I live on an active volcano (Mauna Loa), work on a dormant volcano (Mauna Kea) and am maybe 20 miles from a town (Pahoa) that might be in the crosshairs of an even more active, currently erupting volcano (Kilauea) right now. We have earthquakes all the time; I rarely even notice anything under a magnitude 4 to 5. Oh, and we also get hurricanes like AC mentioned, and tsunamis, and of course the sharks and poisonous sea urchins... Kinda funny, having grown up back on the east coast, where people will freak out over the smallest tremor. Someday I'll move back there and be all serene because nothing will seem exciting.

My wife Viv worked as a flight coordinator. "Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in" would not faze her in the least.

This. Compared to the James Webb Space Telescope - a ten-year, $500 million project that has turned into a 21-year, $8.8 billion project so far, that's chickenscratch.

(But I still want them to finish JWST and launch it.)

I know, Occam's Razor would explain this by simply having all airline employees be psychic, but in fact, when you call and talk to someone, they note what you talked about, then when you call and talk to an entirely different person who magically knows what you talked about before, they're just reading that note. OMG!

Like others, I've had to deal with these guys for ages. It was because of them that I put MY address on WHOIS records of domains I host for un-clued people (back when I was in hosting) - otherwise the domains would have gone their way.

Seems appropriate.

I was a little baffled by the "convicted then acquitted" construct at first - I presume this means convicted, then acquitted on appeal?

/IANAL (thank $deity)

Well, I guess I'm a mouse. And now, thanks to you, I'm a self-aware mouse!

Well, there's a difference between that raw retail part you bought, and an identical mobo in a pre-built PC. A guy I knew did IT at a big paper in... Annapolis, if I recall. Several years ago, they upgraded to shiny new all-in-one PC's all over the newsroom. I don't remember the brand - either HP/Compaq or Gateway, probably. Anyway, a few months in, they start failing, one after another. Turns out a bunch of them had components that had all been in one shipping container in a warehouse - and that container was under the leaky spot in the roof. By the time they were built, the boards had dried out and nobody noticed, but the damage had been done.

Your retail part, on the other hand, has been in its happy little shrink-wrapped box from the day it was born.

Of course he had to open his mouth and remind Apple of the opportunity for them to start doing driver chips in-house...

Perhaps it's more of an issue at the primary and secondary levels - at universities, it takes a while to get tenure, and the bad apples should be sorted out by then (although there are certainly those who get tenure, then do things they probably shouldn't). It does make me wonder whether there'll be a push for something similar at the university level, though. Given the horror stories in the press about how adjuncts and lecturers are treated, moving away from a tenured faculty (claiming "cost" and "responsibility" reasons, or whatever) might fit just fine.

I remember a decade ago when we'd install the SETI@home screensaver on every computer we could get our hands on. (Putting it on a Power Mac G5 and setting the machine to not go to sleep bumped my electric bill at home up 50% for a couple months.) I guess the difference here is that a profit is being made.

Any "amateur astronomer" who tries to do their laser-assisted star tour somewhere as light-polluted as the surroundings of a typical airport needs clue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

They've already got LLVM and Clang, no? Or did you mean better than those?