Au contraire. See e.g. the rants of people who have to implement UEFI support in Linux: http://lwn.net/Articles/444666/

Remember: remote wipe without a foolproof and frequently used backup strategy is a very very bad idea.

Indeed. USB stick with "insert favorite linux version" installed, and just enough things to allow you to SSH home and access whatever you need (VNC for the GUI stuff). Make sure the USB stick is read-only, no personal stuff whatsoever stored on it, and password-protect the SSH key.

Can't tell if trolling or really serious.

Come on, now. 1080p is the max resolution of an HDTV (higher res is normally called 4K). Are you saying that you play games on your HDTV at higher resolutions than the max resolution? If your intention is to have a 4K monitor and sit reaally close to it to cover most of your field-of-view, then you're doing it wrong. It's cheaper and much better to have multiple monitors, since then you can curve them around you.

Grrr... Third such unsubstantiated statement from you on this story. Seriously, do you have any shred of evidence suggesting Steam is planning to centralize the gaming hardware and stream the games from the cloud? Cause you're the only person that seems to believe so.

[citation needed]

No, no-one will install games on this thing. It's not like Steam has the most successful gaming app store ever.
(I'm guessing you mean "install from a third party", and that will probably be difficult, yes.)

This doesn't make sense from a lot of perspectives. One is latency. Another is the fact that they've spent a lot of time, money and PR on making a box+OS to actually run games on, including large improvements to the Linux GPU drivers. A third is the fact that all previous attempts have failed, see OnLive.

I would mod you up if I wasn't out of points.
And I too think lavarnd.org being down at this moment in time is semi-spooky.

Since you're an experienced ZFS user, do you have any recommendations for how to sync the systems described below?

I have a setup simliar to the one you describe. One box at work with 2x3TB with ZFS and mirroring (raid1), similar box at home. The box at home is fairly recent, so I haven't gotten a good system for synchronizing them yet. My internet at home is 50/10 Mbps, work is much faster. The idea is that I backup both my personal photos (originates on home box, usually ~10 GB a month) and my work data (created on the work box, usually a steady stream of 1 GB per week and bursts of 10-50 GB occasionally). If possible I would like to have some directories on the work box that are not synchronized to the home box.

If the fact that both computers are sources of new data is a problem, I guess it's possible to modify that workflow.

And any other recommendations for ZFS? I scrub the pools weekly, but otherwise treat it as zero-maintenance.

[citation needed]

Seriously, show me a double-blind test with a decent sample size where it's found to be statistically significant that people can distinguish a non-retina ipad from a retina one. Not just calculations on the theoretical resolution of the human eye.

I will note as evidence supporting my theory that "retina==overkill" that monitors recommended for professional photo/video editing, including Apple's own "Thunderbolt MC914LL/B", have less than half the DPI of a retina screen. If it's not popular among people who have virtually unlimited budgets for buying displays, then that's because it's not necessary.

I would add Fortran (90/95/2003/2008) to that one-item list. Not to spark a flame war here, but Fortran can often be 10x faster for number crunching, given the same amount of programmer-hours to code it. Not saying you can't make a C program equally fast, but the default way people structure Fortran code for number crunching results in faster code than the default way people stucture C code for number crunching.

Take IPA for instance: you have to put in some work in order to write C code that will actually benefit from a compiler that has IPA support. Limit your use of pointers, only strict aliasing, etc. For Fortran, you have to put in some work in order to write code that won't benefit from a compiler with IPA.

I care about Moore's law winding down. For my applications (CFD) it means that not only do I have to start paying attention to the fact that I'm running close-to-metal, e.g. I have to minimize the amount of cache misses, but also that if I want to have a scalable application, I can't do it without MPI. And MPI is tricky.

Well, the US military has one called Active Denial System, but that's not the one I was thinking about. I can't seem to find any good links at the moment, sorry :( But it looks like the ADS is not very popular anymore with the military (never been used in the field), so I'm guessing they scrapped the civilan versions. Too much negative PR potential for a riot control device.

You could have a look at the ATLAS-I machine built at Sandia in the 70's, they used it for simulated EMP testing. 200 gigawatts @ 10 megavolts, focused at ~50 m distance.

For reference, the vehicles that have been built for riot control using RF radiation (which obviously put out much less power than an EMP, otherwise they wouldn't be usable in cities) have charge-up times of more than a day, and they're probably supplied by 480V three-phase at several hundred amps.

The "Project Thumper", as someone below mentioned, charges the capacitor bank at 110V 20 A for a few minutes, so that's roughly 4*10*60*24= 60 000 times less energy than something which has much less energy than an EMP. Myth busted.

http://xkcd.com/908/