At work, Windows 8.1 (ugh) i7 5820k, 16gb ram, 500gb ssd. Dual monitor setup, because I code.

Personal laptop, asus zenbook ux31a, dual-booting windows 10 and ubuntu. Recently upgraded the ssd on it to 1tb after the 256gb that came with it failed. Other than that, fantastic laptop.

Home gaming machine, Dual booting Windows 10 and Steam OS. Same as the work machine, except 1 tb platter hard-drive (I need to get an ssd for it) and a geforce gtx 970.

Home file storage / media server. Atom processor d510, 4gb ram, running ubuntu server. Storage drives running a zfs pool raidz setup.

I have an old mac mini in the office that doesn't get turned on very much, except when I want to try my hand at some iOS development.

In this day and age, there's no excuse for password reuse because why not use a password manager. That said, password reuse *shouldn't* be a problem. Client-side salt + hash, encrypted session so the hashed password doesn't go down the wire in plain text, second hash server-side for storage + verification. The server you're connecting to shouldn't be able to TELL what your password is, the salt makes it so that an unscrupulous employee can't use a rainbow table to figure it out (or even determine if the same password was used based on the hash, because they would have different salts), and the server-side hash makes it so a data breach doesn't get you access even to that account, much less others where the password was reused.

That makes it such that the only way you can break a weak password is by trying a bunch of the common ones. Lock out the account after a number of tries, and enforce a certain amount of time between tries even before the lockout, and you honestly shouldn't care if the user picked 1234 for his password (I have the same combination in my luggage), it will be secure. Much more so than depending on your users to be smart about password selection.

If by that you mean that you've never over-indulged on food, and thus never got used to thinking that 4 slices of pizza in one thinking is the norm, then you're right. It's much harder to give up snacking every time you sit in front of the tv once it becomes a habit than it is to just never gain that habit in the first place, for example.

It's not an adverse metabolic state. When you study the metabolism of two different people at the same height and waste, and take the absolute lowest range and compare it to the absolute highest range, the difference is no more than 250 kcals. That's less than two glasses of coke, which most people will drink during dinner. Drink water instead and you just made up for being at the low end of metabolism for your size. You can even compare yourself to body builders. An extra pound of lean muscle only gains you an extra 9 kcals a day in expenditure, on average.

The cause of obesity is exactly the fact we're a wealthy society. Food isn't scarce. I don't have to count calories because my metabolism sucks. I have to count calories because over the course of a day I'll be offered free sodas, somebody will bring doughnuts to work, we'll go grab a burger for lunch at a place where the burger plus a side of fries by itself can have more calories than I need for an entire day (it's pretty easy to get a 2,000 kcals lunch in this society.

It's fine. The food is tasty. I don't deny myself those. But if I have a 4,000 calories worth of food today because I've splurged, I make note of it so I make it up by eating ~350 calories less a day for the next days to make up for it. You can't eat double your calories every single day and expect not to gain weight, but in today's society that is extremely easy to do without paying attention.

It's also really easy to overestimate how many calories you need. I need about 2,000 a day to maintain my weight, which is what people think of as the standard for males. But I'm 5'10", 150 lbs. I don't spend that much just living and sitting at my chair in the office. I spend that much because I also work out every day, and I'm either running for 4 miles or swimming laps for 30 minutes or doing the stationary bike for an hour....otherwise, I'd need to eat about 1400-1500 calories to maintain. If you're not active, it's unlikely you should be eating 2,000 kcals. People don't realize our work changed. We used to have to walk to work, and to be on our feet all day long. My job is sitting all day I'm spending less calories and have easier access to more calories, and people are surprised average weight goes up?

Finally, people think there exist people who can eat whatever they want and not gain weight, because you might see me eat that 2,000 calorie lunch when you go out to eat with me, every time. You think that's representative, and you don't realize you have no idea what I"m eating for dinner, what I ate for breakfast, and what I'll eat the next days when I'm not meeting you for lunch. People who are thin simply don't eat as many calories and / or spend more than you. That's it. Metabolic differences exist, but that's peanuts compared to the real issues.

Not everyone needs to count calories, but those that don't simply aren't tempted by food as much, don't regularly snack, and normally gravitate to less calorie dense foods so they're getting less calories in the first place. If you're the guy always wondering, "should I get the fries today, or am I better off not getting a side", you need to count calories in order to actually answer that question. Have the fries and enjoy yourself, just do so responsibly (if you care about your weight. If you don't mind being overweight it's your life, and I have no right nor do I care to tell you can't choose to eat more because you'd rather do that than be in shape. You simply should understand that's the choice you're making and be free to do whatever makes you happy).

That's true.

That's not. If your unconscious behavior is to overeat, then it means you have to be forever vigilant. I count my calories every day. I will always count my calories every day. I always have to force myself to go workout even when I don't feel like it. I always have to weigh myself every day and ensure the weight remains healthy. None of this is unconscious behavior, none of it is temporary. It's just a responsibility, like showering, brushing your teeth, and flossing. You know you have to do it, and you know you'll always have to do it for your entire life, you don't get a break from it.

Hah. Yeah, I wasn't running Linux at all in those days, but I still doubt I benefited from it in any way. I remember my computer included an intel disk with sample software to demonstrate how great the processor was, that I'm sure was compiled with their own compiler with MMX support. It also came with a racing game that had MMX printed on the cover (really, go Intel marketing), so I'm sure they compiled it with support for those instructions. I can't be certain I remember the name of the game but I think it was called Pod.

