My mother's garden has earthworms. This may seem unremarkable to you, but she has been living in Fairbanks, Alaska for over 40 years now and last summer was the first time she has ever seen earthworms in her garden. The climate is supposed to be too cold for too long for them to survive in the wild.

I have other relatives who live in Denali Park, Alaska, in the midst of the Alaska Range and near the tallest mountain in North America. Over the past 4 or 5 decades, they have been watching the treeline creep hundreds of feet up the sides of the mountains.

Don't worry, Harold and John will stop listening when you get hot and heavy with your date.

I was born severely deaf, have worn hearing aids for my entire life, and found the induction loop kind of useful but not great with the old analog phones, back when anyone still had them. Otherwise, the loop was good for hearing funny buzzing sounds in certain locations. I have never in my life encountered anything else that employed them like what you describe. Now I just take out my hearing aids and use a good $40 pair of IEMs on my iPhone when I want to make a call, and that's a thousand times better than the induction loop ever was.

As far as Bluetooth goes, in my experience it sucks. I now use a pair of good $40 IEMs when making calls or listening to music on my iPhone or watching TV, and they sound great, a thousand times better than the induction loop ever did.

Pick up Kristine Smith's Code Of Conduct, and you'll be in for a very pleasant surprise. Then you'll want to get the other four books in the series: Rules Of Conflict, Law Of Survival, Contact Imminent, and Endgame.

How many raindrops are there in a storm?

Kristine Smith's series of 5 books: Code of Conduct, Rules of Conflict, Law of Survival, Contact Imminent, Endgame. She's probably my favorite overlooked author. I'm quite certain that 999 out of 1000 readers of this thread will never have noticed this very pleasant surprise.

What application is being used? Something that cripples itself with emulation? See this: http://www.everymac.com/ultimate-mac-comparison-chart/?compare=all-g3-g4-g5-intel-macs&highlight=0&prod1=PowerMacG5014 - I couldn't find any i7 Macs (even the laptops and minis) that weren't at least 3 times faster than the PPC Quad Core 2.5GHz (which is really two CPUs with two cores each).

From the Intego article about the new variant: "This malware is particularly insidious, as users don’t download anything or double-click any file to launch an installer." Yet Intego repeatedly refers to as a Trojan horse. All of the other articles I can find only reference the Intego report, and don't call it a virus either, including those who would know better, such as Ars Technica and the ISC Diary.

But if it requires no interaction from the user, then why is it not the first true Mac OS X virus?

It's not a film, but a very significant example of being trapped on VHS is CNN's Cold War documentary. 24 hour-long episodes covering the whole Cold War, start to finish, with an unbelievable roster of interviews including Fidel Castro, Walter Cronkite, Henry Kissinger, Robert MacNamara, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lech Walesa, Aldritch Ames, Mikhail Gorbachev, and more. Never released to DVD, because the series came out in 1998. Then 9/11 hit, and material in episodes 19 and 20 that covered the Russian Afghan war were re-classified by the Bush administration; CNN would not be allowed to republish that material. The DVD market went big-time shortly after, and CNN decided not to transfer an incomplete product. If you ever get a chance to see it, do so. It's worth your time. It's a pity that you pretty much can't obtain it legally anymore.

Latest estimate is $3 billion dollars for the Fairbanks to Nome road:

http://www.adn.com/2010/01/26/1111745/nome-road-could-cost-27-billion.html

"The road would pass through an estimated 65 miles of mountains, 185 miles of wetlands and require the construction of a new Yukon River crossing."

I think that $5 million per mile estimate is way, WAY low. There are highways in the US that cost $100 million per mile, and the conditions are far, far worse in Alaska. And then you need the railroad between Alaska and the US. Alaska, Canada and the US did a feasibility study in 2007:

http://alaskacanadarail.com/index.html

The Phase I report there refers to a "Nominal US$11 billion investment", and there hasn't been any news about it since.

...it's all about preventing used game sales.

DRM doesn't prevent piracy, never has, never will, and everyone knows this, including the game companies. The money that is lost to piracy is 99% imaginary money that was never going to be spent in the first place, so the game companies don't really care about piracy, even though that's their cover story for why they use DRM.

DRM does effectively prevent used games sales. When a used game is sold, the game company sees money trading hands that they think should be theirs. It's their end-run around the First Sale Doctrine. This is also the real reason you're seeing such a big push for books to go electronic; book publishers can't put DRM on a physical book, but they can on their ebooks.

If proponents of the CLI feel threatened by the GUI, they must be horrified by the FUI.

On another tack, I did a quick search and nobody seems to be calling the new interface the FUI - Finger User Interface. It seems so obvious that I can't believe I'm the first to do so.

Stupid question time, but what happens to the tree? I mean, how does it sequester more carbon than a normal tree? Does it simply grow bigger? Is the wood more dense or less dense? Does it become more flammable or less flammable? Will increasing the size of the root system have negative consequences such as reducing the number of trees in a given area?

How about people who are deaf like me? Will we get written up for walking around in a dangerous fashion and relying only upon our eyes to stay alive on the streets?

DRM has nothing whatsoever to do with fighting piracy. All those billions and trillions of dollars that pirates don't spend on games never existed, and spending money to chase money that never existed is, besides being insanely stupid, never profitable. Money spent on used games does exist and there is a lot of it; Gamestop alone had 8 billion dollars in revenue in 2009, and the game industry wants that money. If the game industry as a whole spends a few hundred million dollars to prevent tens of billions of dollars of used game sales, that is profitable and not stupid.