Quote: "within their jurisdiction". That means that the court has ordered (in compliance with your rights) that certain data be discovered or turned over. Seriously, folks: the police do get to investigate crimes. If they need to look at your car (or, in 18th century terms, your horse), they get to.

I don't understand this modern "etiquette". Airline says have a recline button; it has exactly one function, and people are using it correctly. How can anyone then suggest that politeness requires that people should not recline their seats?

Actually, it is that hard. I needed some CR32032 batteries, and looked on Amazon. Guess what? There's a ton of sellers, claiming to sell from a ton of vendors. I'll guess that many of them will sell me a battery with the right physical and electrical form factor, but....

Which brands last longer?
Which sellers are selling official brands, and which are selling indistinguishable knockoffs?
Are the knockoffs actually worse?

Is something that looks more official and appears more reputable actually selling something better? Or am I paying for reputation and not actual quality?

How valid are the reviews? Are they astroturf? Does it matter? How can someone tell a good battery from a bad one, anyway, right after getting it. Are the just giving 5 stars because the batteries came quickly in nice packaging?

I think these are all reasonable questions, but I don't have an answer to any of them. I'm hoping that someone has done a real comparison, and can provide some kind of solid data.

Funny, I remember the same thing. And it's an old usage to -- I see from the Electric Interlocking Handbook (1913) at http://books.google.com/books?id=ZPINAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA93&dq=%2B%22buss%22+electric&hl=en&sa=X&ei=4kfUU4_2McW1iwKwyYHIBA&ved=0CFgQuwUwBg#v=onepage&q=%2B%22buss%22%20electric&f=false that it's been used in the industry.

What's the probabilitiy...
It's easily possible to idly speculate on answers:
Probability of life starting? On Earth, life started up pretty much right away. If it was unlikely, it's more likely to have started later, not earlier.

Probability of life becoming complex: low (ish). Out of roughly 5 billion years, 4 billion were spent on one-celled organisms

Probability of sentience: out of a metric buttload of species, we know of exactly one species with both sentience and high technology. That kind of indicates that's it's not so much a survival trait :-)

Tenure exists in the secondary education market because local school boards used to always fire teachers before they could qualify for their pension.

Actually, most of the comments I've seen about the OpenSSL code are immature, and show a lack of appreciation for the changes in the industry.

Like, remember that if-isupper-then-tolower code? Well, back in the day, tolower on most platforms would just bit-bang in a '1' bit. That will convert A to a, but also converts at-sign to back-tick. In "modern" toolchains, this doesn't happen any more; tolower is expected to handle all chars, and work correctly.

But -- as a developer, can you prove that every system that you're running on has a proper implementation of tolower? It's easy for me; I only work with one version of Visual Studio, and I can quickly prove that tolower work.

I've done code that works on multiple platforms. It used to be really, really gnarly: everything platform was always just a little bit different. And you get code that looks just like what I've seen in the snarky comments.

From TFA (2007): "Gore said that Arctic ice could be gone entirely in 34 years, and he made it seem like a really precise prediction"

OK, it's been 6 or 7 years since then. Would you say the artic ice is substantially less, substantially more, or about the same from then?

Hint: data at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicen...

Eyeballing the data, there's a ton of noise but there is a decent trend in there. And the data in the last 7 years doesn't look like it is violation of that trend, or the prediction voiced by Mr. Gore.

WTF? Are you mad? Or drunk? The whole point of a model is to predict the future. And they can, and do, make predictions. And over time, we can see if the predictions worked.

And your biggest issue is that the model conserved energy? You do know that in the middle of a time-step, things get wonky, right? And that the modelers know this, and therefore apply some brainpower to make it work?

The early models of galaxy collision (per the Toomre brothers) were astonishingly low-res, and yet they captured some pretty subtle effects. And guess what? They had to apply fix-ups on each time-step, too!

Climate researchers have certainly put some real thought into geo-engineering. The neatest simulation was, "what happens if we try geo-engineering, and have to stop". Result: everything goes to heck, and in a hurry.

More like 3K for a terminal, and 5K for a PC.

I've used some of the earlier "internet tablets" (e.g., the Nokia N800) and PDA. Early machines had real issues with being powerful enough to actually work well -- something my low-end phone still struggles with.

(Not to mention the terrible, terrible connection managers. For one particularly horrid PDA, I spent more time trying to get on the internet than actually using the internet)