I'm in the same boat. I have two old Dell Inspirons and the battery has failed in both. I just run them off of power, and hibernate/suspend-to-disk when done working (which I have configured to happen automatically when I shut the lid). It's not as nice as having a working battery, but it's useable. I could buy new batteries, but last I checked, the official Dell ones are several hundred dollars, and third-party knockoff ones are almost a hundred. That's not worth it for my 10 year old laptops that I got for free.

Google has published a similar study: http://research.google.com/pub... a few years ago. I wonder if technology changes have had much of an impact.

yes, that's how I found out about it.

http://xkcd1446.org/ has the complete archive; currently at about 120 images.

yep: /var/log/apache2/access.log:89.207.135.125 - - [25/Sep/2014:09:26:29 -0400] "GET /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi HTTP/1.0" 404 491 "-" "() { :;}; /bin/ping -c 1 198.101.206.138" That's pretty quick. Fortunately, I didn't have that cgi script, but still quite scary.

obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1056/

no, the difference is Big Data. Before "Big Data", machine translation, self-driving vehicles, chess, etc. were problems that were attempted to be solved by algorithms written by humans. These kinds of algorithms would be full of heuristics such as "if you are in situation X, perform behavior Y". This led to fragile, clunky code. Nowadays, with Big Data, the algorithms are more like, "see what everybody else is doing in situations similar to X"

http://developers.slashdot.org...

tech.slashdot.org/story/01/05/17/1452217/scaling-walls-with-suction-cups

The code was reviewed. The commit log shows that the reviewer was Stephen Henson (thanks to slashdot user grub for pointing this out.)

Because breathable Earth-normal atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, we could make a relatively low budget colony without any terraforming. Just send a big balloon. It could ride the relatively stable upper atmospheric winds on Venus, circling the planet every 4 earth days, and be at standard pressure, so any hull breach would not result in explosive decompression.

That's actually a really good point. I wonder if there's any justification in the Policy for retroactively removing content based on current robots.txt

except for page deletion. In that case, only certain people can view the history.

That's true whether or not you watch the film, due to the nature of his option-only (no royalties) contract.