. I think that's the reason why I'm starting to see a lot of low-end or even custom built 1U boxes and blades pop up in datacenters that otherwise would have purchased IBM or HP.

I think IBM is leaving the space because they see that trend and they can't effectively compete purely on price given their cost structure, while Lenovo has a better chance at making that happen. It's a simple business decision.

Even if it's not true "nano" scale, this technology could potentially enable the creation of micro drones the size of a mosquito. Imagine the potential...

1Password will do the trick. It works on almost every platform and you can access your encrypted items remotely via Dropbox with a fairly nice HTML UI.

One possible answer to your point is to use Parallax OS or a similar concept. I find very appealing the self-contained nature of FCAPS to an individual core.

Interestingly, they leverage Bare Metal OS and the coding is done mostly in Assembly (although C is possible). I think the fattening of all kernels is making these kind of projects look more interesting.

Not sure where do you actually live, but what you are describing is simply not true here in Silicon Valley. The industry is very hot and there is a lot of competition for talent. The more, the better, so your education and experience is far from a problem. And I'm not only talking start-ups, but even larger companies.

Now with the appearance of SDN (Software Defined Networking), all your networking skills will become valuable again. It's a new market with the traditional players will fight with the newcomers and innovators.

I know because I'm exactly in that business and I can't hire fast enough.

About a year ago I bought The Modernist Cuisine and recently, their new "At Home" book also. Remarkable compendium about food, tons of scientific data and exquisite photography. Just the photography alone makes it worth spending the big bucks the books cost.

What makes me bring this up here is that the book was written by Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft and probably one of the smartest geeks alive today, and yet, he chose specifically to do this work in paper because there was no way to provide a compelling experience to the reader that would reflect the nature of the work in any electronic format available today. I cannot imagine this book having the same effect in a Kindle, iPad or even a laptop screen.

I think the right model at this point is an intermediate one, much like Richard Dawkins' The Magic of Reality, which is published as a book (although they do have eBook and audio versions) but with a companion app that expands on the book. The App alone is not attempting to be a replacement for the book, but rather an extension of it. I'm fairly convinced that this is the model with the strongest business case for the current state of the technology.

Whatever flashy headline was used to attract readers to the fact that there are potentially *a lot* of undetected large objects that could wipe us out was worth it. I mean, this is serious shit, and we are NOT taking it seriously enough. Believing we have it covered or it won't happen for 600 years is not good enough. Even Stephen Hawkins has brought this up before. We are seating ducks unless we "diversify our investments", meaning going out there and colonize other planets. It took millions of years and many extinction cycles to get us where we are as an intelligent species, and now we have to think big to survive. Honestly, I'd expect this crowd in Slashdot to really understand the implications. This issue needs to be at least high-er in the priority list of what we spend money in.

The majority of mailing lists can now be replaced by internal company-only social engines. My company (14K people approximately) switched to Socialcast and the amount of email lists related traffic and reply-all problems virtually disappeared. I generally HATE social networking, but this particular system when properly implemented can really be a game changer in the dynamics of internal communications.

If you really think what you wear doesn't have any impact on you, there is a really good experiment you can try yourself and be amazed. Go to a hat store and try some different hats on in front of the mirror. I've never met anybody who after a few minutes of trying them doesn't have some sort of change in their demeanor just based on the hat they are wearing and their perception of what they believe it represents.

At the core, that's fashion. A way to express who do you want to be, and projecting an image that conveys something you want to say about yourself. It's completely valid for folks like Zuckerberg to do what they do because in the end, they are communicating something about themselves by making those choices, but keep in mind that the human mind is fairly complex, and even if we may not be totally aware of it, our subconscious does end up paying attention to things we say don't matter.

In the last 15 years I've had 4 different jobs, I've moved 4 times in 3 different countries, I divorced and got remarried and I've had a lot of personal changes. In all these years Slashdot has been a refuge for me, even an obsession when I had nothing else going on, or when I was stuck over the weekend in some foreign country. I always felt part of this community even if sometimes I've been modded down into oblivion.

Being a nerd and a geek is cooler now, but we are still fringe elements of society at large, so I never want to underestimate the need and value of the few good virtual places where we can be accepted and talk to others like us. So today, I just want to say thank you Slashdot for being there. We've all grown together.

Sam Harris has a very good post on the freedom to offend an imaginary god. It was written with a focus on the unrest in the Middle East, but it's equally applicable to this particular case.

I disagree. By making programming mandatory you help these kids create new ways of thinking. It's not about the programming itself, it's about learning how to understand interactions among abstract entities, and how to take a problem and separate it into many smaller problems. Those skills are valid for all disciplines and are useful all your life regardless of what you end up doing in life.

As an added bonus, 20 years from now, none of those kids will see computers as magic, and they would have learned at least the basics on how things work internally, a skill that some lawmakers would really benefit from.

I haven't solved a single Calculus equation in 25 years, and although I was good at it, I couldn't probably do it any more without going back to the books, but one thing I can say, is that I can clearly remember the way my way of thinking changed after I learned those skills. I was never the same, and I applied the logic created by those new neural pathways in all areas of my life.

I see programming being an extension of math from that perspective, where logical, structured and rational thinking helps develop areas in your brain at a critical age that you could not get if this would be optional.

The problem is that many of these things are potentially possible, but they are presented from the pure technology perspective without considering the social and political aspects that at the end are the ones with the real influence.

Think about TCP/IP in general. With the power of todays computers, even cell phones, the world should have evolved into an Internet architecture that was purely P2P based. Everything could have been a real cloud of distributed processing and information sharing. But that would have been disruptive, and any technology that would sufficiently threaten the establishment, and in particular the ones with serious money, will be fought back in the form of regulation or in more subtle ways, such as a slight bending of their direction. ADSL was one of those cases, where by empowering a download speed substantially higher than uploads, it literally steered the way technology developed, from all nodes being equal, to nodes becoming consumers, while other becoming servers.