Not to mention the stigma.

The words "dweeb", "geek", and "nerd" still carry significant amounts of stigma that dates back decades. Basically, unless a nerd can show up a jock in a real-life life-or-death matter and garners national/international attention, I don't see that stigma breaking anytime soon.

More efficient than corn, perhaps, but what about vs. sugar beets?

Irrelevant.

Even on a sloped surface or on a lap, coffee that is only at 60 degrees (your average coffee temperature) would elicit cries of pain and a scramble to get the hot stuff off, but the odds are good you'll get nothing worse than a mild redness which should fade over a day or two. Coffee (or any other liquid) at *90* degrees is just asking for trouble: almost like holding your hand in front of a steam vent while the kettle's boiling. The point being made (and the nail for that McD's franchise) was they they didn't just make the coffee too hot--they made it HAZARDOUS. Hazardous as in carrying 90-degree coffee would be pretty much like carrying a similar amount of concentrated nitric or sulfuric acid.

From what I've read...

The temperature of the coffee in question being served was somewhere near 90 degrees (Celsius, in case any Americans are reading). That 10 shy of water's boiling point and well above your average coffee serving temperature (a much safer but still hot 60 degrees, which is also right about the scalding point).

Moral dilemma.

The trouble is that this "distilled" news is what people WANT. People are inherently lazy (I'm not speaking about this in a negative context rather as an evolutionary trait--perhaps the term "economy of effort" would make a more accurate description). With all the average person undergoes every day, the last thing they want to do is be forced to THINK their way through the evening news. They want to know what's going on around them without having to think so much, so "distilled" news tends to get watched and read.

Thing is...

...the roads, rails, and skies all have physics to bolster their advantages. If you want delivery from warehouse straight to warehouse, it's hard to beat a tractor-trailer that can travel the roads from loading bay straight to loading bay. That said, trains have advantages in bulk and less friction to fight, which is why they can transports lots of stuff for much less per mile than truck. And then you have jets: when speed is a must.

It'll be interesting to see how any of these can be unseated while still obeying the physics that give each method its preferred niche.

Thing about sandboxes.

AFAIK no one's been able to build one completely sand-tight and failsafe. Microsoft should adopt the philosophy that even a Metro app could escape the sandbox conceivably unless they intend to vet every Metro app and app update personally ala Apple.

Differences.

While airplanes come in all shapes and sizes they have a number of differences from the flying car concept. They require dedicated areas to operate. Can't just set one down in front of the house or like that. Pilots receive specialist training that goes well beyond your average road exam. And since airplanes don't suffer from the design constraints of the concept of flying cars (think objects the size--at worst, slightly larger--of the average automobile), certain aerodynamic considerations can be factored in to make certain kinds of failure a less-than-catastrophic affair.

In any event...

Both Duracell and Energizer are still going. People still need alkaline batteries for their everyday stuff, and they keep a diverse line of specialist batteries (such as lithium watch batteries, NiMH rechargables--they incidentally keep working on that tech to differentiate themselves, it's why we have batteries that hold charges for longer), so I don't think either one is going away anytime soon (in any event, Energizer is now a conglomerate with acquisitions in personal care products as well). Nor is Rayovac, which continues to hold a nice spot at the low end of the battery spectrum.

In addition...

...I think Fuji was smart enough to focus on the one part of the old process that still had significance: the printing. They adapted the process to one that could used image files as the base, and suddenly digital cameras weren't a concern at that end (since many people still want physical prints in the end). I'm sure you'll find many print labs still using Fuji equipment (I know Walmart still uses them for their standard photo systems--the "instant" jobs go through HP) and Fuji digital camera processing frontends.

Probably it's that future that's wrong.

Flying cars and vacations on the moon, for the time being, have run into a couple of nasty reality checks.

For the first, it's the basic fact of gravity: what goes up must come down, so if your flying car breaks down OVER the middle of nowhere, where does that leave you?

For the second, it seems to escape some people that getting something out of the earth's gravity well takes an extraordinary amount of energy. if we want space travel to be more ubiquitous, we're gonna need to lick the problem of a better source of escape energy first: something like an electric->kinetic converter useable up to over 30,000km/h.

