I just read on Ars that the head of the TSA testified to Congress that children under 12 were not subject to enhanced pat-downs. I'm shocked, shocked to find that he may have been lying!

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/tsa-boss-our-patdowns-turn-up-artfully-concealed-objects.ars

The effect was actually the opposite for me. I grew up in NYC, and knew that the walk buttons did nothing. So when I went away for college I never used them. It took me about a month of observing other folks use them to realize that they actually worked there!

Loran-C may be obsolete, but the enhanced eLoran does make for a good backup system to GPS. It's accurate to about 10 meters or so with modern receivers.
No, Galileo and Glonass are not good backups to GPS, because they are also satellite-based and rely on the reception of weak microwave signals, just like GPS. Those signals can (and do) get jammed, and can even be spoofed under the right conditions. Differential GPS or other GPS augmentation systems aren't even backups at all, as they rely on the main GPS signals being present in order to operate. Loran-C and eLoran are land-based, long wave signals that are very hard to jam. It is most useful in places and under conditions where GPS has problems. And in spite of how popular GPS is, there are definitely areas where it has problems.
The UK and other countries have committed to eLoran for the next 10 to 15 years, so it's not like Loran-based systems are totally going away. They see the benefit of having a truly redundant positioning system, why doesn't the US?

I signed up for the Verizon marketing E-mail for the Droid phone, and saw this at the bottom:
DROID is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. and its related companies. Used under license.

No, you paid for that lunch. It may not have cost you money, but I'm sure you paid for it....

Other countries have made the choice that they want to make health care available to all people, regardless of the ability to pay, and regardless of social status. This is simply unamerican. Why should I use my hard-earned money to take care of someone else's Health Care?

When that guy shouted "You Lie" at our President, it was because the President said that nothing in the new Health Care bill would offer coverage to illegal aliens, and the gentleman in the audience disagreed with that assessment. Forget the outburst for a minute. What the guy really said was "I don't want any Federal tax dollars paying for any health care for illegal aliens". Think about that for a moment. Pretty much every other country has decided that health care is a basic human right. Why haven't we reached that same conclusion in the US?

I typed "12345" into Google, and Google did not know that was the combination to my luggage.

I'm seriously asking who came up with the name. I always want to read it "cornfucker"....

You can be a bad engineer or IT professional and still be overqualified for retail....

Actually, it might really be good timing. Retail space is cheap right now, and there are probably a ton of overqualified IT and Engineering folks out of work who would be glad to get any job right now, even in retail.

The time scale GPS uses is basically the UTC timescale that was in effect when the GPS system went first live (1980?). This is the time that GPS broadcasts, forever and ever.
Along with that time, there is a broadcast of the current offset between GPS time and the current UTC time. This offset goes up by 1 on every leap second since the GPS system first went live.
So as long as the receiver is getting all the GPS broadcasts, it will always know what the correct UTC time is.

I used to work in a Big, Multi-National company. In it's heyday (when they weren't laying people off left and right), the process to actually fire someone for performance reasons took quite a long time -- two to three years of performance reviews and coaching, depending on the department. I heard stories of people who considered themselves in "in-plant retirement", where they physically showed up for work, but did nothing but nap and read books (and more recently, surfed the web). They knew that before they could be fired for cause, they could retire! They can't do that anymore, though, because there's always the risk that a new layoff would happen, and they'd be at the head of the list to get axed, no matter how close they were to that pension....