Maybe, although I foresee massive class action suits by everybody from major corporations to pensioners holding US bonds.

See, a lot of people think that, but it really isn't true. A lot of the US bonds are actually inflation-linked (i.e payments are compensated for inflation).

Well, I am also a lecturer, but I've never understood that attitude. If a student feels they can learn the material more efficiently in another way, then let them try and deal with the consequences. They are young, but they are also adults and should be expected to take responsibility for their own education. If somebody truly learns better from the book than from the lectures, why would I make them sit through the lectures? University isn't some kind of endurance test, it is about getting an education.

Now, if they decide to come to my class, I do expect them to not cause disruptions. If the cellphone goes off more than once during the term, I'll ask them to leave the room; same if they cause disruptions with laptops or just by talking - typically they'll get one warning and that is it. In my 10 years at university I've had one case of somebody refusing to leave. That got solved when I started dialing the number of campus security.

And what moron tagged this "Sweden"?

I am baffled as to the mental model people have of academic research. This was a grad student working in a research lab dedicated to software and chip security. You honestly think he didn't have access to a logic analyzer if he needed one?

Actually, in my time in Germany I found that most measurements were done with device called a "Zollstock", which is a bunch of rigid segments linked up by articulated joints:

http://www.google.ca/images?q=zollstock&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=DywQTdOtNYrEsAO44qy8Ag&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CEAQsAQwAw&biw=1280&bih=703

Ironically, even though the modern versions are metric, "Zollstock" literally translates to something like "inch stick" ("Zoll" being the German word for the unit "inch").

Except that simply not true. Democracy is is not about reaching some imaginary "best" decision (WTF is "best" anyways? By what metric?). Instead, democracy is based on the assumption that, if everybody can vote for their own interests, then a balance will be reached between the different personal interests present in a society.

That is why it is important to separate political decisions (decisions about preferences and tradeoffs between preferences) from decisions that are technical. The technical decisions should be made by domain experts. The political decisions should be made by democratically elected representatives, who are accountable to the public.

In the example of the NSF, the political decision is how much public funding should be made available to research. That decision is the one that should be under public scrutiny, and politicians should be accountable to the public for their stance on that issue. The technical decision is what research projects have enough merit to be funded. That decision is currently made by domain experts (the evaluation boards), which is as it should be.

Now compare this to the intelligence services. Politicians make decisions about funding as well as general directions of the agencies. Day to day operational details are handled by the domain experts. So far so good. The trouble is, that due to secrecy, the political decisions are in fact NOT under public scrutiny; there is no accountability, and that is what makes the process undemocratic.

Seems fair, since they also benefit more from the system than all other income classes - combined.

The irony...

Why would they care at this point? Except for Opera, nobody is making money off of browsers. The only reason why Microsoft wanted to dominate browsers the browser "market" at some point was because at that time it still seemed that control over the browser would also mean control over the web access portal (search engine, start pages etc). The world has changed significantly since then. First, because of all the antitrust rulings (esp. the European ones), they now have to make it easy to choose a different search engine etc. Second, the users have become much more savvy in their use of the web - you are not going to prevent people from heading straight to facebook or google just because your browser doesn't have a direct link to those pages.

So basically, IE contributes virtually nothing to the Microsoft's bottom line. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say that they probably wouldn't mind getting rid of IE, except that they need a default browser for Windows, and they don't want to rely on third party software for that.

All they need to do is install software that will alert security personel if a USB mass storage device is registered. Physical appearance does not play into it.

Reminds me more of the machino line. And that worked like a charm, didn't it?

Given that this is highschool - level math, I'd say "reinventing" it primarily shows a shocking lack of education (for a doctor).

Oh please. A cellphone-grade CMOS image sensor costs about $2 in bulk. Control electronics and optics are maybe another $8-10. Most modern cars already have a display that can be used to show the image in reverse mode. Transmission is over the existing CAN-bus.

Sure, while a feature like this is optional, the car companies will overcharge you by a factor of 100 or so, just because they can. Once the feature becomes mandatory, it just becomes part of the base price, which is under a lot of competitive pressure.