Session hijacking.

How do you get past a two-factor authorization? Simple. Wait until an action needing the second factor is given, then alter the details behind the scenes. The bank gets the request the malware wants and sends out the second factor request. Depending on the variant, either the user enters the second factor thinking it's for their action when it's really for the malware or a mobile extension of the malware (perhaps orchestrated by alterations made by the PC variant) snags the factor off your phone. Either way, the malware now has clearance to do its dirty work.

I thnk that's the point.

It's intended to make the user aware of the motives of the website, much like how, in the US. most states require that all retail prices be posted PRE-tax, so that they become aware of how much extra they pay to their respective state governments (petrol is one exception owing to the fact it's covered under multiple taxes and normally purchased to a price rather to a quantity--taxes are posted by other means there).

If a site won't operate unless they track you, then it should make you pause and think, "Is there an alternative?" Now, it may well be that sites, losing advertising reveneues, may switch over to paywalls; this could well be the intention, an attempt to put an actual price on parts the Internet for public debate on the price of personal data.

Nah.

Word will get out that imitation horn powder is on the loose. That it's not good, could make you sick, even. Next thing you know, the demand will switch to WHOLE horn. Besides, they'll spin a yarn that the mystic effects of rhino horn actually dissipate within 60 minutes of grinding (exposure to the air and such) so that it's actually for the best to get the horn whole, grind and imbibe it in one sitting.

Counterfeiting rhino horn powder (essentially keratin) is one thing. Counterfeiting a whole rhino horn (including the shape, colours, and natural impuriies--which are supposedly the "magic ingredients" in rhino horn) would probably get more complicated.

It ain't slander...

...if it's fact. Speaking the truth is not inherently a crime. Calling a man a bastard is perfectly fine if you can prove he really IS the illegitimate son of a nobleman.

What would you rather have?

America (especially conservative Americans) doesn't like government control of things. They sold the spectrum on the market, and things simply gravitated. Trouble is, fairness and competition tend to have large areas of exclusivity. Unless competition is cutthroat, there's no incentive to be better, yet this cutthroat competition inevitably causes things to gravitate towards having winners and losers, which is inherently unfair. People have been trying to mull that problem long before America came about.

How about...

...give a man a smartphone and he'll be able to look up not just how to find a good rod cheap but also where is a good place to fish? Knowledge is power, and fishing smart can be more productive than fishing hard.

Maybe the other way around.

Where I stand, most of the convenience fees I see get assessed for the following:

- Paper bills. Understandable. Involves the use of paper and the snail mail system, which inevitably cost real money. Electronic deliveries of bills are so cheap as to be negligible to them. Still, some people insist on a paper bill, believing it to be more legally permanent and binding than an electronic one.

- Paying by credit card. This is because some firms don't do credit card payments themselves. Most go through clearinghouses who take a cut, which the company will tend to pass on to the subscriber. They would prefer you pay at one of their facilities or authorized agents if they have such or by EFT which has lower overhead (since they can usually handle those directly).

Excuse me.

But since the modern American CAME from England, we hold an English heritage and therefore can properly claim our language to be English, just as any Jamaican, Indian, Canadian, Australian, etc. can lay claim to speaking English as well. All have English heritage. Just as a number of Québécois and Haitians can properly claim their language to be French (their heritage is French) and all the Mexicans and Central and South Americans can call themselves Hispanic and say they speak Spanish (or Portuguese in the case of Brazil).

How about the dictionary?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hacker

Definition 3B: a microcomputer user who attempts to gain unauthorized access to proprietary computer systems.

Like I said, this definition DOES NOT imply an unlawful intent, since a white-hat hacker would be doing the same thing but for legitimate reasons (such as being hired by the owner of the system being penetrated).

As for "cracker", which I also mentioned, that DOES imply malicious intent since a cracker's intent isn't just to penetrate but to DAMAGE as well.

Since we both have authoritative sources (yours an Internet RFC, mine an official dictionary), we'll have to say BOTH are correct.

It may be simpler than that.

Compatibility in this case may be nothing more than making sure it doesn't hit the same frequencies at the same time as any of the other systems. It's of mutual benefit since the last thing ANY of the countries want (China included) is crosstalk messing up the signals.

