Sounds like we are on the road to a good Quantum Leap! I can't wait to meet Al!

So, the predominant theory seems to be that the water on Earth came from comets raining down in mass quantities in the early days of the Earth. The samples of this old water source shows a high amount of hydrogen. Could the water here have come from our planet having a lot of H2 that burned/reacted with the O2 we had, creating all our water, instead of being delivered here from the sky?

I averaged 9ms from my office. Masked our internal IPs but here's the full path. I sense some instability on the ATT backbone. We're in Indianapolis.

Tracing route to slashdot.org [216.34.181.45]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms <1 ms <1 ms *******
2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms *********
3 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms ********
4 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 209.*.*.*
5 2 ms 1 ms 2 ms 206.246.181.101
6 8 ms 8 ms 15 ms gi7-0.corea.ind.iquest.net [206.246.181.78]
7 7 ms 8 ms 8 ms 12.117.232.25
8 14 ms 35 ms 11 ms cr84.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.132.90]
9 12 ms 14 ms 12 ms cr2.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.123.7.250]
10 9 ms 75 ms 65 ms cgcil03jt.ip.att.net [12.122.84.93]
11 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms att-gw.chicago.savvis.net [192.205.35.42]
12 10 ms 29 ms 10 ms hr1-te-9-0-0.elkgrovech3.savvis.net [204.70.196.14]
13 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms das6-v3035.ch3.savvis.net [64.37.207.170]
14 10 ms 18 ms 21 ms 64.27.160.198
15 9 ms 10 ms 11 ms slashdot.org [216.34.181.45]

Trace complete.

Any word on if this stuff contains BVO like regular Mountain Dew? I would hope the answer is "no", but I've been wrong before.

You could possibly be looping through an array or reading lines in a data file (such as CSV) and have some elements or lines with errors that you just want to handle and keep processing. Exceptions would be a bad choice here. You assume if one entry is bad, they all must be, which is almost never the case. I code for a company that deals with huge (million+ entry) data sets. Using and dealing with exceptions is to be avoided when possible. If you think 4ms is trivial, I would not trust you to write any of our performance code.

I'll take good comments explaining difficult to read code over using exceptions to make it "appear" more readable any day. Exceptions should only be used when the code has no way to recover from the error gracefully. They should not be used to improve readability. That's what comments are for. Now, I'm not saying every trivial line should be commented, but blocks of code that are complex should at least have the intent of the code commented, so no one later on changes its behavior unintentionally (yes, there should be unit tests for that...)

I believe the reason for not wanting to throw exceptions unless really needed is that exceptions (and their handling) are relatively expensive and resource intensive operations. Most languages when exceptions are thrown do a lot of runtime stack analysis to, among other things, get a full stack trace. There are many research links on the interweb explaining how expensive it is in whatever language you happen to be using, but here is the first link I found: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1282252/how-much-more-expensive-is-an-exception-than-a-return-value

In the case of the .net runtime, throwing an exception was > 1000x as expensive as using a return value, in processing time.

Have you tried playing with the sort options under the "View -> View Options" Menu? This menu has a drop-down that lets you control the primary sort, and a sub-section to refine how to sort beyond that (including "sort composer"). Perhaps this is the option you want?

Apple didn't write the original iTunes. Apple bought SoundJam MP from Casady and Green. I still remember using SoundJam fondly. For its time, it was way ahead of the curve (which is why Apple bought it, I'm sure). SJ and iTunes are similar, but iTunes was redesigned as a store as much as a music player. SJ just wanted to help import, organize, and play music.

You can completely disable the iTunes store under the parental controls section if it bothers you that much.

Isn't the main problem that it is trivial to fake or block the real caller ID? If this was fixed, finding the actual source of the calls for prosecution would be straightforward. Right now, they are forging the numbers in a way even the phone companies can't seem to find the origin for the calls. That seems like a problem... and a solvable one.

The only thing some of those pictures were missing was the "whomp... whomp... whomp..." noise from the WOPR machine in WarGames. Nice.

Or you have a dump the hackers made of their client list, which contained screen names as well as other info. They could then use this hacked info to get to any of the other data, especially by someone who posted a screen capture online. Using the leaked DB could tie that screen capture to MUCH more data.

With all the government scrutiny over the FB IPO, perhaps they traded the data collected by their iPhone app, even if this was obtained from a government computer? Possibly some similar scenario with a different company? These IDs could have come from anywhere, any app. Maybe AT&T?

The US doesn't use the metric system, therefore it is full of liars. :)