How much "wilderness" is actually unused land though, as opposed to farm land or protected (state and national parks/preserves)? I realize that the answer is nonzero, but I wonder how much of it is usable/livable. (Pioneer spirit is one thing, but I don't think building a house at the top of Pikes Peak or in Death Valley fall in the realm of reasonable.) I also wonder at your 70% figure.

+1: The class I had in undergrad that I was most excited about was the one that had a series of 7 projects, which cumulatively were 70% of the grade. There was a small midterm and smaller final, but the main point was to get our hands dirty and write a lot. On the other hand, there is something to be said I think for the basics that you get in lower-level courses, and most people in the lower-level courses aren't going to do well if you throw lots of code at them. (Yeah, yeah, use that to select out the bad students so only the good coders even make it to the upper-level classes.)

Not that this comment will get read, you know, being so far down the page...

Presumably, the hotter the temperature, the better, in terms of generating geothermal energy. That means that the eastern part of the state (with the exception of the panhandle) would be the best for generating geothermal. However, a lot of that land along the WV/VA border is protected: state parks, national forests, national rec areas, and a large number of caverns that are declared off-limits. The Greenbanks radio astronomy telescope is also in that area, and a couple miles around it are restricted from having wireless communications or other serious electrical equipment that could interfere with radio astronomy.

On the other hand, if coal ever goes out of fashion, I guess the state will have to make a decision - with coal and tourism being our two biggest sources of money, I guess they'll have to decide whether the state parks are more valuable for tourism or generating power.

The Internet is not and was not necessarily that place ("On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" notwithstanding). The reason everybody can follow you and find out everything you're doing everywhere else in the world is because you announced to everybody where you were going and what you were doing anyway.

I saw one that replaced your HOSTS file to prevent you from going to symantec, kapersky, etc., and show a host not found error instead. Sadly, it wasn't clever enough to check your browser first, so it displayed the IE error page in Firefox.

This is not new. Sure, the WSJ article is dated today(/yesterday depending on where you are), but the Solo Cup case they reference is from last year at the most recent and maybe older than that.

Nah... here at UVA they're living equally dependently on their parents' income all four years. At least.

With respect to fraud in store (stolen CC#), the credit card company isn't on the hook for the money. If they reverse the charges, it's the store that takes the hit. I assume a similar point is true here, if you dispute the charges and they reverse it then the CC company doesn't eat the cost, the scamming company just doesn't get the money.

This is probably why the credit card companies have little incentive to investigate or stop working with any particular company: the cost to them to reverse charges is fairly small, whereas launching an investigation would be expensive, and they're not really losing anything in public opinion because most people apparently don't realize the companies are a scam and therefore aren't clamoring, "Why didn't you protect us?"

Also, because of the work that's done by the integer pipeline, even so-called floating point applications still may do more than 50% integer processing.

So when someone makes logical arguments, they are being bought and paid for by big oil??? When bikers pay into the highway system, then they can have bike lanes. It costs money to build and maintain bike lanes .. how can anyone disagree with bike riders paying their fair share to use them???

Assuming that a large portion of your bikers are people biking to work, I'd guess they're taxpayers and thus are paying into the highway system.

Unless of course they meant a one-liner coupled with a comment from the previous implementation, ie, the clever programmer failed to cleverly update the comment.

I've always wondered if there was any (automated) way to at least give developers a fighting chance when dealing with out-of-date documentation.

My only experience using a source code manager is CVS -- sorry. But I'm sure SVN and Git are similar. CVS understands the sections of code that have changed. There are also numerous ways to parse languages. Can we not combine the two to determine if there is a so-called "significant" change (where this is a highly questionable quantifiable value) and, if so, reject the check-in unless the comment directly above it, beside it, (or whatever) has changed as well? Perhaps there are already tools that do this? I am not aware of them and I would be most interested if anyone has anecdotal stories about things they use at their workplace to try to automate this.

Of course, nothing will stop a motivated developer from eventually getting around such a stop-gap system, but this would be designed to HELP, not PREVENT.

I dunno, I've found Google's targeting to be pretty spot-on, with the exception of Gmail (which is still pretty accurate). I find if I search for something, I'll get ads related to that search, not previous searches.

I would've modded that funny...but my points expired yesterday.