I have fond memories of my Compaq Armada 7790. Among its many virtues was a built-in power supply. If it had used the standard power cable used on desktop PCs (and just about everything else with a detachable power cable) it would have been perfect, although theirs wasn't too hard to get either (it was not some completely nonstandard Compaq-only plug). Not having the brick to deal with makes a big difference in terms of convenience.

Apparently, even financial geniuses can miss bubbles -- see here, for example.

Not to say anything against the financial geniuses of the world, but if even objectively successful investors can miss something as huge as the U.S. housing bubble, it just reinforces my suspicion that those financial types are merely experts on the small scale, and ignorant of the big picture.

The big picture being: population grows. Places where you can find gainful employment are growing at a lesser pace because of limited natural resources. Population density grows disproportionally in areas with lots of Big Business and concomitant employment opportunities. Housing in said areas becomes scarcer and therefore more expensive. People get antsy about having to spend more and more on housing, but demographic inertia prevents the decline in population growth that would bring things back into balance quickly; instead, people start focusing on how rising real estate prices could actually work to their benefit, and buy things that are really kinda out of reach. This leads to real estate prices rising even more rapidly, making the expectation of rising real estate prices a self-fulfilling prophecy. People buy outrageously expensive houses yet feel that they've gotten themselves a great deal, will be able to retire 10 years sooner than they used to expect, a win-win all around. Some sane people realize that this cannot continue because it's just another pyramid scheme that will implode once the market runs out of suckers. Those sane people are a tiny minority that everyone else just laughs at -- financial geniuses included. Then the inevitable happens and the bubble bursts. Bankers get blamed because they made the juiciest profits; people who bought ridiculously overpriced homes consider themselves innocent victims. People who stayed in rented apartments while the world around them went nuts end up just scratching their heads and laughing at the stupidity of it all.

Protip: when someone doesn't get that you were joking, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're "humour-impaired". Maybe, just maybe, it means that it actually wasn't obvious that you were joking.

Besides, the difference between strong beer and whisky is no joking matter.

I'm pretty suspicious of those numbers. I mean, I keep hearing things like X thousand species going extinct each year, or umpteen bazillion species of insects found in one square mile of Amazon rainforest, and I can't help but wonder: *really*? Did they actually try to interbreed any of those bugs to make sure they were different species and not just slightly different-looking individuals from the same species? I'd love to know what criteria are being used there. I suspect that, with such large numbers being bandied about, while the line between what's a species boundary and what isn't isn't always very clear, even the various races of humans or breeds of dogs could be mis-identified as separate species rather than intra-species diversity.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to discredit the dangers of biodiversity loss, but I have real trouble assigning any real meaning to the notion of "millions of species", and I don't think that those numbers are doing much to win over eco-skeptics either. The real issue to me seems to be overall genetic diversity and the need to preserve it; how many "species" you pigeonhole that diversity into has very little practical relevance and is probably impossible to do properly anyway.

Right. And if you freeze-distill wine for long enough, it'll be brandy, right? Bullshit.

It makes a huge difference whether you remove water by freezing or by distilling. The heat used in distillation causes chemical changes that do not happen when freezing; also, in distillation, much more than just water is left behind in the heated vessel, only the substances that can travel with the alcohol fumes end up in the distillate. This is why beer , even the really strong stuff, tastes nothing like whisky, and why even fortified wine tastes nothing like brandy.

But hey, if you want to call everything that was made from barley or wheat and has a high alcohol content "whisky", feel free to try and rewrite the dictionary -- while the rest of us continue to use words like "strong beer", "vodka", "aquavit", "jenever", and whatnot. Cheers!

No, you, sir, are making the mistake everyone makes. In game theory, it's called the Horizon Effect: where you fail to make the move that produces the best long-term result, because you aren't looking far enough ahead to see the disaster that will ensue if you keep on minimizing short-term losses.

Yes, lowering birthrates will mean that the generation that decided to have only one child per couple will have fewer children and grandchildren to take care of them. *Not* lowering birthrates leads to a world where natural resources are so depleted that your large number of grandchildren will have nothing to support you with.

We're already collectively screwed; the longer we stay in denial about this, the worse the pain will be when starvation forces population growth to zero or less.

