1983 was over thirty years ago, just for the record :)

I actually have studied it; some of my colleagues work directly in this area. It's a fairly big interest here in Scandinavia, because some populations can be identified with relative genetic stability over significant periods of time, which makes some kinds of studies easier. Iceland has particularly good records and genetic isolation, but much can also be done in other parts of Scandinavia. And it is quite difficult to correlate societal changes with genetic changes even with these detailed records. For example the major shifts in Scandinavian society from warlordish violent societies to peaceful egalitarian societies don't appear to be related to genetic shifts.

and those traits which are successful in a specific society will then go on to build the society that those traits are best adapted to. like a feedback loop.

The evidence for this is actually pretty inconclusive, which is where some of the disagreement stems. It's easy to hypothesize this, but hard to prove it. In particular, many evolutionary biologists are skeptical that historical-timescale social changes and changes in genetic makeup are closely tied.

You can complain about literally anything? So it's the superset of all reviews sites/forums on the internet? How accurate do you expect the results to be?

Yeah, I can believe most of the calls are either accidental or fraudulent. I'm surprised the location part doesn't work though. Shouldn't Phase II E911 be able to report an approximate location based on the tower that's receiving the call?

It's a special case written into nonprofit law by Congress specifically for the NFL (not even sports leagues in general). The more familiar nonprofit status, 501(c)(3) charities, include amateur sports leagues but not professional sports leagues. But then there's 501(c)(6) status, which is basically a grab-bag of industry/trade organizations that would probably not otherwise qualify as nonprofit, but are given that status anyway:

(6) Business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, boards of trade, or professional football leagues (whether or not administering a pension fund for football players), not organized for profit and no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.

Yeah it's actually kind of common for charities to collect donations of old phones without service, to give to people who they worry might be at risk of needing an emergency call (women at battered-women's shelters, etc.). Any phone with a functioning radio that dials 911 has to be accepted by the carrier it tries to connect to, even if it has no valid account associated. Even applies to GSM phones with no SIM at all (as you mention), and to phones with blacklisted ESNs.

Yeah it's been on /. previously a bunch, so probably some people are interested in the follow-up: 2008, 2008 again, 2013, 2013 again. Might've missed some others in between.

Other animals that IT personnel may impersonate include canaries and guinea pigs.

One of the bigger cultural differences I've found working in both the U.S. and Scandinavia is that American meetings are long, unpredictably scheduled, and really disorganized. A 10am meeting might really get down to business by 10:15 if you're lucky, maybe 10:30, and probably won't end on time at 11:00am. Nobody will have distributed any material to consult ahead of time, or even a proper meeting agenda for that matter, and as a result people don't come particularly prepared, and a ton of time is wasted. Since there is no real agenda, who needs to be at the meeting also hasn't been very carefully decided, so a bunch of people are just in case, and they spend half the time on Facebook or email while irrelevant parts of the meeting happen. The assumption seems to just be that just half-assing the whole thing is the best way to go...

Yeah they've been really playing that up angle when competing against Google Apps for Business in particular.

That appears to be the argument, yes. The court isn't claiming authority to send police officers to Ireland and physically seize the data, or authority to force Irish police to conduct a search. Instead they're demanding that Microsoft (a U.S.-based company) produce the requested evidence, if indeed its U.S. staff have access to it (which they probably do).

I think it's problematic from a practical perspective, but I could see how someone could reach that conclusion. Usually jurisdiction of U.S. persons does extend to their overseas assets, e.g. in an investigation of fraud a U.S. court can demand that you turn over your Swiss bank account records, even though these accounts are (of course) in Switzerland.

The main problem IMO is that it puts companies operating in multiple jurisdictions in a bit of a bind. For example, Microsoft Ireland may have responsibility under EU law to not release data except in certain cases, while Microsoft U.S. is required to release it, meaning the company will violate the law somewhere no matter what they do. I'm not sure whether it's possible to avoid that by really firewalling the access, e.g. make Microsoft Ireland an operationally separate subsidiary whose servers cannot be directly accessed by Microsoft USA staff. But that would certainly complicate operations in other ways.

Malina is pretty well known in some corners of CS for his work on kinetic sculpture and generative art, and for founding the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, along with its associated journal Leonardo . But I didn't know he did rockets earlier in his career.

A distribution of the expected returns would be more useful than the mean expected return, which can be dominated by a handful of best-selling titles.

Well mostly I want a good starting point written by someone who's looked into it (like the DJB ones above). That involves: 1) parts that work together and have been successfully used together, preferably under Linux, by someone other than me; and 2) parts that fit at a good point on the price/performance curve.

Sure, I could dive into separate reviews of every individual component and piece them together myself, but that's more research than I want to do. :)