These kids have my thanks, as does North Korea. Sony hacked my computer with the XCP trojan they loaded on a music CD my daughter bought at the record store she worked at. So any time Sony is hacked, I cheer and hope the attackers do a lot of expensive damage.

Yes, over ten years ago and I'm still enraged over it. Someone should have gone to prison for that.

Fuck that evil God damned Sony and the ass it rode in on, the fucking bastards. DIE, SONY, DIE!!!

I think losing keys, at least outside, is worse. especially in the winter.

Actually, I'm having the time of my life.

Again, you're still focusing on the name. The vast majority of the paper has nothing to do with Christianity nor Science. It's just a newspaper.

CSM is actually a good paper, and I say this as an atheist. The only regular "religious" aspect is a single daily column, "A Christian Science Perspective" - you'll find less religion in the CSM than in lots of other US papers. The overwhelming majority of their reporting has nothing to do with religion. They've won 7 Pulitzers and are famous for avoiding sensationalism.

It's somewhat of an unfair definition, though, as it's much easier to dominate a narrow orbit. If Earth was out in the Kuiper Belt even it would struggle to remove all competing large bodies. And there's supergiants where you could put Earth even into the habitable zone and still not have it able to dominate its orbit. On the other hand, large asteroids that don't even have enough gravity to fully collapse into spheres (Vesta, Pallas, Hygiea, etc) could clean up in a close orbit to a low-mass brown dwarf.

So solar charging should be forced to be impossible for no good reason whatsoever? The only thing rendering it suchly is the stupid non-disableable screen-activation feature on Android.

BS on the charging port issue. I've had it happen twice, and it was never a "cheap trip to the service center", the estimated cost to repair was both times more than the cost of the phone.

A bad charging port often means replacing the whole phone, it's often cheaper. And how do you propose "fixing" a solar charger? Do you have magical powers over when the clouds come and go?

Back when I worked for a BIRN project center, it was made repeatedly obvious that alcoholic beverages purchases were banned with the funds. But they got around that by corporate sponsors donating the alcohol for free.

Yeah, compared to the size of this project, these costs don't seem disproportional at all.

Let's say that salaries + equipment + overhead amounts to 100k per employee per year, and let's estimate that around 1/3rd of the budget, say $150m, was spent in the audit year. Then there'd be around 1500 employees. Thus we have a per-head cost of:

Winter holiday party: $17
Coffee: $7
Shirts and other clothes: $2

For a project of that scale, whatever business development covers, 83k is chump change and I wouldn't be surprised if the expenses are reasonable. $3k on board of directors dinners sounds abnormally *low*, so kudos to them for keeping the costs down. The only one that sounds off is lobbying - but then again, that's a tiny fraction of what a company that size would probably spend on lobbying, and I don't know what they classify as "lobbying".

Those things are unholy terrors. Chewing right through the cardboard and plastic into unopened boxes of food, with holes so small you don't see them, and you can only see the infection when it's gotten so bad that your food is all webbed up with their feces. The larvae pupate for varying lengths of time, as much as many months, so they keep coming back long after you try to treat the problem. And they don't need much food to keep going. It can be many month or multi-year battle to completely get rid of them. At least there's traps, but they only catch the males, and only the ones that are free-flying in your house, rather than inside food packages. For everything else, you have to first become a neat freak, then have to inspect every food item in your house, store all food in airtight *thick* plastic containers (or metal), inspect those at regular intervals because you've surely trapped moths inside of them which can spread to other foods in the container, and of course before you put things in there, even if they pass inspection, you have to either bake all of your food to kill the larvae, or if that's not possible, deep-freeze it for long periods of time.

One that annoys the heck out of me, if you have an unreliable charging source (poor cable or charging port, solar-powered charger, etc): the screen comes on, both when power starts, and when power disconnects. Combined with an unreliable charging source, your screen is constantly coming on, wasting what power you do get, and there's no way to disable it without root. (The best non-root option I've found is an app that shuts the screen off immediately after it turns out due to a power state change, but that's obviously not ideal).

Did #1 Monday