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Yup. Basically at some point or another, you have to trust somebody . Unless you make your hardware circuits from scratch then write a bootstrapping compiler in binary.

Actually, the Vikings lived in the Americas for five hundred years. This was fairly well known at the time in Iceland.

What Columbus had that the Vikings didn't was that thier American culture died out before the printing press was invented. Columbus, who was by all accounts a total buffoon, too stupid to even realise what he'd bumped into, became famous because the printing press had been invented a few decades earlier. Thus all of Europe found out about his explorations, rather than just a few nautically-inclined iberians. Empowered to communicate, they could figure out what he'd found, even if he was too stupid to see it.

Fedora has SELinux, and everyone complains about and disables it

. . . Wut? Dude, SELinux was merged into the Linux kernel. A decade ago. Development continues. merges continue. And as a "security researcher" like yourself you should know that Linux has a lot of MAC implementations: TOMOYO, SELinux, AppArmor and SMACK.

AppArmor is an extremly lightweight form of MAC, and only Ubuntu implements it correctly.

As apposed to Window's "rudimentary MAC implementation"? And I don't know what's wrong with SUSE's AppArmor, but Ubuntu is the most common Linux distribution. And as for "lightweight".

[AppArmor] also only applies to applications that ship with the distro.

Uh...... bullshit? Cite that. Seriously. Because it's not really an optional thing. That's the "M" in MAC. "Mandatory". Anything you get from the solution center, apt-get, or download and compile are going to be running with the mother-may-I from AppArmor. Were you getting ahead of yourself and thinking about ASLR?

Most distributions don't include applications compiled with support for DEP and ASLR, despite the support being in the kernel.

AH! Now you say DEP and ASLR aren't common. Just like MAC isn't common in Linux. Because Ubuntu just isn't common enough for you (until later in your post). And hey, you're probably right about the uptake of DEP and ASLR by Linux applications. But Windows applications fail just as hard. Also, wow that was a way's back there, but the discussion originally focused on security. You know, people using TOR? So, for this aspect, it doesn't matter so much how common a feature is, as long as it's available to the people who want security. So, you know, stop making arguments that don't make sense. Like suggesting a child instal Win7 on a 486. I'm not going to let you forget that fuckup.

[number of] Vulnerabilities are a pretty poor measure of security,

Yeah, I'd agree, but you're the one quoted the marketing fluff: "Windows is more secure than most Linux distributions. Due to the mitigating technologies done right and increased focus on security resulting in few vulnerabilities." So I figured I'd throw some statistics at you.

Also a fun statistic, from your very source
Linux: Unpatched 0% (0 of 259 Secunia advisories)
Windows 7: Unpatched 4% (6 of 148 Secunia advisories)

But yeah, on this point you're right. Linux has had more vulnerabilities. Generally less severe then what's been seen in Win7 though.

Ok, I'll bite.

Cool - allow me to dispel some bits:

-- You still need to patch, or install 140+ dependencies to install one application. Same difference.

RedHat-based: yum -y install (whatever).
Debian-based: apt-get install (whatever).

Best part is, you can put the whole list in at once if you want in one go.

Windows world? It's gotten better (adding roles and features), but it's still reboot hell at times.

-- You still need to reboot. A lot. More than I thought.

Only if you're patching the kernel or glibc. Protip: If you don't want to bother plowing through reboots just because you don't like restarting services, learn to use the telinit command. ;)

-- Things that really ought to be automatic, aren't. I spent a good 50% of the lab doing really fiddly things like cut & pasting iptables rules to open firewall ports. The installer really should have just done that for me.

Clue: Windows application installers don't usually mod the firewall either (unless we're talking MSFT-branded ones, e.g. SQL Server.)

Binding services together and just generally getting things to start up and talk required an awful lot of error prone manual labour.

'fraid you'll have to be more specific than what you posted, because you're not making sense here. What exactly do you mean by "binding services together"?

I love the disclaimer in the training guide: "Linux configuration scripts do not tolerate typos, are case sensitive, and are not possible to validate before running the associated service." Fun stuff. I can't wait to diagnose random single-character problems in 10 kilobyte files when the only error is that one of a dozen services barfed when started.

