This is why I don't drink tap water.

My tap water is pumped out of an aquifer where it has been for decades. This is of course, unsustainable in the long term, but in the meantime I'll take my chances with my tap water (which tastes great, by the way) instead of the bottled stuff.

Up north it's not uncommon to see temperatures that low. I've never seen analog gauges in a car or truck act up at those temperatures. LCDs generally work, but the contrast can get screwy making them hard to read, and they update really slowly. LED and vacuum florescent displays are generally fine.

A couple notes: Numbers with 0 on the right without any decimal point (e.g. 10, 2500) create an ambiguity with sigfigs as to whether those zeros are significant or not. Some authors put a bar over the last significant figure to clarify, but many do not. In fact, one of the textbooks I used --- I believe it was for trig --- changed its practice in a later addition regarding whether those zeros are significant or not.

I've never heard of that. I've always just used scientific notation to remove any ambiguity. Sure, 1 x 10^1 or 1.0 x 10^1 is a bit more cumbersome than 10, but at least it's clear.

To be fair, he only claimed it will readable. That doesn't mean we'd be using CSS 500 years from now, but that a computer 500 years now would be able to understand it.

The jokes about Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh date back more than 10 years before the release of Vista. Besides, I used Vista on a Phenom II with 8GB of ram, and when you throw that kind of hardware at it, the performance was perfectly fine. I also ran it on an older P4 with 2GB of ram, and even then it wasn't horrible.

There never was a 4GHz P4 released, so it's not clear how that's even in the database. Maybe it's some engineering sample, though as someone else pointed out it's half as fast as the 3.8 Ghz P4 (the fastest released Pentium 4) so my guess it's an error. In any case, I wouldn't use if for any meaningful comparisons. Also, you might want to note that the Core i7 has a turbo boost up to 3.3 Ghz and I would have to assume that's what it's really running at during any benchmark, so to call it a 1.7 Ghz CPU is misleading at best. It's also a dual core, so to compare it to single core is also bit unfair. Perhaps the closest comparison might be the Pentium D Extreme Edition which was two hyperthreading P4's in a single chip which would be the closest thing to the i7.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=1955&cmp[]=1130

You'll see that the i7 is now only about 4-5 times faster.

Considering that a pascal is a newton per square meter, it's the exact same concept, just with different units. Given that a square inch is a more useful measurement of area when dealing with something like a tire it's not hard to see how the PSI came about.

My experience is that the lights are fine, but the cheap wall wart power supply is what is actually dead. My guess is that they tend to get a power supply that is rated just high enough to run the lamp, and unlike most things that use a wall wart the light is going to be drawing the full amount of power any time it is on. Find a working power supply at the right voltage (most use 5 or 12V which is luckily common) that preferably has a higher amperage rating and you can usually revive these lights.

My understanding of trademarks though is that if the mark is not in use (and they haven't built a Packard in a very long time) then someone else can use the name.

I've never figured out that argument. Who, having experienced the crappiness that is iTunes on Windows, would want to buy a computer where the entire OS is created by the same company that made iTunes for Windows? I mean, it would be like running an OS created by the same people that wrote Java!

Actually, I wouldn't call registry corruption a myth, as it was a very real problem back in the Windows 95 and Windows 98 days. I'm sure that's one of the reasons why the registry is robust as it is now is from the lessons Microsoft learned the hard way from earlier versions of Windows.

Welcome to Windows prefetch. Basically, Windows will preload your programs and data that it thinks you might use into ram after you boot. The idea being that if the program is already cached when you try to launch it, then it will launch faster. The actual result seems to be lots of disk thrashing after boot, and the more ram you have the more Windows will thrash as Windows will prefetch until it's full. At least they toned it down a bit with Windows 7, as one of Vista's faults was that it was far too aggressive about prefetching.

Windows XP definitely got slower as the patches and service packs piled up. The original release of Windows XP ran acceptably on a P3 with 256MB of ram, which was a pretty typical computer when XP debuted. By the end, it was a total dog on a P4 with 1GB of ram, which would have have been a high-end machine back in 2001.

It's the Mercury version of the Ford Tempo, which didn't make the top 20 at all. And I'd be willing to bet Ford sold a lot more Tempos than they did Topazs...

Probably the reason for that is all the Tempos were driven into the ground a long time ago by people who more or less considered them an appliance, whereas the Topazes were bought by older people who took a lot better care of them and drove them less. Now, the Tempos are gone, and these survivning Topazes have been passed on to their next (and probably last) owners, and are now being driven into the ground.

0F if there is salt on it.