to free up the name name for the inevitable 7" smart phone.

Microcomputer and "personal computer" (no caps) were used almost interchangeably. They did not mean the same thing though. A personal computer was simply a computer dedicated to a single person. A microcomputer was a computer built around a microprocessor. In principle a microcomputer could be a multi-user and a personal computer could have a multi-chip processor. In this era, though, both were rare.

What you did not encounter was the acronym. Any machine could be a "personal computer" but "PC" was shorthand first for IBM PC and later for "IBM PC clone".

Maybe there is only one bug and the remaining 29 are just trivial exploit variations of a single error. Of course, if that were true, it would help if Groupon actually explained that rather than hiding behind generalized and opaque "policy" reasons.

All monetary transactions are like that. Yet we don't negotiate for toothpaste, gas, etc.

Negotiations helps both sides find the middle ground that is acceptable in transactions where the stakes are high enough to be worth the trouble. Which side of that middle band the deal lands on depends on the skill of the negotiators. In the case of hiring, "no negotiation" means the employer needs to make a better first offer than with negotiation because there is plan B if the candidate refuses the first offer.

If there is only one way to do it, then it is a fact of nature and can not be patented. Also, if the standard has been published, that counts as prior art so no new patents can be applied there. However if I choose to create a standard that requires your existing patent, why should that give me the power to invalidate your patent?

Standards bodies usually try to avoid patents but this is often not practical because there are so many patents and the best solution is often patented.

A perplexing one for those who know anything about Oklahoma. Oklahoma is not known for heavy tree cover. Most of it is naturally grass land with quite few trees. According to Wikipedia, forest covers 24% of Oklahoma in the present day. I've heard it claimed (having difficulty finding authoritative sources) that this is consequences of numerous artificial lakes changing the climate and that originally there were fewer trees.

It is excellent tech but they can't stack the cells indefinitely. The approach uses pillars of cells with no cross wiring. All the control circuitry is in one plane at the bottom. This makes it cheap because they only have to mask and etch once: all the way down to the planer circuitry on the bottom. The downside is you can only go so high before the control circuitry can no longer detect the signal from the top layers They could add another layer of control circuitry but the principle cost of making a chip is the masking and etching so it may be just as cheap (and definitely easier) to just make two chips.

It does, but not where you would expect. Siberia is on the North American Plate. The plate crossing happens on dry land.

Strong AI and uploading are nearly orthogonal. Some possibilities:

1) Strong AI happens but no practical method of extracting a mind from a biological brain is found. The only machine intelligences are purely artificial.
2) Strong AI and a practical method of extracting a mind from a biological brain is found but technologies are incompatible. At best, the machine can emulate a biological mind very slowly.
3) A practical method of uploading a human intelligence onto a machine is found but strong AI is not solved. The only machine hosted intelligences are uploads.
4) Strong AI is not solved. Uploading is available but uploads are slower or otherwise inferior to running on a biological brain.
5) Neither strong AI or uploading are solved. The discussion continues until the end of days.

Switch your deflector shields on -- double front!

Deflector shields are mentioned often in Star Wars. I don't recall any visuals, though.

That's a secondary problem. Most people worry about how they would *survive* without the paycheck that comes from having a job.

Oh, I can think of a reason: One or both members of the household has a strong sense of aesthetics and do not want anything resembling a computer in the living room.

In ran into this once with the girlfriend of the guy who owned the house I was living in. I was arranging speakers next to a big CRT TV. I noticed that the speakers interfered with the CRT, causing quite noticeable color distortion strong near the side and fading toward the center. I suggested moving the speakers out a foot as I found that this was enough to cure the distortion.

Her: "No, it looks better the other way"
Me: "But it doesn't work well"
Her: "keep the speakers close"

I gave up. Not my house and she watched the TV much more than I did.

The current current situation is probably considered acceptable only because the machine than drives it is a laptop and it gets packed away when not in use.

Parity can not correct any bits. It only detects single bit errors. While many ECC codes exist, the Hamming code overwhelmingly used in computer memories can correct one bit in a 64-bit word and detect two bit errors.

Or maybe he *was* using ECC. ECC can only correct 1 bit.

Jupiter is not a brown dwarf. It is not massive enough to even burn deuterium. No fusion == no star