You mean like when a seemingly random multi-MB .aspx file has a single typo in it, causing IIS to not run, with only a cryptic (and definitely non-intuitive) generic blurb buried somewhere deep in Event Viewer? Or how about a typo in some config file (lurking under a dozen nested folders) causes SSRS to fall over?

Or are you just arsed over case-sensitivity? ;)

Wow, the 70s called and wanted their limitations back: spaces in file names?

Just like in Powershell, you may want to learn to use quotes or escape chars... and with MSFT moving away from the GUI at the server level, you'd better get used to it.

IPv6? In theory, not in practice.

Now I know you're trolling, or are completely ignorant.

GUI config wizards? Nope.

Clue: Wizards are going away in Windows too. Better brush up on Powershell. ;)

Want to make a configuration change to a service without having to stop & start it? You're dreaming!

That's actually an advantage: one can change all kinds of differing network info (IP addy, DNS, NIS/windbind, etc) over ssh (think RDP for grown men ;) ), and not have the machine blink out until you're ready to commit those changes.

An editor more user friendly than vi?

Try EMACS (I kid, I kid...) In all seriousness, there's a zillion of them, with varying opinions. vi on the other hand has the advantage of being universal. I can use it in Linux, HPUX, Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, etc.

A lot more portable and capable than Notepad, dontcha think?

-- I love the undecipherable command-line wizardry. I'm not an idiot, but how-the-fuck would I know what "-e" does on some random command?

man {so

No, iPhone can only use the same charger as an iPad or iPod touch, nothing else.

Wrong. http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/74660/can-you-charge-an-iphone-5-from-a-standard-non-apple-micro-usb-cable - now go to bed without dessert.

Damn Small Linux is a modern distro. It's one made to work on things like 486's. The nice thing about Linux and the open/free format of the environment is that it's AMAZINGLY agile and adjustable. It makes the term IT RUNS LINUX into a catchphrase. Do try to keep up.

Seriously, I think you need to read up on how these technologies work.

I really do. Because I actually don't know much about, well, most of this. I'm a C developer working in avionics, not some sysadmin who has to harden networks. But the fact that your claims are refuted by the most basic of internet searches show that you're full of shit.

My point was that on average, Windows is more secure than most Linux distributions

A contentious argument, but one you're free to make. I'd suggest you put forth some sort of justification for that statement.

Due to the mitigating technologies done right...

And what such technologies would those be?
MAC, ASLR, DEP, and UAC? I've shown that Linux incorporates those mitigating technologies. Your argument is invalid. (Pft, "Done right"? Come on)

...and increased focus on security...

Sheet marketing fluff.

...resulting in few vulnerabilities.

Well Linux developers take longer to close the vulnerabilities, but look at the numbers. There are a LOT less vulnerabilities for Linux. (in 2012 at least). Furthermore, the entire report was a piece of FUD made by a MS partner who was trying to spin it best they could. I have no doubt that MS has had an increased focus on security. Unfortunately, they like their marketers more than their engineers, and they're working that propaganda machine hard. And apparently you've fallen for it. Seriously, just ask around.

Well, that may not be true. It would seem that when the transporter is operating normally, the original matter is in fact sent. We even see a first person view which is uninterrupted during transport. On the other hand, under special circumstances some people are able to use the transporter to make duplicates or new individuals from patter buffer records (i.e. Data makes a new Picard at one point).

Obviously there is a healthy debate on this subject.

Algorithms aren't patentable.

I'm not a programmer, so I'll tend to defer to your knowledge. However, have a look at this article on how to patent algorithms.

And this discussion on a programmer's forum about patented algorithms. (as an aside, Google's Page Rank is a patented algorithm? *shock*)

My point is that IP law is in a state of flux and given the uncertainty and the risk-adverse corporate culture most companies have, I won't be surprised if the directive from management was "Don't copy, make our own".

Further, before the Oracle vs. Google case most people believed APIs to be unpatentable as well. That didn't stop Oracle from filing a very expensive and lengthy lawsuit.

