I've worked on machines from smokers only to find the insides covered in fuzzy, sticky brown residue. It smells horrible as well. I can see how this sort of thing could cause warranty issues without question.
If I were Apple, I'd simply take in image of it and show the customer.

What about statutory rape, like the 18yrold with 17yrold cases?

That's not rape, that's legal bullshit.

I'll repeat it for you: if both people consent, it's NOT rape. There are no exceptions.

I didn't RTFA, because I can proudly say that I was involved in the group that produced MHC mediated sexual selection studies that ScientificMatch.com uses to claim their rationale. A few comments: First, if Scientific match has any wits about them, they'll also consider other information. I don't think anyone's stupid enough to think there's a single correlate to mate selection. But the worry about people who are too different is poorly founded - MHC diversity is strongly retained throughout most human lineages. We've had negative frequency dependant since we were swimming in the ocean, and as a result, if you sequenced any given allele, you'd find that it's just as related to Gorilla sequence as it is another randomly chosen allele. My ex-boss used to have students do this as an exercise to illustrate the point. Because of this, you're just as likely to find someone very MHC (or in humans, HLA) dissimilar next door in these modern, mobile times, than you are in, say, in a distant country.

Second: They're only (to my knowledge) matching at MHC for disassortative matings, not the rest of the Genome. How is this better than picking someone based on hobbies? Because research actually shows that mating patterns in humans follows this pattern. It is a bit of a crock, since the odds of you picking two people at random with similar MHC complements is low, but let's not get into that. ;)

Finally, let me just say, I'm proud that so much scientific blood, sweat and tears into understanding the maintenance of the immune system, and what drives host-parasite co-evolution, has been distilled into an online dating site. Forget having worked with a Nobel laureate, this the highest honour a scientist can know. ;)

I've noticed this too, but I think it's a general rule of our society. If you go along and can stay employed and you work for a large company, you'll eventually be promoted to Vice-President of Pre-Disposal Paper Stacking at a six figure salary. If you have an MBA, and can stack the piles in a more complex way, you get a 7 figure salary. There are overwhelming rewards for pretending that you're just like everyone else and out to server the company rather than yourself.

Yes, most of the collegiate coders love to think inside hip new boxes like "Agile" and "Scrum." They swoon over "Patterns." Of course, these things yield zip more often than not, if you use any rational measure of ROI.

I've worked in QA for 15 years and watched a lot of coders. I regret to inform everybody that the coder who gets things done is often some hack in the back who looked up some code on the net, stared at it until he/she understood it, and started the thing from scratch, ignoring algorithm optimization, not using void virtual functions, pretty comments and otherwise ignoring the niceties.

That said, I hate that sort of thing. Not very sustainable. If I ruled the development department, I would put in place a strategy of "define, then refine" where the brilliant hack does his thing, making his or her pretty new algorithm work. Then that code would be delivered to the next guy who would take it, comment it, improve it and otherwise make it presentable.

I had computers as a hobby for many years, starting out with FreeBSD 2.2.8 when I was in 8th grade and teaching myself C and dabbling in a few other things as well. I'm 25 and have a legitimate 5-digit ID, not that it means much other than I got started with being a nerd at an early age for some reason signed up for Slashdot. I thought I was going to be a Comp Sci major, but then I quit and studied English and Classical History instead.

I still kept up with Unix-y things, and futzing around with Perl and stuff like that, and after an endless string of half-ass pseudo-success after college while trying to do the "english major" thing, I bit the bullet and got back into computers. I've been employed for the last year and change as a Linux admin at a web hosting company, and just got a new job that I start next month where I'll probably have to write the occasional C code again, too.

Now, I think I'm a reasonably competent programmer -- definitely more so than one would expect from a liberal arts major, but I'm definitely not a computer scientists. I'll read algorthims books and study stuff on my own, but I think I lack the degree of comprehension that someone who had it drilled and tested in a formal environment would. I'm not a great programmer, but I can hold my own in the certain realms in which I need to write code, but computers are also not my entire life.

Most tech school people I have met are really only interested in computers and doing computer stuff. They're the ones that throw the memes around and use terms like "lulz," and as long as they do their job, I don't really care. But those I know who studied computer science are more likely to be able to talk with me about non-computer things, and I really appreciate that. I make my living in technology, but my hobbies and interests are wide-ranging, and I don't always just want to talk about computers. I also find that the university-trained computer scientists are more likely to be able to explain WHY they are doing what they're doing, why they made the design choices they did, and in general have a better understanding of the whole system rather than just doing things "they way they were taught" whether its the best or not.

Of course, I realize this is all just anecdote and not just data, and I'm probably going to piss some people off by saying, however I will stand behind the notion that university-trained computer scientists are going to be easier and more fun to deal with than someone with a more myopic view of their "trade."

Also, if you really want to get at why those with a 4-year degree from a "real" school get offered more and are picked first, its probably because those are the degrees that management understands, whether they understand the subject matter or not. Management typically has a 4-year degree from a real school, and so they'd rather hire people with a piece of paper they "get" the value of. Perhaps its an economic or educational prejudice, but such is life.

Really, it's appalling that teachers aren't some of our most highly-paid professionals.

