Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop runs on PCs and Macs. Download your copy from raspberrypi.com today.

Not contagious? How about secondhand smoke.

From what I've been told and read, mainframe processors have extensive self-checking circuitry. Their are designed with the intention of catching almost all errors within 1 cycle, and the rest within 2 cycles. Real companies with real responsibilities, like banks, used to only use mainframes, this being one of the reasons. When companies like Google and Facebook buy vast numbers of the cheapest processors they can get, well, they get what they pay for. Google has always hyped the resilience of their approach to individual failures, but I think they always assumed failures would be hard stops, not transient miscalculations. But to reliably get hard stops when errors occur, you have to buy mainframes, not cheap chipsets.

An event that has probability 1 is called "almost certain". (That way mathematicians can allow for an event of probability 0 that is not included in this event.) 35 years after I was taught this term it still cracks me up.

Every day or so I sit sipping coffee where I can see cars moving through an intersection in the middle of my town. At least once a week I see a car blow through the stop sign just outside going what looks like 30 miles per hour. No radar gun or nothin' but that's how it looks to me. I'm not talking about the many who slow down to only 5 or 10 MPH but the ones who don't appear to slow down at all.

The only party interested in having Windows work well on their laptop is the manufacturer, and that only until the thing is sold. After that, forget it. And laptop hardware is crazy, with a different chip being switched into the middle of the production run because it saves them maybe 10 cents per unit. And they fix the driver to match. For the version of Windows they expect to be installing for initial sale. Period. So I just take whatever the damned thing comes with and leave it alone. That approach has worked for me since 1997 (Thinkpad 765D with Windows 95) and I'm sticking with it.

The Deep Space Nine episode "In the Cards" has a wonderful bit of dialog between Jake and Nog. Jake wants to give a certain baseball to his father, and needs money from Nog to buy it. Nog says "Your society is so advanced that you don't need money." Jake: "Right." Nog: "Then you don't need mine!" (I only saw this episode that once, when first broadcast, but I think that's close enough.) The whole sequence of bartered exchanges is pretty hilarious, especially when they take advantage of Weyoun's hypochondria, but this comment on the absurdity of having no money is just perfect.

A degree in art history doesn't cost a great deal unless you choose to go to a college that decides to charge you a lot of money. You are free to choose a cheaper school, or one that offers you a scholarship. If that still isn't cheap enough, you are free to choose a different school, or a different major, or to follow a different career path.

A friend of mine ended up going to a 3rd-rank, state-supported college because it was cheap. After graduating with top honors, he got a scholarship to Cal Tech and earned a doctorate in computational chemistry, completely free of debt. He now manages a group of scientists at a national lab. Picking the college based on affordability didn't ruin his life.

Every Henry Fonda movie is over 25 years old. Copyright doesn't need to last that long in order for the artists to receive some reasonable compensation. The fact that a crazy long copyright period made a bunch of people richer than they would otherwise be is not interesting to me.

From everything I've ever observed about performers, good ones, they'd do it for free if they couldn't get paid to do it. Losing a shot at retiring on the proceeds of one big hit wouldn't stop a single artist. It might slow down the creation of media personalities and blockbuster special-effects extravaganzas, but not artists. Color me unconcerned with the future of civilization.

It's a 'real-time' collaboration tool / toolkit. You could build forum software that leverages Wave functionality, however.

Sure, it's not the best pointing device out there. Either a mouse or a trackball is going to be necessary for any serious clicking around. But for those times that you just need to move the mouse a bit and go back to typing, the keyboard clit is awesome. That actually describes most of my mousing so I'd love to have one of these. By any measurement it's far, far better than those crappy touchpads everyone is using these days. Those are simply unusable for any purpose.

After getting my clicky Das Keyboard a couple years ago, I thought I was done buying keyboards. But I'm lusting after that Unicomp. I wonder if you can get it with black keys.

Because Anarchist's Cookbook is not illegal in and of itself, but publishing copyrighted material without owner's consent is?

(note that linking to copyrighted material which is published legally with permission is not illegal)

I'm no expert on law, but can you give a better explanation as to why libel/slander, for example, are not protected under the First Amendment?

s/lice/guns/g Or mod chips. Or bongs. Or anything else that you want to put in the "I only sold it, it's not illegal to sell, just use" camp. How about Yellow Cake and Nukes? Somewhere there is a line - this is ok, and this is not. I feel sometimes like the line is in the wrong place. :(

The "interest groups" they are referring to are in _support_ of the 18+ category. Reading comprehension, mate!

(I do think it amusing that the pollies have basically come out and said: "we're delaying the implementation of this policy, because the public response has been too positive" ;-)