No, I didn't have it set up to require login credentials, obviously. In the trade-off between ease of use and security, I considered the machine being physically taken to be a fairly unlikely event, and it was. The fact that it happened doesn't mean it was likely. I could say I learned a valuable lesson, but in reality the lesson I learned is that if I HAD secured it, I would not have gotten it back.

I am saddened to think of Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) going under. Their announcement email explained the situation very nicely, however, and one can hardly fault them for calling it quits. They were never able to monetize the data they aggregated, and not enough people would be willing to pay a subscription fee now that all the browsers are providing sync themselves.

I've been their add-on since almost day one; at first they didn't even have a central server to provide the service, it was just an add-on that you could point to an ftp server of your choice. (You can still point it to an ftp or WebDAV server of your choice, so that is one way to keep using it, at least until browser updates break compatibility).

Actually, Foxmarks once got a stolen laptop returned to me. About a month after my house was burglarized, I noticed new bookmarks showing up in my browser on my other machines. The person who "acquired" my laptop never bothered to wipe and reinstall, or even to create a new user account. So every time he bookmarked a URL, Foxmarks would diligently sync it to my other computers. So, from my own machine, I edited all of the bookmarks to point to a redirect page on my server. Once my changes were synced back to my stolen laptop, I was able to record its IP address every time he used one of his bookmarks. I gave that to the police, and another month later they got my laptop back after subpoenaing his ISP to get his address.

So, Foxmarks has a special place in my heart.

It's not ridiculous, since such an argument has been made -- successfully -- against many bits of technology created in the last thousand years. Why do you think so many products come with a sticker, slip of paper in the package, or whole chapter in the instruction manual dedicated to moronic safety warnings about how you shouldn't try to stick the product up your ass, or smash it with a sledgehammer to slurp up the delicious chemicals inside it?

It wouldn't be hard to program the machines to disregard a sudden radical drop in the reported market value of gold, or to stop selling whenever the price falls below a given value. This would make sense even if the sudden change in market value is legitimate.

Since it wouldn't be hard to program the machines thusly, and since the flaw inherent in not doing so is so obvious that you and a dozen other slashdot commenters have seized on it, it is a fairly safe assumption that the designers will have done something of that sort.

Why does every article about a new technology or in this case business plan get this treatment on slashdot? "The brief write-up from some journalist didn't include an exhaustive technical analysis of every detail, so I assume there are no details and no thought has been put into this project whatsoever! More evidence that everyone in the world is stupid except for me!"

I don't mean to single you out here. It's just that I see this kind of reaction on slashdot constantly.

Are you sure that was the National Enquirer? As the other guy said, the Enquirer is a trashy gossip rag, but usually accurate -- in fact they are often the first news source to uncover the illicit affairs of politician's, which then, rightly or wrongly, become major political scandals.

The headline you described sounds like something from the Weekly World News -- a hilarious source of completely fabricated B-movie-grade sci-fi, which is sadly no longer printed, but lives on in web-only form.

I stand corrected. I assumed the parent was claiming something like "I used to pay 20% of my income now I make just a little more and pay 30%!" I was considering only the simple math of the tax rate in each bracket, not credits and deductions.

My bad.

Bullshit. Mathematically impossible, unless your earnings in the new higher tax bracket are taxed at greater than 100%.

I wouldn't say that they have diverged, as they are still mutually intelligible. More like they were caught in the act of diverging when advances in travel and communications technology largely negated the factors that were causing the divergence. I imagine that they remain in this state (slightly different but not different enough to matter) indefinitely, or converge again in a few hundred years.

If they have diverged, though, then I can finally consider myself bilingual!

I generally go with "Oxidize rapidly, totally, and exothermically."

My great-great-great-great(etc)-grandparents are all dead already, so they probably won't be troubled by it.

JETPACKS!

Aside from the potential shared interest in reaching a verdict, these interests are generally directly opposed, so where one party has an interest in removing intelligent potential jurors, the other party would generally have an interest in removing less-intelligent members of the jury pool, though I don't think its really that common where that would be a factor, anyway.

You said it yourself, lawyers want jurors who will be amenable to their arguments -- often that means both sides have in interest in removing intelligent, critically thinking jurors in favor of those who can be more easily persuaded by misdirection and logical fallacies.

I'm pretty sure "The Second Coming of Citizen Kane" would be a terrible movie that would be universally reviled. Would Kane be an undead revenant trying to find his sled or something? Or would it turn out he faked his death? In any case, it would be a poorly written opportunistic sequel rushed out by Hollywood to capitalize on the popularity of the original.

I'm don't consider it clear how one is supposed to interpret that example problem either. I can only assume that the empty parentheses are supposed to represent a variable, and the student is supposed to put a 7 inside of them. But that representation is not part of any arithmetic or algebra that I remember being taught. If that is what is intended, what's wrong with using "x" or any other lowercase letter?

4+3+2 = x+2
        9 = x+2
        7 = x

Or maybe the blank space between the parentheses is the variable, and the parentheses themselves are part of the equation?

4+3+2 = (x)+2
4+3+2 = +2(x)
        9 = 2x
    9/2 = x

A decline in the birthrate does not mean a decline in population. It means our still rapidly growing population is growing slightly less rapidly than it was before.

Hence the rate at which we produce new corpses to bury will continue to accelerate.

Even if our living population were shrinking instead of growing, our deceased population would still continue to grow -- until such time as our living population reaches zero.

So no, the problem will not become less acute in the future.