...or when we're testing video chat solutions. /awkward_moments_in_professional_history

When I worked at a major US university, we would test new student-facing systems against Windows, Mac, Fedora and Ubuntu. There wasn't a ton of demand, but we never wanted to invest a ton of money in a solution only to find there was some percentage of users - likely the savviest of them - were guaranteed to be left out in the cold. My team made a genuine effort to engage the uber-geeks on the network - they could either be your staunchest ally or your loudest critic, and I never felt that their requests were unreasonable. In terms of "support", we all had a bit of knowledge and could help if need be, but we rarely got support requests from Linux users - if they had the skill to install and run a linux distro they probably didn't need much of our help.

I've been noticing this for about a month, and haven't had the time to research the cause. It sucks the most when it crashes after you've read a few hundred pages, and the thing forgets where you are in the book. Good to know I'm not alone and that there's apparently some sort of remediation available...

Anyone who confuses "science content" with "scientific method" is kidding themselves. It has science content, they just don't adhere strictly to the scientific method. i'll admit sometimes i disagree with their conclusiveness (even if i don't always disagree with the conclusion), but I still find it entertaining. Can you imagine if they had to actually follow the scientific method? It wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. As it stands, they may get some people turned on to the various fields of science through entertainment as opposed to making people think science is ridiculously boring (which as a spectator sport, it is).

Back in the day, Microsoft had ports of NT for Alpha, PPC, and MIPS.

And Windows Server still supports Itanium.

Alpha and MIPS are both dead and gone, while SPARC and PPC have corporate overlords who seem to have no interest in catering to the consumer market.

Meanwhile, Itanium is still actively developed, and has a corporate overlord that had announced plans to move it to the consumer market, before abandoning those in the face of the popularity of x86_64 which it cross-licensed from AMD, reserving Itanium for the enterprise server/HPC market.

Is it possible that the parameter space remaining to be excluded could still contain a supersymmetric higgs? There is a video showing Lisa Randall talking about the possibility of finding photinos at the Tevatron but could a SUSY higgs could be found first?

I LOLed

The simple fact that police carry lethal weapons has more than a little to do with the "sirs"...

That's kinda the point. If you call them 'sir' then it legitimises the thinking that "carrying a gun = creation of authority". If you treat them like an ordinary public servant, it emphasises that "carrying a gun = part of your job and not the thing which gives you any power over me."

I.e., their power comes from the law, not from the fact that they wear mirrored sunglasses and can hypothetically kill you.

I did exactly that when trying to buy an iMac without Applecare. After being held up for 5 minutes at the checkout while he kept trying to coerce me into getting the warranty, I loudly asked him exactly how big a piece of crap this thing was if it's so likely to break in the next 6 months and started to walk away. He decided that maybe it wasn't absolutely mandatory after all.

Feel free to correct me, but I seem to remember Cogent and Level-3 having a similar disagreement a few years back, with Cogent being just as intransigent then. Peculiar that a major peer like Cogent would be unable to resolve peering contracts twice in such a short period of time - were I a Cogent enterprise customer I'd be pretty concerned with the pattern that's developing here.