You want to know why they stopped stamping labels directly onto citrus fruit?
It's nothing to do with the safety of the inks. Sometimes, I think people ink entire oranges to make them orange enough. No. It was determined that, if more than a certain number of people squeeze a given grapefruit, the ink smudges, leaving the label unreadable. This is worse than nothing no matter how you slice it -- especially now that large oranges are the same size as small grapefruit.
Using water-soluable ink on citrus fruit that is then left directly under sprinklers also creates problems...

No, premise is wrong. Some parts of "our" population have exponential growth rates and some have exponential decay rates. And projections are that the global population will start to decline around 2050.

If there's a reason to the music I like, I would like the computers to tell me. I like all sorts of music, from acoustic folk to pop to alternative rock to christian rock to screamo. I'll even listen to some country now and again. If a music recommender can understand that by my admission to enjoying 38th Parallel and Blindside, that I'd also enjoy something by Jack Johnson, I'd be amazed.

"The system remains down Thursday, with no ETA in sight.""

Can't find those 5.25" floppy disks for DOS 3.1 I see. Time to check ebay.

I'd weigh the cost/benefit of each. Odds are really good that I would do neither. The Mars program would probably take place in the absence of any economic launch infrastructure to space and hence, be hideously expensive. The national energy infrastructure would most likely be a boondoggle and a bad choice. It's better to allow the market to chose a energy infrastructure rather than impose a bad idea (especially one chosen on the basis of what selfish special interest groups are most powerful).

Instead, I would probably focus on spending reduction, not just of expensive, delusionally misguided military projects, but everything including entitlements.

Why would I ever want to run a pre-installed OS? Aside from the security implications, it's incredibly unlikely to be installed the way *I* want.

As much I like seeing companies out there trying to make money off of promoting and selling Linux, I think a good portion of the lunix users wouldn't ever run/trust a pre-installed OS.

Problem is, it can't be done when the battery is physically disconnected from the electric motor. When you turn the Prius off, there's a big honkin' relay that actually cuts the supply from the traction battery to the motor. That relay doesn't get connected until the start button gets pressed with a valid key present, plus about a couple of dozen more checks. For a Prius that's actually shut off to start moving would require a cascade of failures to occur just to even get the battery reconnected to the motor. Then, once that happens, the ECU would have to shift itself out of park, which it's designed not to do unless the brake pedal is depressed. So, again, a couple of failures have to occur simultaneously for that to happen.

A much more likely scenario is that someone gets out of the car and forgets to turn the car off because the engine's already stopped. Not saying it's impossible for what the GP described to happen. It's just about a billion times more likely for the driver to screw it up. Occam's razor and all that.

For instance, Joe User picks up that nice Windows 7 Home Premium machine he saw at Best Buy, and plugs his Windows Vista drive in to copy over applications, unaware his old computer was running Vista x64, while his new Windows 7 machine is 32-bit. Joe has some Problems now, when he tries to run some of his old installed software that was 64-bit only.

Unfortunately, the days when you could transfer applications from one machine to the other simply by copying binaries are LONG gone in the PC world...

What's a homepage? My browser just boots with whatever was on it when I shut it down.

30% this time is less than 30% the last time they showed a speed increase.

Start off with 100%, 30% faster gives you 70% of the original time. Take off another 30% and now you're doing it at 49% of the original time. Now remember, we're on the 5th iteration of XX% faster, since the original chrome was XX% faster than (whatever they were compare it to).

Its not likely most people will notice a 30% increase on most pages, especially Googles own pages.

When you're talking about taking 30% off of something that already loaded in 1 or 2 seconds, no one notices, you get more delay from your overloaded cable modem than from the browser.

Decades ago, the county used to hire my Grandfather to use divining rods to find pipes and electrical wires underground when they could find the original drafting maps.

He had a bit of success at it too.

Why? How?

My bet is a friend at the hall of records. Missing maps...... yeah right :)

knowing about the placebo effect lowers its effectiveness

I phrased that badly. I was thinking more if you understood the placebo effect (not hard), would the idea that it might be a placebo lower the chance that any potential for its effectiveness regardless of its true state?

Now I've written it out it seems obvious it would. *facepalm* Bad day for me.

I have yet to see a system that could effectively run XP that couldn't also run Windows 7.

Really? Because I'm fairly certain the P4 w/ 512MB of RAM and an integrated Intel video card that I have at home won't run Windows 7 anywhere near "effective". XP Pro runs without any noticeable slowdowns, even when watching Flash video (YouTube, Hulu, etc.).

More topically, I would wager that the average person has no idea the difference between 2.5G, 3G, EDGE, or regular voice access. Non-technical people are just going to see two maps and notice that the red one has a lot more red than the blue one has blue. I'm not sure the fine print at the bottom of those ads stating that voice coverage is different is even large enough to be readable unless you have an HDTV.

Is there a link to an article on this that isn't a video?

Porsche and BMW exaggerate speed the most, and the theory is because owners of these cars are quite likely to upsize their rolling stock (and thus make the speedo read lower). It's annoying, but it's simply in response to a legal requirement.

Wouldn't a better solution be a programmable speedometer like the trucking industry uses? Any time tire size or axle ratio is changed, you simply plug the new info into the computer and it adjusts. IMO, if Porsche and BMW do that, every vehicle they sell is defective. Their speedo is about as useful as a Windows progress bar.