No, the uncertainty principle is not due to technological limitations. The uncertainty relationship is a fundamental property of all phenomena characterized by finite-length wave trains, quantum mechanical or no.

I paraphrased Feynman's explanation as well as the mathematical reasoning in another comment

Feynman sez:

Here we encounter a strange thing about waves; a very simple thing which has nothing to do with quantum mechanics strictly. It is something that anybody who works with waves, even if he knows no quantum mechanics, knows: namely, we cannot define a unique wavelength for a short wave train. Such a wave train does not have a definite wavelength; there is an indefiniteness in the wave number that is related to the finite length of the train, and thus there is an indefiniteness in the momentum.

Just for a couple minutes of your time, you can help stop more bad Software Patents from being granted.

http://patents.stackexchange.com/

If we stop enough of the lazy software patents, a lot of those companies will realize they are simply wasting their money on lawyers and will stop the practice.

I've been running a three-monitor desktop for many years, and I've had to use Xinerama to get it to work. This results in some serious performance issues occasionally (I think triggered by Adobe Flash, not surprisingly) where the whole system becomes mostly non-responsive for a while. The right way of doing it is to use xrandr to configure the displays into a single logical screen. That would work great if I had a video card that could drive all three monitors. Unfortunately, I have two separate video cards, so I have to use Xinerama to make it work, which, as noted, kills acceleration.

Support for RandR across multiple GPUs has been on the schedule for years, but it's slated for release 2.0, which isn't going to be out anytime soon. When it does come out, I'll be reconfiguring my system to use it.

A bit of Googling reveals many similar stories. For example: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/30958/setting-up-a-3-monitor-display

So if you can find a video card that can drive all your monitors, you should be all set. There may be some vendor-specific options for doing this, but I'm not aware of them. (I seem to recall some gaming cards that would let you combine multiple cards into a single logical card, and that might work here. I have no experience in that area.)

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=99890

http://fixunix.com/redhat/489285-rhel-5-1-rhel-5-2-dependency-hell.html

http://www.freelists.org/post/oracle-l/Linux-X86-26-Oracle-9204-and-RPM-Dependency-Hell

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/53077/firefox-circular-dependency-hell-on-linux-mint-13

http://linuxgazette.net/issue71/tag/3.html

http://lwn.net/Articles/198455/

http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/406017-does-dependency-hell-still-exist-2.html
* "The best (worst) way to get dependency hell is to add too many repositories. Eventually one will find the right combination of conflicting repositories to create a situation of dependency hell."
* "The problem is the more repositories that are added, the less and less likely that applications are built against the same set. "
* "Dependency hell ALWAYS exists. ALWAYS (Yes, Debian users, I'm talking to YOU). The question is whether or not if somebody tries to NOT go to dependency hell, is the system going to take them there anyway."

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/32594/fedora-16-dependency-hell

http://www.eonlinegratis.com/2013/dependency-hell-trying-to-install-gcc-on-centos4/

Oh, dependency hell is real alright!

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=99890

http://fixunix.com/redhat/489285-rhel-5-1-rhel-5-2-dependency-hell.html

http://www.freelists.org/post/oracle-l/Linux-X86-26-Oracle-9204-and-RPM-Dependency-Hell

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/53077/firefox-circular-dependency-hell-on-linux-mint-13

http://linuxgazette.net/issue71/tag/3.html

http://lwn.net/Articles/198455/

http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/406017-does-dependency-hell-still-exist-2.html
* "The best (worst) way to get dependency hell is to add too many repositories. Eventually one will find the right combination of conflicting repositories to create a situation of dependency hell."
* "The problem is the more repositories that are added, the less and less likely that applications are built against the same set. "
* "Dependency hell ALWAYS exists. ALWAYS (Yes, Debian users, I'm talking to YOU). The question is whether or not if somebody tries to NOT go to dependency hell, is the system going to take them there anyway."

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/32594/fedora-16-dependency-hell

http://www.eonlinegratis.com/2013/dependency-hell-trying-to-install-gcc-on-centos4/

Oh, dependency hell is real alright!

I have a hard time reading through Nokia's patents that VP8 supposedly infringes on. I thought it was just my inability to read patents, but as no-one on ask patents has been able to help...

