If it's true that there are more traffic fatalities every year in San Diego than there are murders, it must be the world capital of bad drivers. Maybe they should be putting some of this money into improving their Driver's Education and Driver's Training classes instead of trying to make it harder for people to use the streets.

Not everybody who has a tattoo is stupid. I have three, but not by choice. They're 50 cm "up," and it takes two days of prep and the help of a proctologist to see them.

Not that good of a location, hard to see and easy to be covered.

Whoosh! That's a reference to the TV show Dark Angel. All of the gene-engineered "soldiers" from Manticore had barcodes on the back of their neck and it wasn't a tattoo, either; if you removed that section of skin, the barcode would still be there when it grew back.

Does that mean that you'll give a good grade to a student who came up with a clever way of solving the wrong problem?

Microsoft products are simply a disaster and require years of experience in order to use them.

And there's a very good reason for it: vendor lock-in. Once you've gone with Microsoft and its products, there's a very long, expensive learning curve before your employees are proficient and productive. It takes an exceptionally brave manager to admit that they were wrong and that all of that money the company spent on retraining was wasted, especially when it's easier (and possibly cheaper) to stick with what you have because "everybody knows how to use it."

I had the same experience. However, I've also found that clicking on the number of comments will get you to the discussion. I do wish that the webmonkies would give the crack-pipes back to the mods and stop uglifying the site.

For several years now, Google has taken to ignoring all of the punctuation in my query to "give me more results," when I added them to get me less results and avoid wasting time wading through page after page of irrelevancy. Yes, I know that I can force Google to Do It My Way, but only after the fact and in any event, I shouldn't have to. Google knows how to give me exactly what I asked for so why doesn't it Just Do The Right Thing. Google may not be doing evil, but it's forgotten that if you don't please your users they won't come back and there won't be any ad revenue. Personally, I've switched to startpage.com, not so much for privacy issues but because it returns the kind of results I want, not what gives them the most advertisements.

Well, no, legalising the blasting of such people with a shotgun would probably be a very effective way to protect the privacy rights of those who don't want the cameras on them.

I'd have no problem with that, provided that it was limited to practicing politicians who needed killing.

I can't speak for anybody but myself, but I'd have a lot more respect for them if they'd stuck it out and fought for their principles, even though they knew it was a lost cause. What they did, essentially, was give up without even trying, leaving the impression that they didn't consider their principles worth fighting for.

Americans didn't worry about fitness until JFK started talking about it, and it took years to catch on. Today's adults are far more fit than their parents were and have more muscle mass. That's going to make them heavier, but not fatter. Yes, there are probably more tubs of lard out there now, but the fitness freaks and body builders are helping bring the average up as well. (And, as the BMI doesn't take muscle mass into account, most of them are considered obese even though they have very little body fat.)

Well, for starters, this site is devoted to petitions, although very, very few of them get any response.

Covering over black so that it doesn't show isn't easy. It can take a surprising number of coats to do the job. Sometimes you can strip all of the paint off the wall and start fresh; other times you're better off going with wallpaper. Still, I agree with you that the father deserves an A++ for understanding that it was an accident.

...or I would walk across the building and we would talk in person, with the understanding that...

Every time I do so, your performance evaluation goes down because you're being an uncooperative asshole. And, every time that happens the odds that I'll decide it's not worth the bother and fire you instead go up.

Think of it this way: most of today's malware probably wouldn't run on it anyway.

If nothing else, this shows just how bad an idea it is to put too much trust in computer models. There are always factors that we either don't know about or don't know how to include properly and getting even one of them wrong can throw the whole model off. Yes, computer simulations and models can be very, very useful but you have to take the results with a grain of salt and remember that they're only approximations at best.