Make sure your permits are in order and you've paid off the inspectors. Oh, wait... I see where the comparison breaks down. No one's palm needs to be greased when the job is done half-assed.

Red dwarf stars cannot synthesize anything beyond He. They will never create Pb.

Take your fancy liberal arts trivia to some other site. We don't need your kind around here. This is "News for Nerds" -- history was an elective.

Lots of good stuff. Byte could have morphed itself into this magazine.

The only way that we will ever deal with our national debt is with very high inflation. We will all be millionaires soon enough.

I am too. And I agree with Stevens that it needs to be changed. I don't think the Constitution should be ignored because parts of it are no longer useful or fashionable. It should not remain some relic of a bygone era. It should be a living document that enshrines how we have grown as a nation and as a people; how we as citizens want to live today and in the future. I think that is what the founding fathers would have expected of us.

This is not for a remote control. It's a simple slide latch for a radio battery. And the problem with the design is that the plastic it was made from was the same as the battery case, which is too brittle for the switch. A less brittle plastic such as ABS or HIPS would actually work better and last longer. Was a material scientist consulted when designing the battery? Doubtful.

Since you have no idea about the problem I am trying to solve, the "ignorant" comment seems misplaced. Will the solution be ideal? Certainly not. But it will be "good enough" and even "better than stock". Probably. I currently have six different types of material for my 3D printer, each with its own purpose. Is 3D printing a panacea? No. But there are real problems that it can solve today. And putting more of them in people's hands will encourage innovation in printing technologies and materials science. Hell, the materials available to work with today are way more versatile than the limited rapid prototyping materials available to me 20+ years ago.

Exactly. I have a battery with a broken latching mechanism. A replacement battery is $50. I could print a replacement plastic part for pennies if I had a model for it.

More like the tortured English of Murdoch's London headline writers. I don't think they are required to have a complete understanding of the language. I could write a book entitled "How to turn any sentence into meaningless gibberish with just a Thesaurus" using just London newspaper headlines as examples.

You want that tenured position? Suck it up.

You really don't want your kernel swapping when it runs out of memory. That is too late and will kill performance. Instead, your kernel moves pages that are not used to swap so that it can be freed for other, more important things when the need arises. That is a much more efficient way to manage memory.

That said, the kernel provides tuning parameters that will give you what you want.

sysctl vm.swappiness=0

Compressing/decompressing the data in RAM is faster than writing/reading from disk. CPUs are getting much faster than disk. And flash/SSDs have a limited number of write cycles. It improves performance and preserves the life SSDs. What's not to like?

Agreed. And you can look for signs of stress on the skin of the Jalapeno. There will be white striations on the pepper. The more the merrier in my book. It's only a guideline -- there will still be lots of variation in heat. But, in general, the more skin damage the hotter the pepper.

Google has a *long* way to go. Unless they allow their customers to select the operating system (by providing IaaS), this just won't fly long term. We looked at using Google, but we need Windows Server 2012 for some of the things we wanted to move out of our datacenters. And SQL Server. They provide/allow neither.

Except they make it readily apparent how to compose a tweet -- even for new users. #dying