Not always; sometimes it's just bad design. At a previous job many years ago, I recall being able to demonstrate getting past the screen lock on Perq computers by taking advantage of processing lag -- when you hit the key combination that would bring up the password input to unlock the screen, it would briefly clear the screen lock and show the desktop -- with full access to the computer until the screen lock process updated and showed the password prompt, which blanked the rest of the screen. Doing this repeatedly, you would first open a new shell window, then run a ps -ef command to show the active processes, look up the process for the screen lock, and then do a kill -9 on the screen lock process, which got you back to the desktop. We wrote this up and sent it to Perq, and they went back and altered the screen lock code so that it didn't display the desktop when you hit the unlock key combination.

Not just the chunk-chunk-chunk of the keypunch machine, but the rapid-fire chunkchunkchunkchunkchunk when you pulled a prank on someone and made a program card for one of the IBM 029 keypunches that declared every column a duplicate column and stuck it on the program card cylinder. Most people didn't look at the window you could see the cylinder behind, so if they started punching cards, when the first one left the punch station and hit the read station, with a second card feeding to the read station, it would automatically punch the new card as a duplicate of the first one in about a second and a half -- and then repeat the process over and over again until they figured out to turn the 'use program' switch off.

Watching a blacksmith -- or a glass blower -- work is worthwhile, just for the artistry.

And if you're willing to special-case the smithwork, the Japanese government has been deliberately working to preserve the swordsmithing skills.

That was mostly subsonic; you didn't hear it, you felt it.

Not the same way, or as often, but you still get the clack as you go over a rail joint; they're just expansion joints and less common. I recall a problem that I ran across in high school, that posited a one-mile continuous length of railroad track, and asked 'if the track expands by one inch, and buckles rigidly, so that it bends only at the middle, and is otherwise straight, how far off the ground is the rail at its midpoint?' The answer is, surprisingly, almost 15 feet (do the math: Pythagorean theorem, hypotenuse 1/2 mile + 1/2 inch, one side 1/2 mile, solve for third side). And you'll still get the rail clacking going over points and frogs in areas where you have switches.

You're missing one critical factor. There are absolutely no words that can justify the initiation of force. Using force to defend yourself once someone has used force against you is perfectly justified.

The other primary problem is that both bifocals and progressive lenses have the near-focus section of the lens at the bottom, where for most computer work you are looking at your screen through the middle and upper parts of the lens. This makes both bifocals and progressive lenses pretty much useless for computer work.

What I did was to visit a supermarket and use the display of reading glasses to determine what amount of additional correction gave me clear view at normal monitor distances, then order some clip-on reading glasses with that correction. The clip-ons are about $12 -- much less than another full pair of glasses with a different distance correction -- and just as easy to keep around. I look like more of a geek while wearing them, but they're less trouble than keeping track of which glasses I'm wearing.

Actually, it always was a zero-sum game within any given pool of readers. Each individual has some amount of money that they are willing to spend buying books, and if they buy one author's books, it reduces the available funds that can be used to buy another author's books. The subscription model that Amazon is adopting changes the model by paying authors , not when their work is purchased, but when it is read. This changes the way a book is valued by its author; previously, once the book was sold, the author has no direct interest in how many times the purchaser reads it. Under Amazon's model, readers no longer own their books; they effectively rent them anew each time they want to read them. And a book that would have been purchased, read once, and binned to go to a second-hand bookstore has less value to an author than a book that would have been re-read again and again over time. And there are two ways for authors to respond to this change -- they can produce works that are worth reading again and again, or they can produce more books for Amazon to 'charge' for. As Scalzi points out, we are seeing authors, resigned to the lack of quality and rereadability of their work, breaking books up into chunks so that each piece of the book can be counted as a separate publication for the purposes of receiving payments. It will work to the detriment of the 'story collection' books -- why should an author publish an e-book that collects a dozen of their stories, when they can get a dozen times the 'read count' by publishing each story individually? Other authors might break up books into chapters as individual publications to artificially boost their 'read count', or write shorter stories instead of novels. By treating all works as equal, regardless of size, the payment method encourages authors "gaming" the system to artificially inflate the number of times their works have been read.

As an illustration of this attitude, there was a slogan during the development of the F-15 Eagle -- "Not a pound for air-to-ground". And look at all of the upgrades and rework to make the Strike Eagle when it turned out that the Air Force didn't have the planes to conduct the CAS operations they had to do (because they continue to hoard non-Navy fixed-wing air assets to themselves, rather than letting the Army operate their own fixed-wing CAS units, even though the USAF doesn't want the CAS role), so they had to turn the F-15 into a mud mover.

I am reminded of the fortune-file entry "/earth is 98% full. Please delete anyone you can."

And just think -- with the waste products from a fusion reactor, we can alleviate the increasing scarcity of helium.

However, we'll have to start dealing with all the environmentalists pitching a fit about people inhaling reactor waste products, or filling balloons with them and letting them float off across the countryside.

"Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
-- James Klass

There's still some DC power distribution by PG&E in San Francisco for elevators and the like, but Con Edison cut off the last DC supply in New York on Nov 14,2007.

Actually, science is the pursuit of Truth. Unfortunately, what we get from that pursuit is not Truth, but a useful approximation that works well enough for practical use within the limits defined by the parameters of the experiments. When your use moves outside those limits, the approximations may or may not hold, and experimentation to discover why this happens let us extend those approximations further.

It's not generally fatal if it's been properly aerosolized, but you're correct that inhaling quantities of liquid or thermally-vaporized DHMO is often fatal.