On the contrary, it is a moral issue. Quite apart from the basic personal morality of honoring one's word, those who default become part of the statistics used to set the interest rates, so they're still raising the rates for everyone else. Worse, since you can't sign away the ability to discharge the loan in bankruptcy, those who would not attempt to evade repayment of a loan they voluntarily agreed to are penalized along with the rest.

Or, they would get a National Security Letter compelling them to turn over your keys and your data.

See also Lavabit.

If you can dump your 80 year old brain in a healthy 18 year old body, I would imagine a good number of people would take that option over death, at least until they sort out the whole "connecting the brain to the central nervous system" problem.

If you enable pipelining, firefox can be MUCH faster.

TFT should read: "NOAA Alters Climate Date to Hide Pause in Global Warming."

Finally, even with silly little distractions like terrorism, the economy, foreign threats to our security, and other things, there is a candidate that is ready to tackle the real issue of our time - our unit system! Seriously, this has to be the biggest threat to our prosperity since the Spanish Flu and George W. Bush.

Even if he doesn't win the nomination, which I admit is a long shot given how incredibly obvious it is that our unit system is the most compelling issue of our time, I'll write him in.

Go metric!

It does no such thing. Now, panicking and trampling others in your haste to escape the "fire" does infringe others' rights, but that isn't directly caused by shouting "fire" and would not be justified even if the fire were real. The responsibility for that harm lies squarely with those who panic.

If someone fraudulently claims that there's a fire, and you take justifiable action based on a reasonable belief that they're telling you the truth, then they would be responsible for any harm that results from their fraud. That harm resulted from their choice, not yours. That isn't the case here; panicking and trampling others are not justifiable responses to a fire.

I find it hard to believe that so many people are willing to defend this bizarre ruling, which besides being unjust in its own right was also clearly politically motivated with the specific purpose of circumventing the First Amendment and permitting the suppression of political speech opposed to the draft (Schenck v. United States).

What's worse, I promise you that a larger company that has made enormous campaign donations to certain politicians does not have to jump through all of those hoops.

Few battery powered devices don't already have a boost converter built in. Most wireless mice, for example, have two AA batteries in parallel and boost the voltage to whatever it needs, be it 3.3 or 1.8 or whatever.

Well I just updated to 2.6 and now cinnamon continuously crashes into fallback mode

This is Slashdot. Did you really expect anything other than rampant, hard-core bias in favor of Tesla? It matters not that Daimler and dozens of other companies have been doing battery storage power facilities for decades before Tesla existed.

It has been a great many years since I was fresh out of school. I now own my own company and employ nearly 50 people.

The way I got to live the dream is by being honest and having integrity from the get go. That means saying what is on your mind, professionally and personally, and above all, being NICE about it. Also, being flexible and eager to go outside my comfort zone was a huge help in learning everything I had to learn to go out on my own. The biggest mistakes I see "green" engineers make are:

1) Getting defensive. You're going to be wrong. A lot. You have a lot to learn, and a winning attitude is to accept this and seek out learning opportunities. There are certain school I just won't hire from anymore because they program their students with ultra large egos, probably to compensate for the ultra large price of tuition. There isn't much room for ego in an Associate Engineer position.

2) Getting lazy. We all realize you've been busting your ass to get your degree, and that being a good student is more than a full time job. But, you don't get to stop working hard just because you graduate.

3) Closely related to being lazy is: doing the bare minimum. You'll likely not be assigned enough work to keep you busy for 40 hours, but it will generally be expected that you spend the remaining time seeking out learning opportunities, reaching out to people for new work, and generally being eager and inquisitive.

4) Pigeon-holing: I see this one a lot too. Having your first real job is scary, and often I've seen new grads learn their first new skill, get comfortable with it, and then not want to do anything else. I would say the first 10 years of your career are not the time to specialize in something. The first 10 years are for exploring different skills and use cases and finding out what you're really good at.

I think the top three things you can do during the first year in your new job are:

1) Get to know everyone you can and what they do, and learn something about it, and how it ties in to the overall goals of the company

2) Be helpful. Offer to assist more senior engineers with testing, documentation, or whatever. You need to learn how to do the mundane and seniors will definitely appreciate your help in doing some of those tasks.

3) SAY SOMETHING when you get into trouble. If you're getting behind, don't know how to do something, or need help, SAY IT. You will not get in trouble for not knowing what to do, and the only way to learn is to ask. "I don't know" is not an obscene phrase.

Mars' gravity is well less than half of Earth's gravity. It's not a lot larger than the Moon. To put the same stress on your skeleton on Mars that an obese person does to their own in Earth gravity, you'd need to add about 250 to 350 pounds of radiation shielding.

Seriously? You move my poll and don't give me a Cowboy Neal option? Slashdot, you are dead to me...