He's responsible for a huge number of the voices on television's Best Show Ever (tm).

PLEASE PLEASE Don't break The Simpsons! 26 years of gold, and it's still amazing!

This? http://www.ecma-international....

Use malware signatures to uniquely identify the machine.

I have a few users who have AOL addresses. Not one is under 65. Or what one might call "computer literate"

I got a call from "Microsoft tech support". I did everything they asked - I opened a browser, went to the page for the remote support tool, but ran into problems finding the icon they wanted me to click. I explained that Lynx doesn't show icons, and that I couldn't use another browser because I hadn't installed a GUI on that machine. They failed to grasp the implications.

Eventually I grew tired of keeping them on the phone (I was at the office), so I said, "Oh, maybe the problem is that I'm on Linux and you're a lying criminal sack of shit." This amused my coworkers.

That's brilliant!

Can we sue Mindspring next?

So, they successfully tested not launching a rocket? That's basically what I do all day long!

(Yes, I know. But it's funnier this way)

It really only smells like that in the subway.

The nuclear plants are a few miles outside the city. There's a big one just North on the Hudson.

But yeah, there's really just no room in the city itself for big sprawling power plants. Or anything really. It's two islands and part of a third, so it's as big as it can possibly be.

Fortunately, it's a big-ass hunk of granite, so it's sturdy enough to support vertical growth. I don't think vertical NPP's would work, but there is an incredible amount of wind up there.

And yet it remains the beating heart of global commerce. All the money in the world moves through Manhattan, multiple times per day. Everything but the cash in your pocket.

Productivity is more than the manufacture of physical goods. Financial services count, and NYC is the heart of the global financial system. Hell, it's the center of global commerce, and seat of the closest thing there is to a global government. Managing multinational corporations counts as productivity. Commerce in general counts.

And being Capitol of the World has to count for something too.

Your zero nature = zero quality of life equation is a bit oversimplified, no? Maybe missing a few variables, perhaps based in nothing but your own desires and beliefs?

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that millions upon millions don't love it. Greatest damn city in the whole damn world.

Everyone knows nobody drives in NYC. There's too much traffic.

I am serious.

The presence of a Department of Education does not mean the Federal Government runs the education system. Public Health, Safety (police), and Education are the sovereign domain of the States.

The Federal government can only attach conditions to grant money offered to the States. What those conditions can be are extremely limited, and States are not obligated to take the money. What is being described in the article is well outside the limits for the conditions. Obama is just declaring his support for the efforts of an NGO.

There are also serious limits on those strings, particularly on how specific they can be. The Federal government can't, for example, set requirements for curricula, let alone require specific courses or require using particular contractors.