Do postal service employees work for free? No. They pay taxes on the income that USPS pays them. Even if USPS doesn't generate a profit (and therefore doesn't pay an tax on its profit), it's still generating economic activity which is taxed. No different to any other company that is not making a profit.

It's clearly satire. You're wrong on this.

The whole point behind Literate Programming is that you can't read non-literate code as literature, and Knuth believes being able to read code as literature makes it easier to understand. If you could read any sort of code as literature then why would we need literate programming? So given that virtual all code in existence is non-literate it's pretty obvious that trying to promote code reading as literature reading is not going to work that well. The point of this article is that the author tried it both ways (code reading groups reading code as literature and treating it as an investigation) and found the investigative approach worked better. He's not expressing an opinion or proposing a hypothesis, he's simply reporting what worked and what did not.

Evidence? Did you RTFA? I've just given you a one line synopsis, if you want evidence you'll find it there.

We're not talking about Knuth's book. We're talking about the article, which you apparently didn't bother to read. In it Knuth provides an anecdote that supports the author's contention. Please, go and RTFA.

Knuth (and many others) think code should be more like literature, but to successfully create a code reading culture you must acknowledge that in practice examining most code is not at all like reading literature and instead needs to be approached more like a scientific investigation. Knuth actually provided an anecdote that reinforces this point so I very much doubt he disagrees with it.

The first thing the government's lawyers would try to do is to get as much damning evidence as possible defined as state secrets. That prevents the evidence from being introduced in court or used as the basis for a decision or finding. They've done this before, see this story, for example. For a breakdown of the various types of secrets and how they are handled in a court see this piece which is part of a series on Ibrahim vs DHS, the first challenge on a "no-fly" order to make trial.

Only if he or she advertised first. But if he or she was solicited, which seems more likely, then prostitution was the oldest.

Everyone uses one everyday. I've got four implementations by different vendors on the system I'm using right now. There are implementations for Linux, OS X, Windows, and pretty much everything else. Have you heard of HTML? It's the network transparent UI platform that the world has settled on.

They do. From the first link in the post you replied to: "AVAILABLE IN WARM WHITE (3000K) or DAYLIGHT(5500K)".

"Broke the law"? There hasn't been a trial. Not sure how you got that wrong.

Perhaps he looked at the way in which the US treated Bradley Manning and decided he'd get better treatment elsewhere?

It's such as simple question that I can't believe that "no one can seem to answer". More likely you just don't accept their answer for some reason. Anyway Google "climate proxies" and you'll have your answer.

No, no, no.

Yes. See, for example, this Straight Dope which mentions that there is a 8" difference between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at Panama.

We weren't talking about the industry as a whole. We were talking about desktops. Try reading the article in that context.

Desktop sales shrinking for that long is not an insignificant shrinking of the market (segment), it's a sign that the market has permanently changed. There will always be a market for desktops but it's in the process of becoming a niche segment.http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3518209&cid=43088747#

It's happening now.