Just sayin'. It's unlikely that the girl in the story was talking about the feedback effect of water in an ecosystem that was already warming due to other factors... but she could have been.

I'm pretty sure I already have to pay my own state's sales tax if I purchase something from out of state. They just call it use tax instead.

What happens if you can't afford to buy an SSL certificate for your mom and pop website? (Yes, I know, someone at Comodo will buy one for you. Har har.) Is SPDY only for large hosts or can the little guy benefit as well?

As of today, we have some pretty sophisticated equipment used to measure picosecond-sized times. I sincerely doubt that, for any definition of not too distant future, we'll get down to the level where something that is in only a few research labs is used for trades. Also speed of light.

Just to be clear, viruses are not classified as alive. Sometimes, I'm not convinced that this is entirely correct, but that's what the biologists say.

And then it was. True story.

The need to know it's fake might have some sympathy with the uncanny valley phenomenon. If we know that something is not real, but looks almost real, we have a visceral reaction to it, since we can detect that there's no mind there.

Might it be similar here, but in reverse? We can detect that there's no mind in the fake violence, so it's placed in the (positive) uncanny valley and our reaction ceases to be what it would be if we could detect a mind?

Simony would seem to be the greatest objection here. Someone is charging $1.99 for a sacrament? That's never been anywhere near acceptable in Catholic teaching.

See that's the thing though. Since you hadn't heard about it, you wouldn't try to run it. He heard about it, presumably knew that it was a linux executable, and tried to run it on a machine that he thought was also capable of running Windows executables. It takes a special type of dumb to be aware of something, but to try to run it on something that shouldn't be able to run it.

And yes, I do recognize that he could have downloaded wget to a Windows machine, but he did not do that.

Agree.

I'm not sure exactly how this guy thought he was going to run perl and wget and win2ksp3 on the same machine. That takes a special kind of dumb.

Oh, a fractal viewer. Or more specifically, a Julia set viewer.

Would have been nice to know what sort of a viewer this was by the summary. After all, it's not like there are other things named Julia or that fractals have been used for other types of viewers.

Does that make Dr. Mironov, animal, 56?

Why not just install Sophos' free version for Mac?

Are they talking about confidence games? As in, ``It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine''?

I'm not sure why Cisco feels the need to invent a new term for something that has been commonly understood since 1849...