Say you want to give a 50 question multiple choice test. First make up two or three questions of similar difficulty for each "slot" on the exam. Now use a pseudo-random number generator to generate a "unique" test for each student by picking just one of the candidate questions for each slot, also use the random number generator to shuffle the answers so the correct one differs from one paper to the next. Include the seed for the random number generator on the test paper and have the student enter it onto the scantron answer sheet. Then you just need a smart scanner to check the answers based on which set of questions the student was given.

Cheating is still possible, but much harder because students can no longer send simple "Q23:B" messages, instead they need to send the complete question and answer (which may be a waste of time as that question may not even be on the recipient's copy of the exam).

The 10240 core system is a 20 node cluster with 512 cores on each node (Columbia cluster at NASA).

These big SGI systems prove little about the general scalability of Linux as they are all running HPC (high performance computing) workloads - read in some data, crunch floating point numbers for several hours then printf("42\n") at the end of the run. I.e. not stuff that will stress the scalability of the operating system.

Take one of those systems and have it run a workload where all the cpus are trying to create/write/read/close on a bunch of small files, and you'll soon see how poorly they scale for general purpose workloads.

Catch someone texting while driving - impound their car and tow it away. We already do this for people who are too drunk to drive. This just does the same for people who are too stupid to be allowed to drive.

Take the phone away too.

If they do decide to drop the printed version - then there seems to be little point in waiting 10 years until they "complete" the current edition before publishing it. They could simply release any completed sections into the online version at whatever frequency made sense.

1) Record anything broadcast for replay later
2) Easy edit to trim off commercials from recordings
3) TiVo style back-up & replay of last 30 minutes
4) One-touch sample for use as ring tone
5) One-touch e-mail of recorded samples to friends
6) One-touch sharing of recorded samples on social media

All of these look pretty easy to implement. I'm sure that NAB and RIAA will just *love* that all this flexibility will be available to every smart phone user.

There are plenty of precedents for laws that make discrimination illegal. Have any of these been challenged with this 5th amendment argument? E.g. there are anti-discrimination housing laws that (attempt to) prevent landlords from discriminating when renting out properties.

"I'm excited that we get any signal at all from social media"

s/excited/amazed/

I seem to remember that some candidates used copyrighted music as the soundtrack for their campaign videos without permission of the rights holder. Holding them up as a shining example of all that is good and right about non-infringing use of You-Tube clearly does not match with recent history.

Just got a pop-up from Quicken 2007 telling me that it will cease down-loading data from my bank at the end of April. If I want to keep being able to do this, then I'll have to upgrade to Quicken 2010.

This is the second time that Intuit have made an incompatible change to the download data format (at least while I've been using it). So I'm going to assume that their business plan now includes a forced upgrade every three or so years. Time to start researching non-evil alternatives.