Atari is only the second company I know of that offers a sabbatical after 7 years, the first being Intel.

Maybe your plants do. My plants are powered by the sun, and only emit CO2 during construction and demolition.

Strange, I don't recall this being the case with Windows XP and Windows 7.

Windows XP built on the NT4 kernel that Windows 2000 solidified, and added crucial Win9x software compatibility. It effectively replaced both Win9x and Win2k in one fell swoop.

While Windows Vista was widely panned compared to Windows XP (and for good reason), it was a technically better OS than XP; it just couldn't overcome the flaws. Windows 7 fixed everything that was wrong with Windows Vista, and rapidly displaced Windows Vista sales. 7 is also a better product than XP, though the system requirements are substantially higher. Most consumers that stubbornly held onto XP were because they didn't want to do a hardware upgrade, even though 7 is a much better OS.

From TFA:

From the sounds of it, the cotton and paper industries are in need of manufacturing improvements of some kind.

Considering the amount of money that Walmart has invested in useless plastic bag carousels at their checkout lanes, I'd say the cost of the bags themselves to the retailers is pretty trivial.

Probably.

Most grocery chains in Arizona (unless you count Walmart as a grocery chain) offer paper, plastic, and reusable. Plastic is ---by far--- the most common choice.

Fruits and vegetables don't usually come prepackaged, at least in the US. Most meats are packaged, but also tend to leak. Just about everything else comes prepackaged.

I'm wondering if there's a difference between paper bag users and plastic bag users. Not routinely washing a reusable bag is a plausible source for disease, but it isn't the only thing to consider.

Water that is absorbed by the ground and isn't directed into aquifers or similar structures is effectively lost. The rest is lost to the ocean or to evaporation. Granted, you could desalinate the ocean, but then the question becomes what to do with the leftover material, which is an environmental issue unto itself.

The States are not bound by the 1st amendment. Only the Federal government is.

At least in my local neighborhood, most ISPs frown on running an internet server of any kind out of your house, even Minecraft servers. That is, unless you opt for a business internet account, which adds substantial cost to your internet service over a standard home account. That cost alone will easily eat into the savings you have from running the hardware out of your home instead of a VPS.

Of course, most business internet accounts are also bandwidth unlocked, so there is that.

Cinco de Mayo is almost a holiday in Arizona.

It just drives me absolutely crazy that low end hard drives are as expensive as they are, and stubbornly not dropping. Take for example these prices on Newegg for a new internal desktop hard drive:

250GB - $49.99 ($2.00 per 10 gigabytes)
320GB - $59.99 ($1.87 per 10 gigabytes)
500GB - $58.99 ($1.18 per 10 gigabytes)
1TB - $79.99 ($0.80 per 10 gigabytes)

I mean, don't get me wrong, the 1 terabytes are an attractive price on a price-per-gigabyte point of view. But there are times where you simply don't need (or want) a large drive, and a small one would do, or your budget for a larger one doesn't exist and you need a smaller drive. But the price per gigabyte is so out of whack on the low end models, it doesn't make sense to waste your money. You'd think stores and suppliers would want to dump their low end inventory for the larger capacities, but apparently they aren't in any hurry.

IANAL, but I would also ask for proof that they actually own the patent, or are legal representatives of the patent owner.