While I wouldn't mind seeing teachers paid more, that hasn't been the main problem, IMHO, for some time. In this market (Atlanta) good teachers take a pay cut to go work in the better private schools. The attraction is clear... they have a more supportive environment, creativity is encouraged, parents tend to be more engaged/supportive, students tend to be more motivated (not to mention in many of these schools tested in at minimum levels), etc.

I agree that age-based instruction is a major flaw we have in today's system. But I've also increasingly come to believe that the biggest flaw in the U.S. K-12 system is the political basis. I'm just not sure anymore that locally elected school boards are the best way to run a district or bring about positive change. I've interacted with some pretty frightening school board members across the country who really have little to no related skills or education to qualify them for the role. They just won a local popularity contest.

The best / most successful districts I have encountered, the School Board hires a really good Superintendent and then mostly backs off. A great SI who is well educated, professionally minded, motivational with business sense makes a huge difference. That position, IMHO, should definitely be paid more.

Consider for a moment that the sphere of a high orbit is larger than the size of the earth. Then consider all the orbital altitudes (like layers of an onion) which need to be "scoured", and you're talking about an amount of space that is many times the total surface area of Earth.

That's a whole lot of territory to cover, even for a large army of scour-ers.

As someone who works in space flight hardware, I will state what I think is obvious to most slashdotters: These are not just "consumer grade electronics." True, they were based heavily or solely on an existing consumer product, but they have to meet a very stringent set of requirements to operate in space. *They need to cool themselves effectively despite having no gravity, which means heat doesn't rise and you lose all naturally convective heating *They need to be radiation hardened to mitigate against bit flips and the like due to radiation particles *They need to meet specific reliability and usability requirements driven by spaceflight And lastly, with everyone complaining about how the government wastes money, do you really expect that it would be better for NASA to contract out development, design, testing and building of a one-off product (laptop, camera, MP3 player, camcorder, PDA, etc) where it isn't necessary?

It occurs to me to wonder if a person who is strong-willed and motivated enough to take the trouble to skip commercials on a DVR, is of the sort who weren't listening to the commercials anyway even if they did occasionally stare at the screen during commercial breaks before the era of DVR, and further, whether the sort of person who passively listens to commercials with or without a DVR is the sort of person who tends to be influenced by commercials with which to begin. Perhaps worried advertisers and network executives realistically aren't losing nearly as much of their actual, receptive (if hard to measure) audience(s) as they fear.

You're right that it is common for maintenance, but its not as hard when equipment is being *replaced* instead of *added.*

The camera is one thing, then you need the cables, the recorder, etc. An A&P needs to amend the weight and balance sheet for every aircraft modified and add an appendix to the manual with all the data for the camera system. The AOM for every aircraft has a weight and balance sheet specific to that airframe. Alterations to the aircraft require recalculation and signoff by an A&P. This is because not every aircraft is identical; there are manufacturing defects and repairs that make them all unique. The math isn't hard, getting the mechanic to have to do all the work and paperwork is expensive though. Changing the CG and useful load (which is exactly what adding a camera system would do) is not a trivial task. Remember what a PITA it was to get armored cockpit doors...

anything on non fatal accidents.

They are probably down too - at least in London, the reason for the decline is that the blocking of "rat runs" means that the slightest minor accident blocks the main road completely for several hours.

I live on the edge of the Olympic Park, and no one here thinks that people will be able to get to the Olympics through traffic jams. A relatively minor incident on day one will close all of East London for at least three weeks. A journey that takes me 15 minutes walking, recently took me 2 hours by car. A burst watermain typically causes a 20 mile tailback for several days with a deep recession and no Olympics.

Unfortunately the truck in front of me only moved forward 2 car lengths, and then suddenly stopped to make a turn. He did not have his turn signal on, but he stopped anyway. I was caught off guard.

Where do you live that somebody not using a turn signal "catches you off guard?" Where I am, in Washington State, you're lucky if half the cars on the road use their turn signals... it's not the kind of thing you can rely on for safe driving.

Also: I hope you got ticketed for it. The point of eating your fritter when it's safe is that it has to be WHEN IT'S SAFE! If you have your foot on the gas pedal, it's not safe. In fact by multi-tasking (putting the fritter down while attempting to drive forward) you were probably more dangerous to the truck than if you'd just held your fritter on the left hand and drove normally.

Now, if only we could ensure that ALL military hardware had kill switches, and that everybody on the planet knew how to use them.

The best proof of this is that small countries buy military technology from larger countries.

I didn't know Belgium was a large country. Switzerland is also big? As is Israel?

Falcon

Have you been trying the 4.x series? In the early releases 4.0-4.2.x a lot of KDE 3 series functionality was missing because they just rushed it out of the door. Starting with KDE 4.3.x and beyond things are starting to get back on track. Maybe you need to give KDE 4.4 a try when it comes out...

Gnome ehm... is just for the majority of users I guess. I personally stepped off the cool and sexy bandwagon and started using E16 because the only thing I really want to do with my OS anyway is connecting to the internet, adjust the volume, look at the time and date and run applications and that at the speed you'd expect computers to have in this day and age...

This is ofcourse just personal because I don't think that there are a lot of Enlightenment users out there, let alone version 16 users :P