Cost to Raise a Kid
$221,000 over 17 years. Not including college, of course.
E-Book Readers
Annotation.
- Absolutely required. I markup (both non+fiction) books pretty heavily. I want to be able to track/search/look back at those notes sometimes. Not being able to do either has resulted in my not buying an e-book reader.
Archiving.
- Persistant storage of my books (in contrast to the degradeable nature of those on my meat-space bookshelf) is important.
- Kindle’s wireless is fun. Now let me buy a Kindle server (or app for the cloud) to archive my books (and share them and pass them around etc etc. )
Netbooks are Tablet PC’s-in-waiting
With a screen this small, hands are the only way to navigate a traditional operating system. (Chrome OS is a good move even if all it does is remove toolbars from screen real estate.)
The short run winner will be the netbook convertible to a tablet. The long run win will be the tablet (the trick is, of course, user input).
DefCon Is Hilarious
Details on this one are a little fuzzy, but it looks like some people attending Defcon may have ended up the victims of a scam themselves, and it’s an absolute classic: The fake ATM unit. Apparently installed for an unknown interval, the entirely false box was situated in a “security blackspot” in the nearby Riviera Hotel’s casino. It had a PC inside, and presumably was being used to skim people’s cards and PIN numbers. It was an entirely unbranded unit, and that’s what gave it away–an unnamed Defcon attendee noticed its LED was the wrong color, and the plexiglass screen was too dark.
Perhaps the strangest, or most worrisome news from the entire conference: Four South Korean journalists were ejected from the proceedings because it seems they weren’t journalists at all. In fact, three of them may even have been on an “intelligence gathering” mission–they were, in effect, spies.
The alarm was raised by several attendee hackers, who noted that the interviews the group conducted involved “inappropriate” questions that were out of keeping with normal journalistic investigation of a story. They attended one day of the Defcon Black Hat hacking conference before being rumbled and then ejected.
Defcon organizers report that this is no surprise. They’ve caught members from Mossad there before.
Dispatch From JRTC
Apparently, my unit is doing actual area recon and old school patrol bases – no vehicles whatsoever – in the swamps.
Not sure how that is relevant for Iraq.