To bypass this nagging, just continue to use an old release of Firefox.

Is that Free as in beer, or Free as in beer?

That would explain dumb blondes.

The world moves on. You can't live in your sheltered world forever. One day, you'll buy a computer that comes with Windows 8, and Windows 7 drivers aren't available for it. Then software comes out that requires Windows 8 or later. You would have a hard time living with Windows 2000 today. The same thing will happen with Windows 7 in a few years.

From this, I would draw the opposite conclusion: we should oppose proposals for a financial transaction tax at all costs! If high-frequency trading is the disease, then a tax on transactions is not the cure. It would make government addicted to the new revenue and therefore dependent on the high-frequency traders, thus ensuring that those leaches will never go away.

A better solution, I think, would be to require stock exchanges to operate on a once-per-second clock. Any trade orders that arrive within each timeslice would be executed in a random order, so as to defeat any advantage the high-frequency traders would get by being fast.

The Chinese term for 13 is "ten three" (the word for "ten", followed by the word for "three"). Furthermore, every digit is one syllable. It really does make learning easier for children. The ease of learning is even more apparent when learning multiplication, since there is a certain rhythm when you recite the multiplication table.

Gladwell actually does address the concept of cumulative advantage, as applied to sports. Kids with January birthdays are more likely to do well in children's sports leagues, and the slight advantage they have at every stage in their sports training leads to a preponderance of professional athletes with January birthdays. Likewise, Chinese children learn to count earlier, start learning multiplication around first grade, and can move on to more advanced topics. This is not to say that all Chinese people are good at math, though. There still exist analytical and artistic students, and generally Chinese school systems allow students to specialize in math/science or the arts after elementary school.

I believe that the analogous crime in the US is called disorderly conduct.

Furthermore, the Mint is currently not publishing details on how the cryptography works. I would assume that the system relies on the assertion that the paying chip will only generate a MintChip Value Message with a valid Transaction Authentication Code after decrementing the value stored on the card.

"You're holding it wrong" -- where have I heard that before?

I don't know which flights require TSA screening, but from the FAA's point of view, accepting any money for a plane ride makes the pilot a commercial pilot, which is a whole different licensing category. To get a commercial pilot's license for carrying paying passengers, a private pilot would have to go through additional training, testing, medical examination, drug screening, etc.

In one case, a pilot killed a passenger when he snagged some power lines and plunged his plane into a river. While that was an unfortunate accident, the FAA decided to throw the book at him in part because the pilot had accepted a token payment of $8 from the passenger.

The problem is, hiring high-school interns to categorize the web doesn't scale. The first good search engine to come along ate their lunch. Yahoo is a tech company with no technology to offer. I'm surprised that they made it this far by imitating and acquiring other companies. But hey, excite.com and lycos.com still exist, so maybe it's possible for Yahoo to just coast along forever.

I don't think you would want one to replace your window, but one mounted just inside it would be awesome. Windows are often subject to extreme temperature differences, moisture, dirt, and stresses. You wouldn't want to have to call in a building contractor to replace it when it breaks. Not to mention, windows also need to have good heat and sound insulation, which are probably not going to be provided by a display.

Out of the box, PHP's mysql interface makes you concatenate/interpolate strings yourself to compose the SQL, and you have to manually escape parameters. In short, it requires extra work for programmers to do things right. All of those "Teach Yourself PHP in 24 Hours" books aren't going to help, either.

In contrast, almost all other programming languages make it easy to do the right thing. For example, Perl DBI and JDBC both encourage you to use '?' placeholders, which are automatically filled in by parameters. It takes no extra work to avoid SQL injection, and your code ends up being cleaner too.