Any slashdoters want to give it a try?

Claim B: Claim A is an urban legend. citation 1 citation 2 and you can find more on the net.

Claim C: Claim B is an urban legend.

Now can someone set up some cameras and prove Claim C? That would be supercool, one level recursive urban legend.

The best use of goto is for an orderly cleanup of resources. If something goes wrong partway through acquiring all the necessary resources to do a task, you just "goto" the appropriate stage of the cleanup. See http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/154974/is-this-a-decent-use-case-for-goto-in-c/154980#154980 for example.

It's also good for breaking out of multiply-nested loops, for checking a bunch of possible error conditions before starting the meat of a procedure, etc.

according to this guy's results, it should now be 4th behind C, C++ and node.js

but I guess it depends on the work you're doing. I'd say C# and Java are exactly comparable in terms of performance and memory bloat as they're roughly the same thing.

Consider this recent story on Slashdot: 9th Grade Science Experiment: Garden Cress Won't Germinate Near Routers

That 9th grader still has a lot to learn about doing proper science.

If they could make planes that ran on time like Swiss trains, they might be on to something. Then again, it would be natural for a Swiss engineer to be frustrated with the inefficiencies of air travel and wonder why planes couldn't be more like trains... so that may be where this thinking comes from.

TFA says the idea is to be able to attach multiple modules to a plane, whether they are passengers or cargo, instead of behind a locomotive. It's my understanding that cargo flights have to be carefully balanced with loads strapped in place so they won't shift, whereas that's not a necessity on a train. This would add some complexity to the idea, but would be made more complex by the fact that you would have to know what position that cargo module was going to be in (left/center/right) and properly balance the module against whatever was going to be in the other modules. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's not as simple as bolting a rail car to the underbelly of an airplane.

As a new smartphone user (Galaxy S), I find my Android OS lasts around a week because I use it mostly only for phone calls/messages. You're right, bloat can sometimes fill the void, but not if you're relatively careful. See: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/476/what-can-i-do-to-increase-battery-life-on-my-android-device

(Just to also add, I thought I'd hate the touchscreen compared to tactile buttons, but using Swype, I'd NEVER go back to a 'normal' button phone again).

According to Hawking, Gravity (capital G) created the Universe: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13013/stephen-hawking-says-universe-can-create-itself-from-nothing-but-how-exactly
According to TFA, Gravity (capital G) created life (via the kinetic energy of the comets obeying laws of Gravity)
According to Genesis, God created the Universe and life.
Therefore, Gravity = God.

Glad we finally solved that! Can we move on now?

What's Apple famous for again? Yup, they are famous for being famous.
Well that and popularizing the graphic user interface everyone uses in the first place.

Introduced 29 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

And for having a pretty decent Unix-based operating system while Ballmer drives Microsoft off a cliff.

Introduced 13 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

And for designing the first mp3 player that the mass-market embraced.

Introduced 12 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

And for ushering in the change from feature-phones to smartphones.

Introduced 5 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

And for creating an earthquake in the tablet market such that in the future it is predicted more tablets will sell than PCs.

Introduced over 2 years ago, by Steve Jobs.

See where I'm going with this? We all know Apple's history. The point is: what insanely great innovations have they unveiled since the death of Steve Jobs?
Answer: NONE.

What's Apple famous for again? Yup, they are famous for being famous.

Well that and popularizing the graphic user interface everyone uses in the first place.

And for having a pretty decent Unix-based operating system while Ballmer drives Microsoft off a cliff.

And for designing the first mp3 player that the mass-market embraced.

And for ushering in the change from feature-phones to smartphones.

And for creating an earthquake in the tablet market such that in the future it is predicted more tablets will sell than PCs.

But yeah...they are just famous for being famous...

...Until they release a TV with a kinect-like interface running iOS. And then Sony's PS4 and the Wii U crashes and burns, (which is sort of already happening...sales on the Wii U are very poor and Sony's electronics wing isn't doing well either), while everyone is playing Angry Birds on their new Apple TV platform and we get umpteen-million articles about the "New Console Wars," which are now between Microsoft and Apple.

