...because they have to have somebody on hand who understands the simple fact that what the market will bear IS what engineers are worth. By definition.

I agree with your point about the passivity of e-ink (and I'm a kindle user), but I think it is also important to note the distinction between people who read, and people who look at the pictures (say, in Elle). There's probably room in the market for both products, and they may not experience too much conflict in user communities.

Yeah, "not enough local movies" seems like a predictable outcome of suppressing free speech.

Frankly, there are a lot of keys we could get rid of, because they just take up real estate and don't help with the way I use the keyboard. I rarely have rekwirements to use the Q key, and I'm kwite sure that others could get by without it, too. These key-friendly users just need to akwire new work habits. What's hard about that?

You can skip the "screen saver" pictures of authors by holding the switch in the off position for ~5 seconds when turning it off. The screen goes blank (no picture or text). I don't think it saves any power, but at least I don't have to go around with an advertisement for a famous author I don't enjoy.

It seems like the thing for the Russians to do is to buy lottery tickets under the name of the asteroid. That way, if the asteroid 'hits,' then everybody in Russia is rich. No problem.

Yes. See "Cloud seeding" on wikipedia for some details.

The article in Time says Moscow usually spends about $12M on removal, twice the $6M cost of seeding for this exercise.

The real issue of concern for me would be that many uniforms are associated with either semi-skilled jobs (fast food) or positions that require special garments to perform work (soldiers, firefighters). Most help-desk people that I've known (and the one I used to be) think of themselves as office professionals. What message does the uniform send to the non-IT staff with whom the help desk has contact. Clearly, you don't want to send messages that amount to either "semi-skilled" or "willing to move filing cabinets."

It's different because users of paid merchandise or services can seek legal remediation if something goes terribly wrong. The payment creates and obligation. In free software, there's no corresponding obligation, because there has been no payment. Of course, paid OSS (e.g., from RedHat) falls somewhere confusingly in the middle.

I think a lot of comments above miss a more important point, that knowing the attacks follow a power law distribution (for argument's sake) still doesn't help predict individual events. Really, unless you're placing bets on terrorism (google for "futures market terrorism Poindexter") this won't help you much.