Thing is...

Polaris is actually the tail end of Ursa Minor (aka the Little Dipper). Why refer to Ursa Major when the star that has guided navigators for centuries is part of another constellation?

Actually...

...people who gain access into other people's computers through unofficial channels are, by definition, hackers. That said, there are hackers (white-hat, ethical hackers--legitimate security researchers, penetration testers, etc.) and there are hackers (black-hats, crackers, government and industrial spies, etc.).

A bodged-up analogy.

Think of yourself trying to listen to a faint shoddily-recorded MP3 (let's assume for legal reasons it's a self-recorded dictation) from the speaker of your phone. It's very hard to hear, so you basically have to put the phone right up to your ear to hear it clearly enough to understand.

Now, imagine trying to achieve the same feat while there's a death metal band performing nearby. In contrast to the tinny sound coming from your phone, the band's using huge speakers and are playing very intense and very deep music. So you try to cup your ear and do other things to filter out the music. Thing is, not only is it very loud (so that you're hard pressed to muffle it all out) but also so deep that you tend to FEEL as well as HEAR the music. No filter you could cook up is going to cut it in this case because the phone itself is starting to shake.

There's only one practical solution: put some distance between you and the band. But there's a problem. You were here first so you have dibs on the spot, but the band counters that there's nowhere else to play. Either other, bigger bands have already booked all the other possible spots. And this is their one and only chance for a breakout performance.

They couldn't.

"LightSquared should have bought the correct spectrum for their needs; they did not."

They couldn't. All the available spectrum's already been taken up. A de jure oligopoly is in effect because everyone who bought spectrum intends to use it, so there's no spectrum to resell. The mobile spectrum market is essentially closed unless you disrupt the market. LightSquared is essentially doing the only thing it possibly can do as a mobile upstart. If you can't get into the market the normal way, DISRUPT it.

And the worst part?

The two fields appear to be (culturally, at least) mutually exclusive. People in the IT field rarely go into law and government, and vice versa. So what happens you have an issue that's both technical and legal at the same time. The IT people lack the legal angle, the lawmakers lack the technical angle, and they're so far apart culturally that they probably don't even understand each other.

For an eye and a brain, perhaps.

But perhaps someone can cook up an app that uses the camera, detects visual blips and interprets the pulses as Morse Code and prints the messages accordingly. With the right conditions, it should be able to pull off 3 wpm if not a little faster, depending on the capture speed of the camera.

The radio idea sounds interesting, too. Some phones can pick up radio frequencies, after all.

Think universal access.

Think being able to make a document on one machine, going elsewhere (even thousands of miles away) and being able to retrieve that same document again. And then update it and send it back. From a computer, phone, tablet, whatever is handy. THIS is an access paradigm shift that hasn't happened until recently because two things held it back: ubiquitous data access at acceptable speeds (3G and up along with more WiFi hotspots and more mobile-capable devices satisfy these requirements for most documents and even the odd audio stream) and a ubiquitous conduit to transfer that information (cloud storage systems, especially user-friendly ones like Box, Dropbox, etc. that can work with these mobile devices).

Asynchronous computing.

There are a few big problems with asynchronous computing. One of then is instruction coordination and dependency. A lot of computing tasks in a CPU are interdependent so have to wait on the state of different units. In synchronous units, timings are better known so processors can be tuned so that dependent results arrive at predictable times, reducing the need for gatekeeping.

The second and more fundamental issue goes to uncertainty. Without the clock ruling the processor, there must still exist some form of coordination between the parts of a processor to determine who gets what first and so on. Otherwise, you can end up in metastable states which can produce dangerous uncertainties.

Um...wrong context?

i think they're saying "Mr. Dot" as in Mr. Dot EATER. Think a certain circular yellow sprite being chased around a maze by four ghosts.

Correct.

Don't blame Valve for the prices you see. It's the vendors who set them, Steam is simply the marketplace.

Perhaps I can assist.

