On the other hand, http://underhanded.xcott.com/

Some of the solutions people came up with to hide malicious code are quite elegant.

http://xkcd.com/882/

Even the example of p=0.01 from the article is subject to the same problem. That's why the LHC worked for something like 6 sigma before declaring the higgs boson to be discovered. Even then, there's always the chance, however remote, that statistics fooled them.

I'm just waiting for other industries to start realizing the brilliance of licensing something instead of selling it. Imagine "buying" a house, when in reality all you did was obtain a license to use a copy of a house design. You might own the land the house is on. You can sell the land, but the license for the house is non-transferable. Except maybe under specific conditions stipulated in the license (which probably involves a transfer of money to the home builder or whomever owns the "copyright" on the home design).

I would think that nobody would agree to such a thing, so it could just be buried somewhere in the mountain of paperwork you have to sign anyway. Nobody reads that legalese anyway, right? (If you can't tell, the last time I went through this process the letters E U L A kept going through my mind.)

OK, so maybe a house is too extreme of an example, but the same principle could be applied to almost any item.

The software industry somehow made this standard without most of the population of the world knowing. You say that "it is well understood that they sell licenses, not complete copyrights" but I completely disagree. Most people don't even know what a license is to begin with. And it's a concept that (so far) is limited to the digital world. Books, photographs, sculptures ... yeah, you can't legally make copies of any of them, and everybody knows that. But since when did I not actually purchase that book? Since when could the author/publisher prevent me from selling that book to my friend?

The reason for this confusion, I think, is that you don't buy a license to begin with. License is a verb, not a noun, in this case. You don't buy a game. You are licensed to use a copy of it. A license is a contract, not a physical object. You are not allowed to make further copies, except as stipulated by the licensing agreement. A license is something you're granted. It's not something you purchase, as that would imply ownership. If you "owned" a license (a contradiction in terms, really), then you should be able to resell that license to someone else. That's what ownership means.

What digital media realized is that without a physical object to own (not even a CD anymore, as if that stopped them to begin with), there was nothing to buy. Nothing to hold, nothing to resell. The copyright retains control over all copies, not just control over the ability to make copies -- and that's what this is all about.

The war is over, and x86 won. But it didn't win because it's the best, but because of economics, marketing, and the quirks of history.

It's the same story everywhere in technology, be it instruction sets, MP3 players, or video media. The winner only needs to be good enough. And x86 has been good enough, hasn't it? Not the best, of course, and by accident some things (like SSE, as you pointed out) have even been made easier.

And yet, the computing world would be better off if we could somehow break our backwards-dependency on x86 to something faster and more efficient.

But ... isn't 4k just a simple upscale of 720 and 1080? Use four pixels for each pixel of 1080 and nine for each pixel of 720? Maybe I'm just ignorant, though.

That's exactly what they were doing. The Constitution specifically says that the definition of a militia would be provided by congress at a future date:

They're not "fully integrated." IDEs can only call the gcc command, and have no access to internal data structures. The GPL prevents these IDEs from using the libraries directly.

Compare this to clang which provides a library API and has the license (BSD-like) to back this up.

Becuase revenue and profits should somehow matter on Slashdot. We're mostly techies here, not investors. Market share is a much better metric for things we're interested in.

When I see a company charging significantly more for a marginally better product, I think "price gouging" and "profiteering" not "exceptional company." but maybe that's just me.

Besides, even investors are worried that the ever-decreasing market share is eventually going to catch up to the high-margin pricing model eventually. Maybe that's in the next couple years (a common view, it seems), but I think it'll be a while yet.

Sweat isn't smelly. It sounds a little odd, but an alternative is to take a shower before cycling. That gets you nice and clean so the bacteria don't get you smelly. Then, at your destination, just freshen up (towel down, deodorant, change clothes, and fix your helmet hair).

That said ... being sweaty isn't exactly pleasurable, so your overall point still applies.

Yeah, someone needs to verify that information. The HealthSherpa passes that responsibility on to the insurance company, which isn't a terrible way to do it anyway.

Playing around with the HealthSherpa, it provides a quick and easy way to specify household size and income, and then updates the prices with the subsidy. Very, very easy. It's also very easy to list the ages and smoking status of people covered by the insurance, and again updates prices accordingly.

The biggest feature it's missing is a plan comparison. All it shows is the premium and coinsurance (in the form of plan type). Sometimes you can guess the copay or deductible from the plan name. Is that information public?

We CAN'T be watching the same C-SPAN channel. Just how dull are your politicians?

Yes, some people actually exercise outside. Cycling is a great form of exercise, and is much better when done during daylight hours.

Keeping DST, for me at least, means I can commute by bike more without messing with headlights, etc.

You're thinking of the Homecoming Saga, which is basically a reworking of the plot and stories in The Book of Mormon in science fiction format.

Ender's Game only has a few oblique references to anything Mormon (Ender's mother was raised Mormon, for example).

Chromecast. If memory serves me right, a decent VCR cost twice that much back in the day, note even counting for inflation.

Caveat: still need a TV with HDMI ... but even those can be had for cheap anymore.