You were modded funny, and I'm not sure if you meant it as such, but this is really a pretty good point. People encourage you to come up with a password that's easy to remember. The problem is, these usually make passwords a lot easier to guess. Instead, you should just use a randomly generated string of 8 characters. If you type the password often enough, it'll be stored in muscle memory with about as much effort in my experience as trying to remember an easy to remember password.

One benefit I can see is that it gives you a single place to go get books from. I don't have to remember the web sites for 100 authors, or 50 publishers. Instead, I can just remember a single site which aggregates all the books together. Sure, I'll end up paying a higher monetary cost due to the middleman, but presumably the time cost savings is enough to me that it is worthwhile.

It's sort like having an iPhone App Store instead of hundreds of independent software publishers to download from. Another benefit is that the App Store provides common payment processing infrastructure, which keeps the cost of implementing this from being duplicated for every software publisher.

If the problem is the oxygen, clearly we need to produce a vacuum between the transmitter and the receiver. I propose a long cylinder of some rigid material, with a smaller cylinder bored out through the middle. Once this long pipe, or "tube," if you will, is connected to the transmitter and receiver, you could suck the air out of the inside of the tube and extend the wireless range. Several such transmitting and listening stations could be combined to form a series of tubes.

Maybe my sarcasm detector failed miserably, but isn't the point of a multiprocess Firefox so that you can encapsulate Flash in its own process?

I'm pretty sure kittens would be extinct within a matter of seconds if that happened.

Keep in mind that RTM means "Released To Manufacturing." In other words, it's the date the developers stop working on it and they hand the final product off to the people that stamp millions of pretty CDs, put them in boxes and ship them out to all the distribution channels. It takes a little while after RTM before you can actually buy a product in stores.

From what I've read the fears over this one are that so far it is killing a lot higher percentage than the flu normally kills. This flu also seems to kill a disproportionate number of people in the 20-50 age rage. Normally flu deaths are mostly confined to infants and the elderly.

From a pure numbers standpoint it's not so bad. What's scary is the similarity to earlier flu pandemics. No one's really sure how bad this may get, so people are taking extra precautions.

I don't think it's altruism if I can be thrown in jail if I decide not to pay my taxes.

Well, most of the problems affecting Windows machines are the result of people installing "Shiny dolphinz Screen Saverz!" or "Save $100s with secret deal-finder software," or "Your computer is infected! Download our super-safe security software that protects you from the NSA spies!" It's technically the fault of the user, but that doesn't seem to stop people from blaming Microsoft for it.

I think OWA (or whatever it was called at the time) was actually the first AJAX application. A while back, I was talking with someone from the Exchange team, and he said the team developed the XmlHttpRequest object that makes AJAX possible for the purposes of making OWA.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, no one really noticed until Google made GMail.

I took his suggestion as "rather than worry about the leak in the hull, notice the entire front of the boat is missing and learn how to swim." The point is, even if the current warming is man made, Earth has been much warmer before and that warming was undeniably not man-made. It's not unreasonable to believe at some point in the future it will warm up to that point again, regardless of what we do. Thus, lets use this warming period as practice for the bigger ones to come.

Not all virtualization requires hardware extensions. In fact, VMware was doing it long before Intel and AMD added virtualization support to their processors. VMware pulled this off by doing dynamic translation, where the virtual machine monitor would transparently rewrite native x86 into virtualized x86 code. For the most part this was just doing a straight copy, and perhaps rewriting some jump addresses. Privileged code that runs in the OS kernel had to be rewritten as something equivalent that would run fine in an unprivileged process.

This really isn't so different from running .NET or Java code. The code starts out compiled to a virtual instruction set, and the JIT compiler translates this on the fly to something that can run natively on the CPU.

This is also how Rosetta worked in Mac OS X to run PPC apps on an x86 processor. XBox 360 does a similar thing to run old XBox games, since the 360 uses a PPC processor but the old XBox was x86.

Sure, you take a performance hit in doing this, but the apps generally get rewritten to run natively eventually, and the ones that don't end up being old enough that they run faster on modern hardware even with the extra translation layer.

I wonder how the answers would have changed if instead of asking "Is X true" they asked "The current mainstream scientific theory holds that X is true." Asking "Is X true" implies "Do you believe that X is true." I know for me, I think I would score fairly well on my general knowledge of mainstream scientific theory. That doesn't imply I believe everything held by the current theories.

I'm probably very much a minority in my view, but I'm a creationist who actually has a lot of respect for Dawkins. I respect him because he's very straightforward about what he beliefs. He doesn't make any attempt to sugar-coat them to make them more palatable to religious people. For example, comparing him to the lady from (IIRC) the National Science Educators Association in the movie Expelled. The NSEA lady was being very accommodating and explain how there's no conflict between "science" and "religion" and how most Evangelicals in the US secretly believe in evolution anyway. Dawkins, on the other hand, was very blunt about his view that with a purely naturalistic worldview there was absolutely no need to consider any sort of god at all. I found Dawkin's approach much more honest, and even though I disagree with his views on our origins, I respect him for his honesty.

You know, I'm not sure that's the model number I'd pick for modern CPU, since it's so similar to 80386.