Myrrh, like frankincense, is a plant product. In this case, it comes from the genus Commiphora, a genus of trees known to grow in very arid, rocky soil. The two have a lot in common. Both come from trees and both are harvested by "bleeding" the trees. AND both were considered extremely valuable in their day (because of their rarity). The line from "We Three Kings" describes it as "bitter perfume", and there's basis for that. The name comes from Aramaic and essentially describes it as bitter. And Myrrh was indeed used as a perfume (also like frankincense, it could be used as incense).

I admit, I used Wikipedia, but the article here is pretty cut-and-dry with plenty of references. It's enough for a general understanding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrrh

Heterogeneous Computing

That's what the article is talking about in a nutshell.

HOMOgeneous multicore computing came about for reasons of practicality and compatibility. Practicality because they were easier to design. Then there was the idea that no matter where on the CPU the instructions went, it would work. It was a practical solution for the first mainstream push of multicore computing.

These days, though, we're starting to see the limitations, such as underutilization. Some tasks can only be divided so much in the x86 instruction set, plus there are tasks like matrix and floating point operations that don't play to x86's strengths. With a better understanding of identifying these outlying tasks, it becomes more practical to start calling in "specialists" and start departing from the homogeneous multicore design.

With proper task management, we can make sure tasks don't get sent to the wrong core, and we can utilize all parts of the CPU more efficiently: kinda like the modern workplace where the push is to get the workers to do as much as they can so you can keep the labor costs down.

Heterogeneous multicore computing is far from new, but it now has more mainstream support. The Cell Broadband Engine was an early attempt at a mainstream heterogeneous CPU, but it suffered from the "first is worst" syndrome: other players managed to outclass it pretty quickly, but the idea has stuck. We'll probably see more heterogeneous computing in the coming years.

Sounds interesting...

...but how do you pull off (C)? There's more than just timestamps involved. VERY precise timing would be needed to ensure each timestamp fires at precisely the right nanosecond (and I DO mean nano--electromagnetic energy can travel almost a foot--a good 25cm or so--in that short a time). Otherwise, the signals won't match up, confusing the receiver.

How about this?

Frankincense is being investigated by the PHARMACEUTICAL industry for its potential as a MEDICINE. This is one great fear about the loss of biodiversity. What good is finding out a certain obscure plant happens to contain a very useful medicine (and many of our medicines and other techs got their start from natural sources) if you learn they died out already?

What about IPv6?

"Of course...we don't really need DNS. We'll all learn to recall and communicate with eachother by learning numerical IP addresses by heart and learn how to setup dedicated computers and install dedicated open wi-fi's and share our files across entire neighbourhoods."

Some people have enough trouble memorizing telephone numbers. At least IPv4 is at most 12 digits, so within the reach of people who routinely dial international phone numbers. But what about if IPv6 becomes mainstream. That's up to 32 different likely-nonsensical hexadecimal characters (so now numbers AND letters) with colons in between each set of 4. And what if your ISP changes your IP? That was one motivation behind DNS: the number can change, but just reassign the name and no one notices.

According to a post further down...

...Apple actually filed the patent in *1996*, just as the Internet ITSELF was turning mainstream. Meaning it likely predates any phone on the market that would have the capability (since GRPS and its successors didn't take off until later) and may even eclipse any existent example of prior art anyone could dredge up. Like it or not, Apple may well have beaten everyone to the punch in this case.

OTOH, the fact the patent was filed 15 years ago also points to a shortened amount of time left for Apple to take advantage of it. As this is a US Design patent filed after 1995 (meaning the patent has a flat 20-year term), Apple has a little under five years to go.

CMYK isn't the issue.

As most printing applications require CMYK use anyway (basically, if you're using color, you're ALREADY using CMYK printing). Since these were intended to be used on posters and other advertisements that are predominantly color, that's no big shakes. Actually, you CAN use black-and-white Tags (Lowe's uses those).

No, I think the big problem was the Microsoft encumbrance: going through Microsoft to get the URL. If you ask me, if HCCB (the actual technical initials for the barcode) wants to make a comeback, Microsoft needs to remove the encumbrances and let people use them freely to encode more than just shortcuts. Think full contact information and so on packed into something you can snap with a camera (with HCCB, this is actually feasible--in 8-color mode, it can do up to a few KB/in^2.