It's not that spammy companies are willing to pay more. It's that the cost of putting up a few ads is measured in dollars while a 30 second spot on a major network is likely measured in the tens if not thousands of dollars (or millions during the Super Bowl). Additionally, the major companies don't need to *pay* for advertising because they have their free facebook pages (i.e. advertisements) that people willingly go to.

You have noticed that nearly every commercial on TV now includes a url for the company's facebook page instead of (or rarely in addition to) the company's own website -- the reason for this is that if you go and visit their facebook page, maybe you'll "like" something on it or comment or something like that which will then cause your network to then see activity on that company's facebook page.

Funny you should mention that, because I'm pretty sure the Cranberry Lambac is the worst beer I've ever had the pleasure of imbibing. It's always in the winter packs, and after the first time drinking one, it's now left in the fridge until the summer when it finally gets thrown out. The best way I could describe the taste of it is "cranberry vomit". I guess everyone has their own preferences though.

Not a fan of fruity beers either, although pumpkin beers in the fall are a nice break from normal. Not sure if that would count as a fruity beer or not.

I call shenanigans! Unless you have very windows-user-friendly SSH software, CTRL+V is not going to help you out too much when trying to paste.

Yes and no. I would imagine that if you could define "exceptional people" empirically and then correlate "high achiever" to them and the schools they attend, you would still get a disproportionate number of people from the "elite" schools such as Harvard and Princeton (as a Harvard grad, I balk at the inclusion of Yale on principle).

These days, especially with a weak job market, who you know is just as important (or in many cases, more important) than who you are -- at least for getting your foot in the door. As people at these "elite" schools are already in a disproportionate number of high-level jobs, you are more likely to have a contact that will get you in the door.

I've seen this first hand. I had a friend that went to a state school for college -- he was very much my equal or superior (and his resume reflected that), yet because my resume had "Harvard" on it and his didn't, there were a few cases where I got called for an interview but he did not.

But at least if you type in your password into a comment, it replaces it with asterisks when anyone else views the comment. For example, my password is ***********. When I post this, it will appear as aterisks to you, but to me I can still see the password in the comment.

You are confusing FaceMash, which did do this, with "TheFacebook" (later just "Facebook"), which did not. The two, aside from both being created by Zuckerberg and both including the word "Face" in the name, are not related. Everything that was on the site when facebook launched was provided by the actual students.

While the term "habitable" doesn't necessarily have a scientific definition in this case, I'm pretty sure the use of the word "habitable" when talking about exoplanets is to refer to the possibility that life could exist as-is on the planet -- not that humans could go and terraform the planet to live on it. A "habitable" planet is one that could potentially harbor extra-terrestrial life (as we know it). You could argue that pretty much any planet could be considered "habitable" by your definition, as it is likely we would eventually acquire technology that would let us settle in nearly any environment.

+1 internets to you, sir.

d'oh...that should have read:

And here comes the endless 500 post thread on how shouldn't allow to install without . This then ends up becoming a debate on operating system security and rights management and 100 other completely unrelated topics. Oh, and vi is better.

Clark (of Louis and Clark fame) would probably disagree with you there...

It really just matters how it is popularized -- I've never heard Louis or Clark discussed separately, just as I've never heard anything about Watson without mentioning Crick (although Franklin is the loser in that one), so they will probably stay in the consciousness indefinitely, or at least as long as we're talking about them.

The fact that Wales is often discussed without mentioning Sanger at this point will likely lead to him being completely forgotten in a general sense associated with Wikipedia.

Clearly the solution is to convert all text into Captchas so we never forget the words!

That's funny, because I called Cablevision the other day to resolve an issue where my cable modem wasn't getting an IP address assigned to it, and I was routed to a completely automated system. The beginning line was "You may ask to speak to an agent at any time, but they will be following the same script that I will be following." I gave it about 3 minutes through the script before I moved to the agent because I figured I could get escalated to a tech faster with a real person than a scripted machine.

You are mistaken. You cannot buzz in until Trebek has finished reading the question. One of the reasons that Ken Jennings was so successful is because he had the timing down perfectly such that he was reliably the first one to buzz in when he knew the answer.

As someone who has heard their ad on the radio at least 100 times, that's KarsForKids with a K. It's also one of the most annoying radio ads I've ever heard, although the fact that I'm posting this indicates it's also a successful ad.