So ignoring the probability of this being a legitimate alien here for a minute - Carbon dating is based on the accumulation of Carbon-14 in tissues of life on Earth. Assuming an alien was not living out their lifecycle on Earth, it's entirely possible that they have a different native ratio of c14 in their environment. This would make any dating results (assuming the alien claim was legitimate) invalid.

Don't worry - Pai isn't suddenly getting a conscience. Remember that Pai is basically beholden to Verizon (where he will end up at after his "public service"). Verizon is not a wireline provider (like AT&T, Comcast, Cox etc...) When 5g starts to roll out, one of the key battles is going to be over telephone poles. There are going to be tens of thousands of mini-cells mounted on poles to support this rollout - and if you don't own the poles (like Verizon), you're going to be at a disadvantage compared to the companies who do (like AT&T)

This vote isn't pro-internet or pro-freedom or anti-monopoly - it's entirely about ensuring that Verizon isn't at a competitive disadvantage in rolling out their 5g network.

Talk to me about IOPS -- Input/Output operations Per Second -- or don't pretend you're talking to me about performance.

Not saying this isn't actually really exciting, but that's the metric in at least 90% of use cases.

World's largest *unclassified* tunnel boring machine.

My sense is that the MEAN Stack (Mongo, Express, AngularJS, Node) is sort of winning. There's some packaging of it over at mean.io.

Personally, I'm really getting interested in Meteor (www.meteor.com). Watch the videos, and realize I saw a smart non-coder go from zero to *ridiculously* interactive site design in three months.

No really.

I took a pass at Python 3 a while back. The amount of hoops I needed to jump through, to deal with compilation errors around Unicode handling, was terrifying. It was simply a poor user experience.

Python 2.7 just works. Sure, it's a nightmare past a certain scale point. But until you get into the dregs of OO it really is executable pseudocode.

Python 3 is some other language that lost that property.

The big problem is that we don't ship languages with telemetry that reports when they fail to work. So things that are completely obvious to outsiders never make it to inner circles. Not that I can really see any way for Python 3 to mend its errors.

My smartphone definitely has free will. I can not predict when it will reboot on its own, when it will freeze on a screen or when it will lie to me about notifications. I think it not only has free will, but is also a sociopath!

Seriously. Write some code, publish it on Github. Spin up a single serving web page, does one interesting thing as soon as you arrive. Remember, everyone else with resumes could be pretending, you're actually doing stuff.

For work experience, sign up on freelancing sites like odesk. Take jobs just to do them. Nobody knows how old you are, there. Even if all you can do is sysadmin -- well, admin some cloud services!

Cavalry Pelican CASD00064MIS 2.5" 64GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820411004

After the data restore, chkdsk had some issues to take care of (as you would expect). I don't have any method to do a full data integrity check, but the system has run without issue for a few months now.

I recently had a "old" (cir 2008) 64gb SSD drive die on me. It's death followed this pattern:

• Inexplicable system slowdowns. In hindsight, this should have been a warning alarm.
• System crash, followed by a failure to boot due to unclean ntfs volume which couldn't be fixed by chkdisk
• Failed to mount r/w under Ubuntu. Debug logs showed that the volume was unclean and all writes failed with a timeout
• Successful r/o mount showed that the filesystem was largely intact
• Successful dd imaged the drive and allowed a restore to a new drive.

After popping a new disk in and doing a partition resize, my system was back up and running with no data loss. Of all the storage hardware failures I've experienced, this was probably the most pain-free as the failure caused the drive to simply degrade into a read-only device.

I'm not seeing any data on what portion of those keys with bad moduli were actually attached to valid certificates.

It's damn fine survey work, but the conclusions are just strange. More detail here:

<a href="http://dankaminsky.com/ronwhit">Survey is good. Thesis is strange.</a>

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/82-percent-of-atts-q4-2011-sales-are-smartphones-66-percent-are-iphones.ars

Yeah. 66% of AT&T's 4th quarter sales were iPhones. I was on Verizon for years, switched to AT&T only for their iPhone, and stuck with them only for their GSM capabilities worldwide. Sure, your margins are less when you offer a better service. Would you prefer no sales though?

The platform that most successfully upgraded itself was the NES. One of the degrees of freedom they had, because there were chips in each cartridge, was to deploy new memory management units inside the games themselves. Quite literally, the NES became more powerful for games released later in its dev cycle. SNES did this too, with the SuperFX chip inside of Starfox (the most popular DSP in the world, for its era) but it wasn't quite the "all games ship upgrading hardware".

I suspect if there was ever to be upgradable hardware, it'd have to work by yearly subscription, and it'd have to be no more than $50 a year for the part. However, with guaranteed sales in the millions of units (as games would hard-require it) the logistics of making some pretty crazy stuff fit into $50/yr wouldn't be unimaginable. Remember that XBox Live is already pulling, what, $60/yr?