I imagine they're doing fine, working for the company you're talking about, Agilent.

Make no mistake: The only thing HP has to do with the company that was founded in the 40s is the name. The company that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded still exists, making great stuff. Its just called Agilent. And they still support scopes and multimeters that say HP on them.

I've had the pleasure of working with the CMU CC for the past several years, broadcasting their Demoparty, Demosplash, on Scenesat the past several years. These guys are seriously passionate about retrocomputing and The Demoscene. They have released some neat Demos for the Apple Lisa and the Vectrex. Good to see them getting some recognition here. They're nice bunch of guys, and the Warhol museum certainly picked the right people for the job, right in Pittsburgh.

If you're in the Retro computers and the Amiga, they showcase a TON of it at Demosplash, both by allowing you to play games on them and by showcasing Demos, so its worth a trip.

Hah, I remember that happening around Pittsburgh. It was on the news. They eventually ticketed a lawyer and that put an end to it- Appeals court said no.

I believe they ended up refunding the ticket monies.

I've seen people drive that fast around here. I've driven past them as they lay at the side of the road upside down (never actually seen one flip in person, though).

I wonder how much of it has to do with population density. I'll betcha a LOT. I assure you that the Japanese, per capita, has a tiny amount of electrical grid wiring compared to the US. We have a ton of people like me living in rural areas, and we have long power lines feeding us. That's a lot more opportunity for a tree to fall and knock out power to a lot of people. You don't think that might account for the .099% difference in reliability?

  In my area the houses are far enough apart that each house has its own transformer. Gives me very stable power, though.

I have a company-supplied Bold, and it is easily the worst phone I've ever touched. Its not reliable at ALL. It only syncs when it feels like it, reception is poor, and the battery life is so bad its never charged anyway. And for some reason, if the battery starts to go low, it just turns off the cellular modem but doesn't turn it back on when its put back on charge. Basically, if you keep one eye on it, it'll just stop getting emails.

The innovative ways that Blackberry devised to suck are impressive. The battery life is about a day (if you don't use it), it doesn't really have a keypad lock as its designed to live in its huge holster, the speaker phone is so bad its useless (the one in my dumbphone Samsung Convey is immensely superior), it has a gazzillion buttons that I don't even think do anything, etc.

Maybe OS 10 is an improvement, but the older versions are so hard to work its not funny. There's Setup, Options, Preferences, and then individual options and preferences in each application it ships with. If you want to change an email option, which of the five options menus is it in? Well, just try them all. Mine's stuck with the French spellcheck library, but I can't find the option to fix it. I found the one for the whole phone, which is set in English, but does that affect the spellcheck? Of course not. Oh, it must be under the "SpellCheck" options menu. Nope, not there either.

The funniest is the charging. When you plug it into a PC to charge it, it lights up with this nice clock thing. Put the PC to sleep, and it'll stop charging. But its still connected to the PC, right? So the clock thing stays on. In an hour or two, your battery will be dead. Even though its getting power in the USB port.

Maybe they should have sold phones that people wanted to use rather than positioning themselves as the provider of phones that your employer makes you use.

It cannot, even if you have multiple displays. If the game it is streaming loses focus, it quits streaming. Tom's review mentions this.

Where did you find information on the USA's spending on weather forecasting? Is it really that much lower than that of the European countries?

People seem to see all the embarrassment behind the fact that the European weather forecasting system is so much better, but Europe consists of 50 countries with a total population of 750 million. I don't know how many of those countries put into that weather system funding pot, but I'll betcha its most of them.

The fact that our system, from one country with half the population, is comparable at all seems impressive to me. After all, we're being compared to a continent.

Have it. Love it. 1920x1200 is only a little more expensive than 1920x1080, which makes sense since its a little bit more pixels. Its really the highest resolution you can get at a decent price, unless you maybe count high end Apple monitors. But I refuse to buy a monitor with a fan in it.

Facebook owns Instagram, so it seems unlikely.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

The password reset issue is not intentional. Normally Sony would email you a URL with a security token in it, this is required to reset your password. As it happens that security token can be gotten from another form if you have a user's username, email address, and date of birth. Kotaku has a list of steps used for this exploit: http://kotaku.com/5803070/sony-playstation-network-password-reset-page-exploited-customer-accounts-potentially-compromised

Actually, he doesn't say where the server is located. It might be at his house! He's asking for a hole in the firewall to get to his server... He didn't say which way he needed to hole to go. I think that he wants to access an off-site server via the hospital WiFi.

Which makes his surprise about being asked for an account significantly less surprising.

I don't really get this. What, exactly, prevents the computer from downshifting the transmission, you know, automatically? Aren't they called Automatic transmissions for a reason?

My car (6 speed auto Ford) downshifts itself when descending hills when the Cruise Control is on to try and maintain speed. Of course, it doesn't work all that well because engine breaking usually isn't enough to keep a car slowed on a hill, and hitting the brake turns off the cruise...

Heck, my dad's diesel pickup (also Ford) doesn't even have to be in cruise control. Just hitting the brake is enough to cause it to downshift and engine brake.