+1! Sheesh, slashdot, why do I have mod points all the time when I don't need them and then they're gone when there's something actually worth voting up?!

Large mirror. Optionally, parabolic.

On multiple choice tests, always read the answers first, and identify the key differences. Here, the options are:

141
1,175
3,525
4,700

And it should immediately jump out that one of these is an order of magnitude lower than the others. So, you know right away that either you can throw this one out or it's the right answer. As soon as you reduce he problem to 47 times 3, you know it has to be that one. Mark A and move on to a harder question. (You can check your work later if you have time.)

If the answer had a higher order of magnitude, the next thing to consider would be whether the answer is likely to be the nice, round 47 times 100 -- another easy-to-identify possibility.

Or for much less than that on AMD/Intel x86_64 too. I'm just sayin' if you're looking at that kind of money, the network technology options actually seem right in line.

The VAX-11/780 was priced at something like $200,000.

If you buy a comparable computer today, getting 10Gbps interconnects would certainly be a reasonable option.

How about requiring them to write in Objective C?

Surely they will be stopped by the login banner which clearly says "If you are a federal agent, log out now!"

I don't get it. That seems statistically unlikely.

"18.8" doesn't sound like a big number, until you consider what it stands for. Each bit of information halves your uniqueness. That means that you can be picked out of a crowd of 2^18.8 people -- 456,419. With an estimated two billion people on the internet today, that means you're down to being one in 4500. That's about the same as saying "My name is Matthew Miller and I live in the United States." Not particularly private!

Another way to think of it is this: those two billion people represent 31 bits of uniqueness. Every bit of information revealed knocks off some of that. When you're down to one, you're positively identified. Your web browser is giving up at least 18.8 of those thirty for nothing, leaving you with just about 12.

It's telling that 5 years is the biggest number before infinity. I don't expect my employer to last forever, but they've been around 375 years, and I expect that they'll be around for another hundred or so at minimum.

The summary here seems to focus on a minor (page 3) point in the article, but, man, what a bad point it is:

Silly. This isn't a "big mistake". It's quite canny — they're paying people (with access to content) for providing word-of-mouth advertising. The cost (an article read for free) is very low and the benefit (lots of visitors come by without being annoyed) is high. It's a good move.

Bill Gates's book "The Road Ahead", is, in its first 1995 edition, focused on how the CD-ROM was going to change everything about computers. Remember Encarta? They were really focused on that -- multimedia on discs, that was going to be the future.

But then, for the 1996 printing, the whole thing was re-written and suddenly CD-ROMs weren't the hot thing. It was all about the Internet.

Troll? C'mon, seriously. Slashdot was here when this story happened. It's interesting to look at the historical comments. Sorry I didn't spell that out.

Old news, slashdot. Very old news!

"Blades on a ceiling fan" do not open. So, if the satellite is trying to open "like" that, no wonder there's problems.

HTH. HAND.