BIair's comments

I'm not surprised this is the top comment on a hacker site. But having watched my 5-year old son assemble a 300 piece set while following a 40+ page manual, gave me a new appreciation. He was obviously creating a new thing, even if not experienting. Not only did he have great pride in his creation, but he leaned a lot about 3D visualization and spacial awareness. Sign me up!

The article makes a good point. It appears Google storing old passwords indefinitely makes your account potentially less secure. So why do they do it?

"Ngo’s ID theft business attracted more than 1,300 customers who paid at least $1.9 million between 2007 and Feb. 2013 to look up Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, previous addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and other sensitive data"

I used to have an orientation preference. Now I have a wife.

I find it amazing 25-year old code still exists at all in a franchise like Madden. I played the original Madden. It bears little resemblance to the current generation. There's really not been a total rewrite in 25 years? Amazing.

I don't think cloud hosting will reach it's panacea until I can just upload a site or application, and be billed for what I use. No calculators, or intervention needed. Are weekends slow? It automatically drops a node. Get front page of Hacker News? Scales up automatically. Hosting that "just works".

On the face, appears to be a huge valuation for an overpriced thermostat and smoke alarm. But combined with their recent robotic acquisitions I wonder if this signals a move beyond the smart phone, and smart car, to the smart home? If Google engineers want to build the Star Trek computer, surely they want to build the Jetsons home.

Asimov added a 4th law:

  A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Is it just me, or is, "don't be evil" a little too close for comfort?

I wonder what percentage of street lights actually have activity below them? What about a motion sensing light that has dual-brightness levels? A lower level when no pedestrian or car activity is detected, and a brighter level when it is. Not only would this save energy, and look very cool when a car drives down a deserted street as lights brighten in advance of it, but it could enhance security as late night prowlers would have attention attracted to them by neighbors and police.

I think it would be incredibly cool just to see your doppelgangers. How many people look like you, and how similar they are. Similar to searching for your name, only to discover other people have the same name, and the curiosity of who they are. Imagine searching for people who have the same face?

Weird, neither the article or the comments seemed to answer the question, "Why is broadband more expensive in the US?"

If you own a website and use Recaptcha for human verification you know it's been broken for years. Whether it's too hard for humans, too easy for bots, or by-passed using 3rd party labor for pennies per solve.

Hacker, cracker... I still don't know how to use 6 chopsticks!

I pay for premium, and find the app useless more often than not. There has to be a better way.

I use Lastpass with Google Authenticator two-factor authentication. Like most Lastpass users the only password I know is my master password, and of course it's the weakest.

Lastpass has worked well, but going forward there are two major concerns. Lack of a mobile browser plugin makes it difficult to use on mobile (Android). Second, is that all major browsers appear to be dropping plugin support out of security and performance concerns.

What's best for password management without using browser plugins? Chrome clear text password storage is troublesome. Bitlocker and mobile encryption may help. Are more OS implementations one the way?

MVP hosts file blocks ads on Windows machines by editing the hosts file. No 3rd party software needed. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

You sir, bring no value to the site as a reader, and offer justification for their move away from Flipboard.

What if someone invented a slick, uniform UX for free mobile apps and repackaged them for easy consumption? Would you jump at the chance to have your apps featured? What if your free apps were ad supported?

Ironic that Google wants to essentially extend the useful life of workers, given that the average Google employee is 29-30 years old (depending on source). Among the youngest of any industry.

tl;dr if you take the Bing challenge and make Bing your default search, try other variations on Bing as you would have on Google.

I tried the Bing challenge, and changed my default search to Bing almost a year ago. According to Google I was performing 10k - 20k searches per month, so Bing Rewards was an appealing incentive. Over a years time, those are some decent rewards.

Bing results are very good. The notable exception I've noticed is for technical, geeky searches that are probably most likely to occur with this crowd.

The biggest problem is one of "branding" and confidence. At first I found myself searching Bing, and if I didn't find the result I wanted, I'd switch to Google. The results were often very similar. But instead of returning to Bing to perform another search, I'd do it on Google. As a Google user, when I didn't find the results I wanted, I'd try a new search... I didn't try Bing. When I noticed this and changed my behavior, I became more satisfied with Bing's results.

Source: My brother died of chronic alcoholism at 42, and http://www.drugscience.org/dl/dl_comparison.html

Addiction rates: Marijuana 9-10%, Alcohol 15%, Cocaine 15-20%, Tobacco 20-30%, Heroin 23-25%

Dependence (ordered higher to lower): Nicotine, Heroin, Cocaine, Alcohol, Caffeine, Marijuana

When first seeing these stats, I was surprised how low the additication rates were for heroin and cocaine. Growing up in the DARE era, I thought simple consumption was enough for everyone become an addict. Instead it appears a game of roulette based in genetic makeup.

The more one researches, the more one realizes the the legal drugs of nicotine and alcohol are more dangerous than those targeted by the "war on drugs".