Of course then a couple years will go by and people will forget all of history and again claim that Apple is just famous for being famous. Such is the cycle of Slashdot.

only slightly different CSS

Not only. If you take the math.stackexchange.com you see that they put an extra effort to have mathematical equations displayed properly on the site.

I really dislike StackOverflow now because very useful questions are discouraged, simply because they are open ended.

The place for open ended question is not SO.

How to choose between SO and Programmers - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/82988/choosing-between-stack-overflow-and-programmers-stack-exchange

If it is related to coding, it should be on Stack Overflow.

If it's related to higher level programming concepts or is conceptual (but still related to programming), it should be on Programmers.

Rule of thumb: if you're sitting in front of your IDE, ask it on Stack Overflow. If you're standing in front of a whiteboard, ask it on Programmers.

There is one very large product that relies on 3rd-party cookies: Disqus. It is used by a lot of popular sites such as Thingiverse and StackOverflow. Disqus simply needs to fix the problem. There is actually a discussion on StackOverflow about this: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/126764/why-does-registration-require-third-party-cookies-to-be-enabled

The last time I looked at it it claimed the problem was fixed, but I just now tried to register and it says this:

Third Party Cookies Appear To Be Disabled
This site depends on third-party cookies, please add an exception for https://openid.stackexchange.com/.

Updating can be disabled for games, you can even specify which ones you want to auto-update and which ones to never auto-update.

Googling turned up these. It doesn't seem that Steam has a good solution for the weekend-with-dialup case, even with whatever the Do Not Update feature gives you.

I'm not saying Steam is worse than the competition, just that it's sometimes worse than no DRM. Having dealt with GreenManGaming's "Capsule" client (it's pretty awful: there's no equivalent of Steam's Backup feature, for instance - you're just meant to re-download) I now appreciate Steam's features and maturity rather more.

Updating can be disabled for games, you can even specify which ones you want to auto-update and which ones to never auto-update.

Googling turned up these. It doesn't seem that Steam has a good solution for the weekend-with-dialup case, even with whatever the Do Not Update feature gives you.

I'm not saying Steam is worse than the competition, just that it's sometimes worse than no DRM. Having dealt with GreenManGaming's "Capsule" client (it's pretty awful: there's no equivalent of Steam's Backup feature, for instance - you're just meant to re-download) I now appreciate Steam's features and maturity rather more.

Google has been hostile to attempts to use GPG. GPG support can easily be added in their API, and plugins for the popular browsers developed. In recent JavaScript updates, there's a file API, where a private key could be decrypted with a user password, encrypting the data in the browser independently of which browser is in use. If we're more security minded, we could have additional methods in place. With an iframe and postMessage, I could encrypt data through an encryption service, which could be on a server I control. Or... the browser companies, including Google, could simply provide for GPG encryption, the way ssh does.

The other guys on this thread are right. Google wants to read your email to make more money in advertising. Any encryption defeats that. However, you are quite wrong.

I need to offer you credit; you are right. The issue isn't really PAE, it's how the kernel manages memory on 32 bit x86 architectures with more than 1GB of memory installed. PAE simply exacerbates the problem. Here's an explanation of the complaint:

On ia_32 systems, the kernel splits memory into 3 zones; DMA, NORMAL, and HIGHMEM.

ZONE_DMA is the first 16MB of memory, and is generally avoided unless needed (due to lack of available higher memory, or for DMA mappings.) The kernel tries to reserve this address range for devices that use DMA mapping.

ZONE_NORMAL is an address space that is directly accessible to the kernel, and extends from 16MB to 896MB. Kernel data structures are stored in this space, including the kernel page tables. Memory mappings start to consume a lot of memory in ZONE_NORMAL, and thus PAE on ia_32 with a lot of installed memory can cause out of memory issues, even when there is a lot of available physical memory. User data can be allocated into ZONE_NORMAL, but is preferred to be placed in ZONE_HIGHMEM to free ZONE_NORMAL for kernel data structures.

ZONE_HIGHMEM is memory above the 896MB barrier. This address range is not directly accessible to the kernel. In order for the kernel to access anything in this zone, a temporary map must be made into ZONE_NORMAL. These mappings consume pages of ZONE_NORMAL, and suffer a performance hit. User space processes can access these pages directly (handled by the virtual memory manager system, of course.)

