Well, they discontinued the half cent in 1857, and just a few years later the whole country was thrown into civil war. Do you think they're going to make that mistake again?

Soundcards generally aren't high voltage or high current, and those are the situations where the bad capacitors made themselves known. That's not to say that it isn't the caps though, especially if the sound card was in a computer case that tended to run hot.

I remember buying some Realistic speakers for about $15. They were unmistakably crap, but on the other hand they were amazing compared to anything else you could get for $15.

Assuming that the scale setting controls some gain stage before the ADC, all they really need is enough bit resolution to match the number of vertical pixels on the screen. Considering some the screens I've seen put into digital oscilloscopes an 8 bit ADC would be good enough. Now, a fully analog scope with a CRT wouldn't have this particular problem.

In many ways SharePoint is like how he describes. Sure, you can take the built-in tools and build yourself a website that can do quite a bit on its own. But want to go outside of what the canned stuff can do and create something custom? Ever look at the code that create those SharePoint pages? Yeah, that's not accessible to normal humans in any way.

performance impact or benefit

When gaming, performance = Frames Per Second. It was neither positively nor negatively changed by using a discrete sound card.

I went across the street and told my elderly neighbours (both have since passed) who had survived the great depression and served in world war 2 that no, they had seen worse in the world, and it wasn't going to end, all they had to do was change the batteries in their smoke detectors and get a good nights sleep.

Well THERE'S the problem right there! Your neighbors were in charge of fixing the DMV's software!

this wouldn't be able to break iPhone fingerprint sensor

a $5 wrench does that if you need it bad enough...the biggest issue is getting a good print to make it from

"Here, hold this wrench a second"

The worse thing that could happen to a view screen is that it gets so smashed up

Well, no, the worst thing is that it falls out, and so does the pilot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Except that the crime is assault. I think it shouldn't be a charge of its own, but I see no problem with a zeroth degree murder charge or assault with a racist insult.

Burn-in was a much bigger problem with CRTs from the 80's and early 90's. By the time the 2000's rolled around CRTs, at least the good ones, were much more resistant to burn-in.

Vista's taskbar was pretty dark. I actually like the default theme for Vista myself over 7's.

Also, you can auto-hide the bars in Gnome 3 by holding down the Win Key + Alt and right clicking on the bar, then selecting Properties, and checking the auto-hide option. Handy if you're stuck with a laptop with a crappy low resolution screen.

what happens if no insurance companies want to offer a plan that does that?

The solution that Alito cited that was in place for religious non-profit and church organizations was for the insurance company to be required to pay for the drugs out of their own pockets and establish a separate pool of money for doing so, that the religious institutions would not pay into. The government considered this to be acceptable because the drugs are cheaper than pregnancy care so the insurance company would save money. The next step will be Christian Brothers Services (a religious health insurance company) suing against being forced to pay for this from their own pocket.

Once that plays out, this decision may end up having little to do with contraception or abortion. In the majority opinion, authored by Alito, he claims their decision only covers contraception, but the only citation he has to prove this is his say-so. The RFRA does not specify any limits on the ability to practice religion (indeed, that was the point of it, it originally existed so that Native Americans can ignore the Controlled Substances Act when it comes to peyote) beyond a "compelling government interest".

Alito's decision that "for-profits should be given the same religious options as non-profits" is an obvious one with respect to this particular case where the government has already given an alternate option to other companies, but it's clear from the situation leading to the passage of the law (Native Americans smoking peyote) that when there is no "alternative option", the intent of the law is to allow "the religious" to ignore laws that would prevent them from practicing their religion.

What will likely happen is one of three things:

1) Nobody pushes their luck. The elephant just sits there, in the corner of the room, and nobody ever mentions it again.
2) Someone declares ___ is preventing them from practicing their religion and sues. A court of appeals cites the text of Alito's decision that this can only apply to abortion and squashes it, SCOTUS refuses certioari.
3) Someone declares ___ is preventing them from practicing their religion and sues and ends up heard by the supreme court. Either
A) The court has to decide that Alito was wrong and the RFRA/First Amendment protects more than just your stance on abortion, and places no limit on it
B) The court cites the text of Alito's decision and denies that practice with no further explanation. Or perhaps the court decides that "interstate trade" is a "compelling government interest".
C) The court has to establish a yardstick by which the sincerity of your beliefs are measured. You skipped church for the Superbowl? Mmmhmmm, I see...

Actually, I've personally witnessed drivers screw up at these intersections by watching the wrong cues. A few months ago a driver rolled out into the middle of the intersection because they thought that when the cross traffic light turned red, our light would turn green (no, the left-turn only lane light goes first after cross traffic). I know that's what they did because I was watching the light too, except this is the last intersection before I get home so I know what the light pattern is. Because the light pattern changes depending on time of day and whatever bug crawled up the traffic engineer's ass that week, when you're watching the other lights, you still have to verify your light before you go.

Ideally we'd get our own countdown timer to let us know whenever the signal is going to change. Staring at a red light for 45 seconds is boring, you can go ahead and insist that we change human nature, or you can go with human nature and give us something to pay attention to.

How about doing what other countries do and giving drivers our own damn timers to let us know when our lights are going to change?