That said, in the 2000s when I started getting into Linux, I experimented with Gentoo and going nuts with compiling optimizations (don't judge me, what idiot things were YOU doing in your 20s?), and I'm sure I enabled MMX and SSE.

No, I don't. I've never had more RAM than hard disk space, and I've definitely never seen it any cheaper. I would have loved that back in the day, we talked about setting up ram drives all the time to speed up disk access, which was really slow. This is just a case of a very large company paying a premium for ram because they needed it, and they didn't need the extra hard drive space.

In fact, it's pretty weird to have a Pentium 120 MHz with a 16MB HDD. When I upgraded from my 486, I got a Pentium 133 MHz (with MMX instruction set, w00...I had no idea what that meant at the time while still in high school, but Intel sure marketed it successfully) with 32MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive. My 486 had a 500 MB drive in it, which we upgraded to from an 80 MB drive.

Which is awesome of them? I mean, companies are under no obligation to give you their software for free just because they're going to stop development on it. Most don't. They can just stop selling, stop supporting, and move on.

I mean, talk about entitlement mentality. They give you software and you respond by saying, "but you're going to stop investing your resources on it!" They don't owe you anything, thank them for what they chose to give you anyway.

No, it really didn't. The second generation beats it pretty handily. My Pebble Time Steel lasts 10 days on a charge.

You're probably using a watchface that updates seconds. Those faces killed battery life on the first generation too. Pick something that doesn't display every second, and just displays the minutes, and you get the improved battery life they claim in their marketing.

Although, interestingly, even the computers do a bit worse :)

Chess isn't a broken game, and there are a lot of permutations that have never been seen before. In the beginning of the game, a lot more options are available, and chess programs rely on a known library of openings and their counters. The middle game, assuming you're equally familiar with the openings, is where you can get an advantage (although it's not likely these days, because computers have gotten fast enough to look a good number of turns ahead, as you've said. Still, it's possible). The end game is optimal for the computer, as the number of permutations left become small enough to exhaustively search. So, if you randomize the board, no opening library for the computer, same as as with the human masters and grandmasters.

Where that threshold is that we can call the endgame where the computer becomes flawless continuously comes a little bit earlier, as processing power improves.

No, they're not. They're not requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to all iPhones. They're requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to phones they have a warrant for, issued with probable cause.

They CAN, however, compel the safe maker to give them the specs on the safe, so that they may better try to crack it. Which is the FBI's point here. If you refuse to have your expert engineers help us, then hand over all the source code so we can make the modification ourselves.

Ever tried that with a chess program? Doesn't go over well. A wildly suboptimal play just makes the tree search look really good for the computer. It doesn't get emotionally distraught because it thinks you've seen something it didn't. It just sees better valued moves.

This Go algorithm is even more complex. It's a neural-network algorithm combined with tree-search (I don't play Go, but as I understand it, the number of permutations are so high, tree-search alone isn't feasible). This neural network was trained using input from previous tournaments, using games against expert players, and using games against itself. I don't think you can throw anything at it that will break it. Computers have officially become better than humans at Go. In a decade or so, when the really good Go programs can run in your phone, you'll be seeing the same type of cheating attempts going on that currently plague chess competitions.

Eh...most phones I've seen limit your key to a 4-digit pin. So we're really talking 10,000 combinations, and that's without taking in consideration the non-uniform distribution of pins people choose.

What about the previously slightly obese person and currently healthy weight person (by BMI measurement)? Because that's me. And even during the obese period, I never had any delusions about it not being as simple as balancing calories in and out. It was a matter of changing my mindset so that I was actually serious about the work involved.

Are they right that the number of calories you take in isn't exact? Of course. It's even harder to measure the number of calories out. Does this matter? Not in the least. They're good enough rough approximations. If you're trying to match your calories in to your calories out to a net -5 calories, you're doing it wrong. Aim for at least -500. Even if you're wrong by, say, 400 calories, you're still negative -100 and in the long term will lose weight. Sometimes you'll be wrong in the other direction and will be negative even more that 500 calories for that day. Chances are, in fact, that the long-term average will approximate what you're aiming for.

>And with good reason. Isn't the whole point of the registry to be able to contact the owner of a wayward quadcopter and hold them responsible for whatever has caused it to be in your possession.

Yes, but not directly. If somebody knocks out your mailbox with their car, you take down that license plate number, and give it to the police, who then run the plates and get a warrant. You can't directly get the name of who owns that license plate number and show up at the dude's door, and nor should you.

If somebody did something illegal that caused you to be in possession of their wayward quadcopter, then you can call the police and report it. Then let them figure out who the owner is. That prevents you from harassing a guy who was doing something perfectly legal that you think ought to be illegal.

As stupid as that reasoning is, that's the point.

There's a fad among certain UI people that you shouldn't confuse users with options, and give them only what they need. The small number of people who need to do more stuff than the majority of people, should either not do what they want to, and adapt to what the interface presents you, or go through a painful process to figure out how to do it. The idea being that if you're computer savvy enough to do something different than the majority of users, you're computer savvy enough to google and go through the extra process. If it's easily discoverable, the non-computer savvy user will come across it and get confused / perform an action he didn't mean to and doesn't know how to do undo.

I can't emphasize enough how stupid that is, but the gnome people have always suffered from it. I like their window manager a lot honestly, this is my one gripe. Options are good, people.