at least they said they were sorry, better than most

I just got my license in CA (previously in Maine) and the little California DMV review thing I read online basically said: Driving over the posted speed limit is a violation. Driving under the speed limit can also be a violation, depending on the current condition (at the officer's discretion).

This gives them a little leeway... as a condition could obviously be weather. Maybe it could also be traffic... Maybe it could be a lack of doughnut.

See: homeopathy, cold fusion, n-rays, scientology, and other fun digressions.

FTFY. Past tense :P

Does Godwin's Law allow for amendments?

How about, computers are good for information storage, retrieval, and transformation?

Then it becomes a matter of how we perform these three tasks. Data by itself has no meaning. We assign meaning to the data. And by doing so, we can then figure out how to enter, manipulate, and display meaningfully.

There are human limits to computing. We can only enter data at a physically defined speed. We can only absorb regurgitated data at a physically defined rate. Thus, after a certain point in time, the only thing that continuously faster computers are useful for is data manipulation.

In the beginning (when computers were starting to get "good enough"), there was only a little bit of data. Since input is physically constrained, it only is natural that there isn't much data to start with. But now, some 10 years after the beginning, there's a lot of data out there--in fact, a whole 10 years worth. That 10 years worth of data means that computation has to improve, and equally as important, output has to improve.

Computation naturally has to improve to retrieve and transform the data. I don't think I have to explain this much mroe. Output has to improve however, because early outputs were designed for smaller amounts of data. Now that there's much more data however, the outputs have to adapt. And as there's more data, more of it can be linked together, so it becomes more useful for the output to show or include the linking.

Now, extrapolate this to the world, where after computation has become good enough for the purposes of input, computing has become more ubiquitous. The amout of data out there has explode exponentially. In the early days of the internet, an indexing site like Yahoo or a portal like AOL pretty much got you to where you wanted or needed to go. Now, we need a keyword search to even hope to find the data we're looking for.

In the past, you may have say, five "objects" to work with, each with ten attributes. You can take those five objects, and use your eyeballs to compare them. You can rank them, rate them, manipulate them to produce a more appropriate comparison, etc. Now, there's a billion objects, each object has a hundred attributes. You need not only computation power to compare them, but you need a different way to display them (top 5, statistical analysis, rules-based dynamic lists, etc. to determine the most relevant 5 to bring to your eyeballs).

I agree that the whole Web 2.0 crap is marketing junk. But behind all that BS, there's a lot of computing progress on top of physical progress. As the amount of data grows, there will always need to be progress in storage and retrieval. The first revolution 10 years ago was to consolidate data into a computable form. This second revolution will be to change the retrieval and display end so that they can automatically scale to fit any amount of data.

That's what Microsoft doesn't get. That's why Vista and Windows 7 is a failure. They put in some bells and whistles, tack on some eye candy, and keep the same fundamentals of how we store and retrieve data, and then hope they can ram it down our throats as progress, when it's the fundamentals that need to change to progress.

While high blood pressure contributes to heart disease and stroke, unfortunately those conditions mainly strike later in life. Even worse, some of those people may elect to control their blood pressure with medication. :)

Most organized religions have some sort of charitable causes. Doesn't Scientology have any? Dianetics for the poor? I have a hard time believing that all Scientologists are evil people trying to take over the world.

http://hothardware.com/News/Chrome-Detailing-Previewing-Googles-New-Operating-System/

I think the posts diverting attention to Catholicism are trying more to discredit Catholicism by comparing it to a cult than the other way around.

True enough, however I don't know if I agree that this should be considered illegal.

If you post an unencrypted message on a billboard anyone that has the equipment (eyes, camera, etc) and comes within range of the reflected light waves has access to that information. If you send an unencrypted message over radio waves, anyone that has the equipment has access to the information. I don't see how anyone can say there is a real difference between the two. Saying the pager has a number (or some other identifier) is to me the same thing as saying that the billboard has "To Slashdot user 695572" posted at the top. It doesn't stop anyone from reading it and it certainly shouldn't be considered criminal if someone did.

I do believe that things with dedicated lines should have an expected level of privacy (such as a phone) simply because to intercept them would require an active attempt to do so. Unencrypted communication that can be passively gathered should not have this same expected level of privacy.

Disclaimer: I am in no way an expert in pagers or radio communications, so I want to apologize if I have any misunderstandings about how these items work.

I think the bad reputation marks against Scientology are getting a lot of press, but in defense of the poor guy getting beat up, are there any good things to say about Scientology?

For the benefit of those of us who haven't studied latin but are interested in languages, what are the forms you've given? What are the forms OP has given? If those answers don't make it readily apparent, why are OP's choices weird?

The summary writer may also have wanted to suggest that thermoelectric devices may be used to convert the waste heat at the data center into useful energy. However, thermoelectric devices are not really feasible for this application. To achieve the efficiencies cited for thermoelectric technologies, you need temperature gradients in the 100's degrees C, as in, for example, a car engine. Typical temperature gradients at data centers are on the order of tens of degrees C. This is considered "low-grade" heat in the renewable energy vernacular.

True but people here on slashdot (some of us at least) leave the house and interact with people and go places.

COP 1: Someone broke into building X last night.
COP 2: Pull up the Cell GPS logs and see who was in the area.
COP 1: O.. good idea! Hey look these 2 people have records!
COP 2: GREAT!!! bring them both in, we got our criminals.