Generally, memory will be allocated to ZONE_HIGHMEM, ZONE_NORMAL, or finally ZONE_DMA in that order of preference.

The x86_64 architecture eliminates the need ZONE_HIGHMEM. ZONE_NORMAL extends all the way from 16MB to the end of physical memory. This approach simplifies memory management, improves performance, and is generally more flexible.

You're correct that there was a major issue with my original post... My memory of the kernel architecture had garbled HIGHMEM with PAE, and I was thinking that PAE required mapping pages above 4GB into lower memory. This would of course cause a huge performance penalty for any process consuming memory above 4GB. I deserve downmods for the technical inaccuracy.

Here's a very brief summary of the problems with HIGHMEM:
http://linux-mm.org/HighMemory

Here's a bunch of links used to refresh my memory:

http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-15-sect-1
https://www.kernel.org/doc/gorman/html/understand/understand005.html
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5143/zone-normal-and-its-association-with-kernel-user-pages

The taken-down images, and the promotional video around 2:53
http://pages.ciphercloud.com/AnyAppfiveminutesdemo.html?aliId=1
make it clear that in these promotional materials, identical plaintext leads to identical ciphertext.

Ciphercould's DMCA takedown notice
http://meta.crypto.stackexchange.com/a/258/555
rebuts that as wrong ("Ciphercloud's product is not deterministic"), with a key point at the beginning of page 3:
"[detractor] implies that what was perceived from a public demo is Ciphercould's product offering".

Ciphercould's position is: you misjudged us from what we have shown, which is not the real thing.

There's meta discussion here, including links to cached copies...

http://meta.crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/250/ciphercloud-dmca-notice

StackExchange appears to have put the question back up, but remove from it the screenshots which the DMCA takedown demand claimed constituted copyright infringement.

The screenshots should be a pretty solid fair-use case, though, so even that part of the takedown demand is groundless.

Each app is run under a separate linux user process and is a separate instance of the dalvik VM.

I'd be curious your definition of sandboxing.

http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/42129/why-each-android-application-runs-on-a-different-dalvik-vm-process

As I wrote on here on TeX.SE, an interface allowing to use to online compilers would be great. So we could have a slim LyX installation while being able to use a maintained up-to-date TeX distribution instead of installing gigabytes locally on each computer. For example the open source LaTeX web API CLSI could be used.

Well summarized list! I've used LaTeX for years as well, and could immediately relate.

tex.stackexchange.com is helpful (wish it existed years earlier), and will hopefully become much more helpful. For instance: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/23650/when-should-we-use-begincenter-instead-of-centering

But I completely hear you: it's frustrating I have to constantly look up things on a forum (or ask the local TeX guru) even after years of advanced usage. BTW, I use https://code.google.com/p/latex-makefile/

If you don't want your images to float, then don't use the figure environment. The whole point of figure, table and other floating environments is that they float. If you don't want it, just use \includegraphics. See also: TeX.SX: How to influence the position of float environments like figure and table in LaTeX?

TFA seems to focus mainly on esoteric typesetting tweaks being worked on in the LaTeX 3 engine. That's cool for people who care a lot about rivers of whitespace in their documents, but there are other things going on in the tex world that I would consider to be more the main event.

Tex predates unicode, postscript and PDF, and modern font formats. There are now versions of tex such as xetex and luatex that accept utf-8 input, generate PDF output directly, and can use whatever fonts you have on your system rather than special-purpose fonts packaged for use with tex. Luatex allows lua to be used as an extension language, which is a great idea considering how much tex sucks as a general-purpose programming language.

The other thing to realize about tex is that today it's the de facto standard input format that people use for creating mathml (since mathml itself is much too cumbersome for humans to write directly). There are technologies like mathjax that support this and that allow mathml to be displayed even in IE, which has never had standards-compliant mathml support.

TeX does clever things especially regarding floats. If you want to understand the concept, have a look at the great post by the same author, who wrote that article, here: How to influence the position of float environments.

