Reporters are allowed access to the event with the understanding that their reports will be published after the fact, thus protecting the value of the real-time reporting being done by the broadcast partners. All this rule is doing is telling the other reporters that they can't publish their content in real time.

These new rules are in response to newer technology, but other restrictions have been in place for years to protect licensees.

For example, as a spectator you aren't allowed to video record an event. Often you are not allowed to bring a "professional" grade still camera, either. (Of course, improvements in camera technology are making it easier to surreptitiously get around these restrictions.) The purpose of those restrictions is to force anyone wanting to see video or photos of the event to go to the licensee -- and pay for the privilege either directly or through advertising.

So, yes, it's about the money.

I push to production fairly often, depending on the nature of the tickets I'm responding to. I'm generally maintaining three branches concurrently, the production branch, the point-release branch and the major release branch. Trivial fixes or small-but-critical fixes tend to go onto the production branch and get released as hot fixes. This can happen several times a day or not for several days, depending on how extensive the change is and thus how much testing is needed.

Fixes that are a bit more extensive and/or that will have visible impact to the users tend to get done on the point-release branch, which typically is merged back to production and released every few days to a week or two. (Naturally, fixes made to the production branch are merged to this branch as soon as they are released.)

Significant functionality changes, refactorings and other large-impact changes are performed on the major release branch -- with the intermediate changes merged in, naturally. This gets merged to production per our roadmap schedule, hopefully after being fully tested by the beta users. (Yeah, right.)

When I leased my Prius two years ago on a three-year lease, it was in hopes that I would be able to switch to a plug-in hybrid at the end of the lease because it would fit my driving profile perfectly (the vast majority of my trips are <40 miles, with an occasional trip of 200-300 miles). Which I still want to do, but the car has to be reasonably decent. The Volt doesn't impress, but the new plug-in Prius may fit the bill. And on a lease, you aren't paying for the entire cost of the car, so a somewhat higher sticker price doesn't bother me.

Plus, I'm not at all sure that gas prices in the US won't be $6-7/gal within the next couple of years, which changes the calculation somewhat.

Except those "highly accurate" crystals are not so highly accurate. Their frequency changes with temperature and as the crystals and other components in the circuitry age. The value of using the power line as a reference is not that it is all that accurate in the short term, it's that it is highly accurate over long periods because it is continually adjusted to be so.

Yes, your battery-backed-up clock will keep time while the power is off, but keep that clock running on battery for a month or so and you will find it inexorably drifts off the right time. You'll end up periodically having to adjust the clock manually. That's not the case if you sync to the power line -- for now, at least.

Not to worry... NYC still has schoolyards

That's such pre-9/11 thinking.

"Hey, Houston! I just cut the cheese!"

Tax them. Apparently, that's the only government activity that's objectionable.

Yes, but what fun would it be to make that the headline?