It's hard to tell from context whether you're not from the US or you're an American who has never used seven-digit dialing.

In the US, the first three digits of a ten-digit telephone number are the area code. Traditionally if you were calling someone who was in the same area code you were in you would not dial the area code but only the last seven digits of the telephone number. If you needed to call someone outside your area code, pressing 1 first allowed the telephone network to know that you were dialing a ten-digit number.

It used to be that when an area code ran out of telephone numbers, it would be split into multiple area codes. This meant that some numbers would change in the first three digits, which is inconvenient. The modern practice is to add a new area code that applies to the same geographical area as the old one, but that means that someone living next door to you may have a different area code than you do; the solution is to make everyone dial the full ten digits regardless of area code.

I think landline practice (7- or 10-digit dialing) still varies by region, but all modern cell phones use ten-digit dialing.

Canada is becoming a free country after all! When did they change the rules on caffeine and non-brown soda?

There are plenty of people who are legally in the country without being US citizens.

When I bought mine you had to go looking for the Ubuntu machines page; when you got there it explained very clearly, in non-technical language, that if you don't know what we're talking about you don't want one: go over here to buy a Windows machine. They thought that out ahead of time and were very clear about it.

The biggest problem is that those cryptographic hashes tend to be easily parallelizeable on a commercial GPU, resulting in a brute force attack many times faster than an ordinary CPU. Hashes like bcrypt are much less GPU friendly.

Do you really think that? A dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist Christian that thinks the Apocalypse is a good thing because he gets to meet his BFF Jesus that day, in charge of the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world?

Are you privy to some quirk of Santorum's eschatology that makes him more dangerous than previous theologically-conservative presidents, none of whom has yet provoked a nuclear holocaust?

I think it was meant to be read thus.

Let me know when your favorite MS Office alternative can open and flawlessly display every Office file that I have, or may receive from somebody else. I also need a guarantee that files I create with it can be sent to people using MS Office, and they'll be able to use them without incident.

In all reality, MS Office doesn't offer that kind of guarantee.

The blazon (the heraldic technical description) of the arms is what officially defines them, and it doesn't include the particular sequence of digits; it just says "in base a bar wavy Sable inscribed with zeros and ones Or."

So even if it means something, that particular sequence is just the artist's interpretation; somebody else who redrew the arms would be entitled to change it. Most likely, it's just what the artist liked visually.

Interestingly, IE 9 seems to be following the rules for CSS and ES5, perhaps better than the other browsers. I'm cautiously optimistic.

In other non-TV media there is a balance for both sides, but of course most Americans only watch TV News.

Well, newspapers often reflect the preconceptions of their reporters, which are substantially liberal (in the American sense of the word). But mainstream US newspapers at least try for balance, even if they don't always succeed, which is far more than can be said for the TV networks.

WHEN THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO STOP TREATING SEX AS SPECIAL?

Maybe when it works the same way as the other human appetites? Which is to say, presumably never. I mean, nobody puts up videos of someone else eating a really good plate of fettuccini alfredo.

Try the Pirate dialect for setting up privacy options:

"Make ye parchment of ye mateys visible to arrrrvreyone?"

Let's see... um... "Arrrrr!" or "Walk the plank!"...

Sounds like they suck. Cablevision doesnt dump a ton of extra taxes on our bill (which is one of the things they point out in their comparisons to Verizon's extra $25-30 of taxes and fees) - nor do they charge termination fees or have contracts (unlike Verizon's 2 year contract and almost $400 termination fee), and various of my TVs do not have set-top boxes (which doesnt lose me many of the channels I actually watch). For the ones I do have set top boxes, it's only costing me an extra $5 a month (which, with a few can be talked down to as little as $2 each) and for "DVR like purposes" I have a combo DVD/VHS deck which I can auto-program to record what I want straight from either the non-cable-box signal or from the cable box (which it will tune to the correct channel and record to either DVD or VHS).

I've known people who have done that... maybe that is also part of the reason some cable companies are no longer selling (or making people jump through hoops to get) cable internet only (ie: with no cable TV package attached).