Just because something can be done, with enough know-how and tools, doesn't mean that you're not being prevented from doing it. When you need a soldering iron just to change a battery or to add some RAM I think you've fallen into this category.

"Being locked in jail doesn't prevent you from leaving, all you need is a hacksaw and some elbow grease. People have been modifying jails this way for a very long time."

This is a very poor characterization of the policies in New York. Nothing about "stop and frisk" or "broken windows" was localized to only poor areas, those were city-wide. You could point out some systemic racism if you want to criticize the targets of stopping and frisking, fine, and if you really stretched it you could possibly make the claim that racism might have been a motivator for implementing the policy rather then the more typical, and more likely, power grab by law enforcement, but stopping and frisking was certainly not a way to contain people in certain areas. Especially since stopping and frisking was happening within the poorer areas of the city with greater frequency then outside of those areas.

As for broken windows... I can not understand why some people are advocating selective law enforcement as a way to decrease police misbehavior. Selective law enforcement is a fast route to a corrupt police force.

Oh, ha ha. You're British or something, and you only take pounds?

You remember when the orange box came out? With an ATI partnership saying that it ran best on ATI cards and that ATI cards would come with a free voucher for the game? No? You don't remember that? Well it happened.

So how exactly might the Bolivian president have died in this situation? A heart attack?

Yeah, I had a vague idea of who Carly Fiorina was previously. I knew she headed HP for a while (with much associated hate around here) and I knew that she was potentially running for office next year, though I didn't know under which party. The summary though is just a long way of saying, "Carly Fiorina has made an announcement: 'I am running for office as a Republican.'"

I'm sure she'll mention the Affordable Care Act soon enough.

What, people don't have hard drives anymore? Why the scare quotes?

Speaking for myself, these sorts of distractions could really be a pain in the butt when they came at a time when we were rushing to get everything done. When they came during the slow bits though, I loved these just as a way to break up the day. Nothing is worse than focusing on just one thing without break or relief, relentlessly, all day long.

If you weren't already at +5 I'd have modded you up for being the only one posting something on-topic, as opposed to just more complaining.

Maybe not "shocked," but I'm a little surprised to see such a difference between sysadmins and DBAs. I usually think of them in the same group, with DBAs being a notch higher by dint of specialization.

Yeah, the grandparent sounds like an American:

Implying, I guess, that he wouldn't pay sales tax if he ordered online. That's how it works in the US anyway.

Belated, but: thank you.

You're overstating that by a lot. We're not looking at total funding, we're just looking at research. Even if we made the assumption that all of the funding in the science category went to research, the total would be $31.3 B.

I'm surprised by the dead face dicks complaints. I've read enough SMBC to see that as being pretty trivial, relatively speaking. Would be nice to get a little more insight into what exactly upset people (though I can't remember this particular strip).

Okay, I have looked up the GAO report: link

I am not weeping.

I... don't know where to begin with this figure. If "by 2010" you mean the amount which has been cumulatively spent on climate research since the United States was first conceived as a country, I probably would still not believe you. But maybe, at the outside. And only if you adjusted for inflation and you included work to address the 1930's Dust Bowl as "climate research."

That is a staggeringly ridiculous number, and the fact that you would present it here as though it were true, as though it were a plausible thing to say, represents a deep myopia. The total R&D budget for the US for 2015 is $135B, most of that goes to defense research.