Cameraphones don't have that today

Not quite true.

Please check out http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/ for questions and answers like these!

The camera built into my laptop most certainly can be turned off or completely disabled. It also has a little LED next to it that lights when it's active, so it's easy to know when it's on.

Actually, this can be circumvented, and as this case shows us, it has been done before.

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/14635/what-will-the-strength-of-a-sintered-steel-piece-be-compared-with-a-cast-piece

Strengths smaller than but of the same order as cast steels.

I want a smart brace. A double sided or all the way around smart phone/tablet for my lower left arm/wrist.

Pretty sure you mean this.

Actual error rates in good memory are very low. I didn't see a single error for a year. The main benefit of ECC on workstations is to detect memory that is slightly bad, which passes hours of memtest86, but still gives you errors maybe every month on your workload. This requires you to monitor ECC errors, and get alerts, so you can replace the DIMMs that give errors repeatedly. The problem is that ECC monitoring for the new Intel chips is not available in Linux (as far as I can tell, cheeky plug for my stackexchange question http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/67999/how-to-monitor-ram-ecc-errors-on-intel-processor-in-linux )

If you've ever recorded static, you've recorded someone's wireless transmission.

No. That is not true. Static is the Cosmic Microwave Background and is present everywhere on this planet (and theoretically the entire universe). The CMB is the leftover from the Big Bang.

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5264/is-x-noise-on-tv-due-to-big-bangs-background-radiation

I wanted to link to NASA but for some reason, it is not resolving for me currently. Very weird. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/cobe_background.html

I wonder if you can do this:
Millions of people leaving extreme poverty in a short time in an historically poor country, all while you have the people who control prices and products in the opposition (which also means artificial shortages), the CIA and the US govt. actively organizing and paying to disinform and to destroy internal economy and political stability (as they did against Allende in Chile, and against many other, which is well known and documented), under an international economic crisis, with food prices increasing since (if I recall correctly) 2008, with consumption rising because of people leaving poverty (and, from there, prices), etc.
None in the poor-hating, racist and xenophobe Venezuelan upper class, none of the previous presidents did anything like that before Chavez, they are mostly foreigners who don't care about their own workers (same as in all Latin America).

Cuba didn't receive oil for "free", they gave LOTS of medics and teachers in exchange to Venezuela, and it's the same for every other country: Chavez exchanged help.

How stupid can people be to believe everything media says, knowing that the mass-media and international "news" agencies are controlled by big holding corporations, kept in their place by corporate marketing and PR? Same for Venezuela. The "freedom lovers" there were a little group of the same kind of people and corporations, that was instrumental in the coup attempt. You can't have real freedom if you don't have basic education, or even food.

Yeah, it's easy to do anything from your computer and/or mouth. Not all has been good, obviously, but Venezuela has changed for good, there is no doubt about that, and even the opposition recognizes it (and even imitates, saying Capriles is a leftist, the same thing Obama has done).

I guess this is the kind of advances and the country you like, don't you?

It is one our test for hiring a new developer. "If you google for help and there are 2 links, stackoverflow and somethingexchange which one do you click on?" If they don't say stack overflow, then they haven't done enough real world work for us.

So I shouldn't pick http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/ when looking for game development related help? Seems there's quite a few domain specific sites in the stack overflow family, though I can only really attest to using gamedev and stackoverflow.

It is one our test for hiring a new developer. "If you google for help and there are 2 links, stackoverflow and somethingexchange which one do you click on?" If they don't say stack overflow, then they haven't done enough real world work for us.

So I shouldn't pick http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/ when looking for game development related help? Seems there's quite a few domain specific sites in the stack overflow family, though I can only really attest to using gamedev and stackoverflow.

While a nuclear plant does pollute as long as the radiation is contained its effect is much smaller.

Even ignoring containment issues, coal power plants produce more radioactive waste than nuclear power plants.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/do-coal-plants-release-more-radiation-than-nuclear-power-plants

The issue is how much less efficient combustion reactions are than fission reactions. It takes so much more material to produce a given amount of energy that the trace amounts of radioactive materials in coal combustion outweigh the concentrated amounts used in nuclear fission.