I'm European and in NYC for the first time this week. It's astounding how many people expect a tip for what is mediocre or poor service (or at least would be back home) because of the "social contract". If people expect me to pay a tip no matter what, it would be easier to just pay them properly, charge a little more, and pay tips to people who actually deserve them.

No. As soon as you decrypt anything to use/view it on a compromised system then that data is compromised, as is any other data using the same key. Anyone with secrets worth protecting shouldn't be storing them on a phone or accessing them from an insecure device.

PCI SATA cards are a really, REALLY bad idea if you have any care about IO performance, and especially if those drives are part of a RAID. Use PCIe SATA cards.

I seem to remember someone using laser engraving to produce colours...

I like it - it just rolls off the tongue...

It's simple - you add up the cost of outages (revenue and reputation), ops overhead (support staff and time lost using clunky UI's) and correcting mistakes caused by errors in the code, then you compare it against the cost of resolving the technical debt. If you're constantly getting told it's not possible then there are either good financial reasons for it, or the project manager needs to start writing business cases which don't suck.

Design Patents are absolutely about how things look.

Bakulina 12 is an address in Kharkiv, in Ukraine. Anyone can pick a random city or country, but picking a specific street in north Kharkiv is less likely. Start there.

I do.

Not where I work, they don't. I/O on VM's (ESX, etc) is generally woeful, and it's significantly faster to pass through a FC card and access LUN's on a DMX or VMax than to use local storage. Hadoop uses local storage for a completely different reason.

How is this even slightly different to the banner adverts we've had since the 90's? Remember doubleclick? How is a Like button different to a Digg button, or SU, or even a Slashdot button? It's not.
If I got to a website that has adverts or articles I EXPECT it to have tracking for either advertising or social buttons (as well as it's own metrics). Clean your browser and see how many cookies are set by slashdot, or CNET (shudder) or MSN.
You know, I don't mind cookies - and here's why: They're going to show me adverts ANYWAY - I might as well let them show me something appropriate.

You've never actually jumped out of a plane, have you? Avoiding the tail is something people say before they do their first jump. It's absolutely possible to open the door and get out of a plane between 5,000 and 10,000 ft, and fine to jump down to 1,000 ft. An A380 can evacuate 873 people in 77 seconds, and in some cases that would be more than enough to evacuate everyone. It's obvious that parachutes won't help in every situation - life jackets only work on water, but they've been in every plane I've been on. Parachutes would have saved almost everyone on Japan Airlines 123 - they spent 32 mins between 5 and 12,000ft, knowing there was almost no way to land. You're correct that chutes are heavy. It might be a good idea to work on lighter chutes.