...somehow did not make it into the summary:

Strandbeest is Dutch for Beach Animal.

One map that visualizes the non-uniformity of US population density pretty nicely is this one.

It does the same thing, for years on end, without having to take vacation days. The funny thing is that you do actually get used to it; I was a night owl, but not anymore. Now, if I do sleep in, I actually wake up with a headache.

... this should be in addition to good coding/style standards, proper design, proper source revision control, proper code reviews, and continuous testing/integration. Without any of the former, using this tool does not provide that much information: You first want to know whether your code does what you think it should do, whether it is thread safe, whether it is leaking memory, etc., etc., etc.

I agree with the power-consumption part, but the reason I would still not buy the Atom line is the simple fact that they do not support ECC RAM; when you say "reliability", you do want to know when your RAM walks out on you.

Supermicro sells a couple of mini-ITX board for mobile Core i7s, though, that will still allow you to build an under-30W-idle system with ECC RAM.

... because that is exactly what this initiative ("Buchpreisbindung") was aiming for. Protectionism is wrong, no matter what you name it.

Your average phone has a ~4 mm (diameter) lens. This yields an Airy disc of some 1.15 minutes of arc.

Even at a wide field of view (say, 60 degrees), this yields a maximum lateral resolution of some 3200 pixels. Isn't thus any camera with more than ~10 MPixels diffraction limited by the tiny lens, and not sensor limited?

So now with Chrome infecting my IE, I have no way to access vital corporate apps.

But you have: The Chrome-frame mode is activated only if one either prefixes URLs with cf: (which your corp. apps will not do), or if one includes a <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1"> header in the HTML (or HTTP), which your corp. apps will not do either.

Only websites specifically designed to use the Chrome frame could force IE into Chrome-frame mode.

Yes you can, but you need to keep both the scope and the context mind.

Regarding scope: high-speed rail is mostly interesting for journeys in the 50-400 mile range; for shorter journeys, the many stops would bring down the average speed too much, and for longer journeys a single-hop plane transfer is faster.

I regularly travel the high-speed net in Europe, and I love it: No of that checking-in business; I get to the station 10 minutes before the train leaves, sit down on my reserved seat, and soon I am speeding through Southern Germany at 200 mph. Still, a ~400 mile journey (case in point: Zurich-Aachen) takes me 6 hours downtown to downtown. The main reasons for that slow ~70 mph average are slow links in Switzerland, and the relatively high number of stops in densely populated Germany. Still, this is 70 mph average, at (when planned somewhat in advance) EUR 120 for a return ticket.

Now, in the US, the SF-LA corridor and the East-cost are excellent choices for such a network. Especially the SF-LA link could do with only a few stops (LA, Bakersfield, Fresno, (Stockton), San Jose, SF, say), so one could push for >80 mph average. This would bring down travel time from _downtown_ LA to _downtown_ SF to 5 hours. Such a journey would be the efficiency limit for a fast train though, since there is a good flight here. Perhaps LA-Bakersfield (~120 miles) in an hour would be a better example.

The thing to remember though, and that bring me to the "context" part of the title, is that high-speed rail cannot exist on its own. Although the connections for larger distances already exist (planes), one definitely needs connections to shorter-distance transport modalities. Examples are fast commuter train for a metropolitan area (relatively high number of stops, but fast acceleration and deceleration), tram/bus networks in the city (and _adaptations_ to the city for that, so that trams and busses are never in traffic jams, etc.). Not having this latter modality leaves you with a "last mile" problem. If you cannot get to the station fast, often, and safe, you won't use your high-speed train, and you could hardly be blamed for that.