Aside from the obvious chicken/egg problem, the other reason why public transit sucks in the US is because we're so spread out. Distances are larger, population density is lower, and a lot of people live outside of the main city/town centers. Of course our car addiction has helped enable that last point, but it's not the only thing. There's also the fact that we treat the ability to live in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere as a fundamental right, to the point of heavily subsidizing utility services to such customers. That greatly lowers the incentive to live in a town center, as most do in other countries.

I'm wondering what an MIT team was doing studying traffic at the home of Virginia Tech? Were the two cooperating, or was there some sort of one-ups-man-ship going on?

Ah, yes, the haunting "Torgo Theme"...

We have always been at war with Eurasia...

...our post-nuclear mole rat overlords!

OR: All I ever needed to know about high-radiation biology, I learned from Fallout 3.

I'm not familiar with the bone-patterning behavior of the octopus. Are they going out their way to do it, or is it just that each tentacle leaves its own pile of bones? Kind of like the aftermath when you share a giant plate of wings at the local sports bar...

"I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!"

http://search.dilbert.com/comic/10%20Dollars%20Bug%20Fix

I would assume that the whole reason IT might be embracing the iPad for user innovation is that it provides a much safer sandbox than the wide-open environment of a PC. Essentially it is already locked down by Apple; the common user can't easily corrupt system files, and the apps they can get from the app store are vetted. Also the interaction between apps is limited, producing fewer conflicts.

The reason PCs are locked down so mercilessly is that they were designed for flexibility rather than safety. PC OSes (and even the boot firmware) generally weren't designed to be fool-proof and tamper-proof from the ground up, so seemly harmless user privileges can open up gaps that allow the system to be destabilized. The very flexibility that makes PCs so useful also makes them inherently dangerous in the hands of a careless user.

I haven't played with G+ yet; is there a way to make your profile non-searchable? I know at least one person who uses a pseudonym on Facebook specifically to avoid stalker-ish folks from their past. There's no real subterfuge there; everyone who's "friends" with her knows who she is, but the fake name makes it harder for a casual potential stalker/troublemaker to find her profile.

In theory, at least, the weight and unwieldy nature of the armor may have mattered less to the nobles who were most likely to wear it, simply because they rode into battle on horseback. As such, they didn't need to support themselves the whole time. The problem of the leg armor in particular largely disappears when on horseback (assuming of course that the horse itself can manage the weight).

If and when they fell off their horse, or said horse was put down, *then* they could be in trouble. But my understanding is that foot soldiers were usually more interested in capturing nobles and holding them for ransom, rather than killing them outright. It was probably far more important that they be able to weather the rain of arrows and the attacks of other horse-bound noblemen.

Agreed, their "massive database" will be worthless in no time. They'd have to largely start over, focusing on the new data they collected since the start of the program.

Eventually it becomes like stock market prediction; even when you find a meaningful pattern to exploit, the very act of exploiting it changes the pattern...

You say that like it's a good thing... I'd say that it's unrealistic depictions like this that have desensitized you to "ordinary" violence, such that it doesn't shock you or stick in your brain as much as it otherwise would.

Now that geeks are hip, hipsters are pretending to be geeky...

The evidence for science and against religious origin theories may be obvious to us now. But thinking historically, how is the current situation for laymen different between listening to scientists today vs. priests and scholars in the Dark Ages? In both cases, the uneducated layman sees that every learned person seems to agree on certain basic facts about the universe, and s/he has to choose to either believe that consensus or not. In the absence of an alternative explanation, how is the medieval peasant to know that thunderstorms are *not* the work of God/Satan, or that any number of "miracles" are not caused by what the learned fathers all agree is the cause? After all, it's the best explanation being offered for the phenomena observed. And without a dissenting voice, those scholarly explanations can seem awfully convincing, especially when they get into impressive theological or natural-philosophy jargon that you can only half understand. For many people, the experience today is the same, only with scientists replacing the priests, monks, etc.

Of course to those of us with at least some understanding of science, the difference is obvious; "science works", hypotheses are tested, etc. But to Joe Sixpack who never had an interest, all he has is the consensus of scholars to go by. But of course that consensus now conflicts with the consensus of his peers and the leader(s) of his religious community, so in that sense it's harder for him to believe in science now than it was for our hypothetical peasant to believe in religious explanations back in the day.

I agree that OO in the 101 course is a little much. You should really be focusing on simple programming techniques that a non-major might encounter when, say, writing a batch script or macro. I'm not sure about the second semester courses, though, since those are more for potential majors. Certainly at some point a CS major needs to be exposed to OO, but I don't think it needs to come first.

As for understanding the infrastructure, I do think C/C++ get you closer, but in my experience it doesn't really click until you take some kind of computer architecture course or similar. For instance, I didn't *really* understand pointers until I understood how values and addresses are stored in memory.