Yes, I believe you _can_ get a lot of the raw data via NOAA's site, it is I believe free for US citizens since we already paid for it through funding NOAA. Maybe you can use Google's new algorithm for detecting 100,000 features in an image on a single computer to make the model run on you desktop in usable time - remember, as one of the NOAA sites quotes a scientist: if your model doesn't run in faster than real time, you might as well just swivel your chair to look out the window (assuming I'm not being an insensitive clod who doesn't pay attention to the fact that you don't have a window).

Once upon a time we were all going to have a 'user agent' that was local to our computer that performed all sorts of mediation for us, sort of an Arthur Treacher (look it up you young whippersnappers) role; this is one instance of that idea.

See this page; the Campanile movie is from SIGGRAPH 97. How is Disney's tech different?

Existing in one form or another since CP67 in, yes, 1967, IBM's z/VM virtual machine hypervisor is arguably one of the most debugged VM implementations around.

How do you store the instructions for using this thing?

Once saw a FORTRAN compiler change cause _slightly_ different numerical results in a bridge engineering program. They did some work to verify that bridges built using the program compiled under the previous version of the compiler were structurally sound but that was the most fearful thing I could think of, that numerical inaccuracies in what the compiler generates could cause an engineering failure that could cause loss of life.

COBOL, which is compiled, doesn't need another language to run. It does, in many implementations, require a run-time library to supply common functions which are called by the compiled code - for example, the DISPLAY verb may be implemented as a common subroutine. On IBM mainframes, the run-time library support for many languages is provided by the Language Environment product.

Rexx is still one of the best procedural-style scripting languages... I use it in Unix (well, Unix Systems Services, the Posix-compliant interface component of z/OS)

Maybe it's just my mainframe background, and maybe I haven't searched hard enough, but I don't see in the laptop/desktop/server enviroment a lot of detailed presentations of performance issues, how they were diagnosed, and how they were solved. I see them very occasionally. Is there a lack of good performance recording (and I mean recording for analysis after the fact, not real-time monitoring) tools, or is it just that purchasing faster hardware components has probably become cheaper than spending time diagnosing the issues?

Ala carte channels would be governed by the law of supply and demand; so if you and five of your friends are the only ones who want to watch "The Channel That Shows Video from Alt.Plan9.OS.Demos" the price is going to be pretty high. None of the ala carte proposals I've ever seen say that the channel provider has to make those channels cheap.

I'm at 42 but I'm in the US - does that mean I'm not legal? ICMP reform now!

"Which is more impressive: Wi-Fi hotspot in 2013, or E-ink display in 2008?" sounds like a new iteration of " Quien es mas macho ?"

"X-Wait" doesn't mean it's never coming back... if you notice it, it means that response time is slower than you expect but it still might come back. Many mainframe block-mode terminals and application "servers" like CICS (CICS is most analogous to Tomcat though the comparison isn't exact) "lock" the terminal until the transaction response is produced, to keep people from entering hundreds of transactions in a row and losing track of which response goes with which transaction. So, if a transaction is delayed for some reason, your terminal is still "locked". Impatient people don't like the situation, reset the terminal emulator, and enter the transaction again - but the only effect of that is to throw away the result of the first transaction when CICS goes to send it (because the terminal session was lost) and put your transaction at the back of the queue. That's not to say that things _never_ get hung up in the locked state, of course there are failures where the response never comes back, but it's good to pick some amount of time (30 seconds, 1 minute) to wait before going through the "throw it away and start over" process.

I don't need or want my watch to check my e-mail, flash when I have voicemail or any of that stuff. I'd be happy with a watch just smart enough, with a very very simple API, to allow me to design and download new "skins" to the watch when I feel like it. It would have a screen no bigger than my current Timex (including the bezel), and have these basic UI elements:

1. Background
2. 12 or 24 hour time
3. Digital or analog display supported
4. Analog display Hand designs - including transparency for those people who just want a little dot rotating around or whatever.
5. The font for the digits; perhaps a separate one for the day/date display
6. A button to cause it to brighten, dim, or be blank when I want it to not glow in the dark
7. Download one or two alarm sounds

Since I don't want to change the watch theme extremely frequently, I'm OK with micro USB to do that, I don't need wireless. Of all of the above, the most important point is to _not_ make the thing look like I've strapped some cellphone to my wrist!

Plastics are primarily made from petrochemicals - i.e. petroleum-based, so their prices fluctuate with the price of oil.