Say what you want about Facebook, but it sounds like they have really good people working on Messenger. A while back they did a massive migration and wrote an article about how they did it so seemlessly: https://engineering.fb.com/cor...

Who is currently selling 200 gigabit Ethernet cards?

Well, they sell skins, and they use peer pressure to get kids to buy/earn them (nobody wants to be a "default"). Not only is this a brilliant business plan, but now kids have some skin in the game (sorry for the pun).

Obligatory IANAL, but I don't think this act applies here. BIPA (http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/publicacts/95/095-0994.htm) defines a "Biometric identifier" as follows:

        "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, ...

Faceprints are not explicitly part of this. They are approximate representations of faces for tagging, but this act seems geared toward more detailed scans needed to (say) unlock a phone.

If capturing multiple frames of a person's face constitutes a biometric, then that could render security cameras and recording video in public illegal.

I think it's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I wish the US would do this a week before elections, with a few test cuts in advance. Foreign opinion shouldn't be ignored, but there are bad actors (e.g. "troll farms") operating outside of US jurisdiction.

I'm curious how hard it would be for the US to disconnect from the outside Internet. Hawaii and Alaska have voting populations and would need to be "inside" the firewall. Ideally we would continue to relay outside traffic through our routers to avoid impacting (say) Latin America's connectivity too much.

Back when there was AIM, MSN, etc., a chat program called Trillian came along and let people use the major chat platforms with one client. Then there was an open source one called Gaim, which was later renamed Pidgin. Then they tried to standardize it with XMPP and such, but that died down for some reason. Pidgin is still around, and supports Facebook messenger. We're back where we were 15 years ago. Now get off my lawn.

The biggest hindrance to adoption is that major browsers, along with JavaScript itself, handle strings in UCS-2 and tend to mishandle codepoints above 0xFFFF. Hopefully this will push browser makers and web designers to handle UTF-16 surrogate pairs properly.

It's about 1.08 millitexases, or 1.25 Chicagos.

Good
luck trying to find this post later.

Please get help. You have so much to live for.

Ohh, nevermind. Knock yourself out.

I ran the Windows 8 upgrade assistant, and had a much better experience:

• * It presented the option to download the CD, which I took.
• * The install CD lets you do a nuke-from-orbit reinstall of the system.
• * While the installer runs, it shows you "the new way to use Windows" (i.e. how to get to the charms bar)

Also, knowing a few shortcuts will save you a lot of pain:

• * You can use Alt+F4 to close Metro apps, and Alt+F4 on the desktop to shut down / sleep / hibernate / etc.
• * You can search apps, settings, etc. by hitting the Windows key, then typing your search (though you still have to click the category to see the results).

For completeness, a a few bad things about Windows 8:

• * If you set up a Windows Live-backed account (the default), it asks for an awful lot of personal information. Worse, you need an internet connection to log in to your computer. This problem is easy to fix: reinstall the system, and set up a local account instead.
• * The control panels (not one, mind you) break continuity big time. If you open the charms bar from the Start screen and click control panel, you get a Metro-styled interface, but only a limited set of options. If you do the same thing from the Desktop, you get a desktop interface with more options. If you click one of the "advanced" links, it takes you to one of the original settings programs that have been around since '95.

I find Windows 8 to be usable. Not great, but at least usable.

Check.

Street cars kill enough people as it is. Flying cars would be like World War II every year.

We already have world peace. It's just that some countries don't want to participate.

Pfft, my mod points expire, right before I get a chance to mark spam.