You're describing your experience in the American job market, but I'm sure this sounds awfully familiar to a lot of people who have been getting nowhere in the European job market as well. The situation you're describing basically boils down to "you're screwed because no matter what job you apply for, there's always someone else, and usually hundreds, who are more experienced / younger / less desperate / more confident / better-looking". No matter how good you may look on any one of those criteria, there are plenty who look better... And being desperate disqualifies you from just about everything.

There is an over-supply of workers. In a Free Market (TM) this means that prices, meaning your wages, will fall until supply meets demand. The supply consists of hundreds of thousands of unemployed people just like you, competing for 1 job for every 5 job-seekers. Demand is limited by the resources that are available for anyone to work with, and those resources aren't growing while the number of job-seekers is. Enjoy.

I'm not trying to be cynical here; I'm a 45-year-old IT worker, with a pretty decent resume, making a very comfortable living, and still the idea of losing my job scares the hell out of me. If I were to get the boot and my personal network can't get me back in within a year or less, I'm very probably screwed for life. Even stepping down on the economic ladder is getting harder as employers tend to dislike hiring "over-qualified" employees.

I'm sure any government that is serious about censorship will eventually also ban encryption, or at least restrict it to only algorithms that they have a back door to. Such a ban is easy to enforce by forcing ISPs to pass only government-whitelisted protocols and nothing else.

FYI, the German federal government is in Berlin, and the high court (Bundesgerichtshof) is in Karlsruhe.

People in the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Scandinavia eat raw herring and have done so for ages -- it's a delicacy. Also, raw oysters, steak tartare... I'll grant that raw dead animals were never as prominent on the European menu as in Japanese cuisine, but they were certainly there before the current wave of Asian food started. :-)

All this talk of getting a few people offworld is pretty unconvincing, too, as long as we can't demonstrate the ability to create a self-sustaining environment first. Let me see a project like Biosphere that actually manages to thrive in complete isolation for several years. Do that, and *then* maybe we should start building rockets and sending people off to live on the moon or on Mars or wherever. Until then, our eggs are in one basket anyway, and we may as well focus on managing this particular basket better.
We just aren't ready to colonize the planets yet, and right now, a mission to Mars would be just as pointless as going to the moon was in 1969. Impressive, sure, a nice feelgood project if you will, but the practical significance is close to zero. Despite all the rhetoric, Neil Armstrong was not the Columbus of the 20th century; being stranded on the moon is, at present, still a death sentence. Let's do something about that before building more and bigger rockets...

In case you're referring to the "Sent from my iPhone" footer you see on a lot of emails from iPhone users, that's just the default signature appended by the email app. You can change that to whatever you want, including nothing (one of the first things I did while setting up email on mine).

The Yahoo! Messenger client for iPhone uses notifications; once you're signed in you will be notified when a message comes in, even if the phone is on standby or if you're in another app. This type of notification support was added in iPhone OS 3.0, I think. Dunno if other IM clients use this, but I'm pretty pleased with the Yahoo! one.

Amen!

Again, I agree. With both points.
I don't think that any argument will shut up right-to-lifers, nor do I think that any argument will shut up pro-choicers. Both camps have good points on their side; it just happens that their priorities are different (the rights of the unborn vs. the rights of the woman whose uterus the unborn is living in), and there simply isn't any way to arrive at a compromise between the two. It is one of that rare species of truly black-and-white issues.

True, I over-simplified, and presented my own point of view as if it were the point of view of pro-choicers in general. Some do indeed simply take the position that life doesn't begin until birth, and under that interpretation, abortion cannot be a homicide, by legal definition. I doubt that that is really the way that most pro-choicers think, though -- and even if it were, they will have to do some serious soul-searching, if and when the countries they live in adopt laws that define the start of a human life to be at conception! Personally, I think that laws should represent a country's values, not define them, but that's another subject for discussion without end.

[citation needed]

Seriously, it seems to be a very popular meme on /. that copyright is somehow a very recent invention, and that in some mythical past the only way people made money from music and other performance arts was by performing live. In reality, copyright is almost as old as the industry that prompted its invention, namely, printing and publishing. Also, the advent of digital media, which has made it possible to create lossless copies ad infinitum and at negligible cost, makes copyright more important, not less, despite what /. naysayers may feel about the publishing industry's "outdated business model".

*dons asbestos underwear*