What sig? I turned off sig's in my Slashdot preferences a long time ago because I got tired of seeing them. Yes, I am an aggressive user of ad blocking, too.

This (almost) all exists today, if you're willing to buy the components required. (Almost depends on who built your camera)

Kensington will sell you cell phone connectors that will allow you to charge a cell phone from a laptop or other USB power source. It also has a portable battery that can provide an additional charge for your cell phone. Or step up to a fully universal laptop battery if you want to power that netbook

Some cameras can also be charged from USB, allowing you to use the Kensington portable battery or your netbook. Google to find out if yours can be charged that way.

There are at least half a dozen systems to charge a laptop (or in your case, a netbook) from solar power, effectively making it your portable power station, using solar power as the source.

While I agree that the level of change is reasonably slow, I think you've taken the conclusion a bit too far in inferring the observed rate of change matches transcription accuracy.

The reason I would be cautious about extending observed mutation rate to infer transcription accuracy is that there is likely to be significant selection bias, similar to how "old furniture" always appears to be great quality (because anything that isn't great quality is in a landfill). Any fatal mutations would never progress and therefore can't be detected by this method. Thus, the 0.00012% is a (very) loose lower bound on the transcription error rate.

To follow your computer analogy, it's like saying a program running for 204 years only produces a wrong answer 0.00012% of the time *that it produces an answer*. What you may be missing is the 50% (making up a number) of the time that it dumped stack because a bounds check failed due to an error.

They just changed our policy at my company. We were paid for both on-call and recall. Now we are expected to provide on-call availability for free and they will pay recall only in the case of serious system outages. Unfortunately, I am salaried/exempt in a right-to-work state, so there is not much I can do except quit. Double unfortunately, the economy is depressed and I am over 40 in an area not known for its high-tech job availability.

On the considerable plus side, I will be completely debt free, owning my own house and cars, in a little less than 4 years. So, I will just hold out for a while and wait for the economy to turn around. Then when I don't really need my current job and there are others to be had, well, in the words of a man named Jane, "Won't that be an interesting day."

Purdue University http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLr_XrooLs

This list seems to imply that there is a duplicate set of Comcast DNS servers that work correctly for opt-out service: http://dns.comcast.net/dns-ip-addresses.html Maybe just changing DNS to point to your alternate opt-out server(s) will work. Unless they sometimes decide to change the IP addresses around without notice.

Concepts are what is important. Concepts are what separate skilled engineers from the common coder. Languages are tools which change often, but the fundamentals are generally constant.

I finished college with a healthy working knowledge of C and Java from academic and side projects. I had become extremely proficient in Perl and I also had a year of internship experience in C++. I interviewed for jobs focusing on all of those languages. My favorite was Perl, and I eventually accepted a position which dealt primarily a project that was Perl-based. Six months later I had to do a fairly complex Java project (lasted 3 months). Immediately after that I started a year long project in Objective-C, a language which I had absolutely no knowledge of. Now I hardly code Perl (I miss it, but I do not mind Obj-C much... I'm quite proficient in it by now).

The point is you never know where life will take you. I can attest from experience that switching to a completely foreign language stinks. It can be very rough initially, but if your fundamentals are strong, you'll have something to lean on instead of falling down. Not to mention that a generalist is an extremely valuable position to be seen in by your boss.

It's important to know languages, but they are secondary to mastering the fundamental concepts that you'll take with you for your entire career.

OLE (1990) was an extension of Microsoft's Dynamic Data Exchange, introduced in 1987. CORBA was 1991. CORBA standardized (and made more flexible) the types of transactions Microsoft defined in DDE/OLE.

I have not - and will never make - the assertion that Microsoft innovates well or consistently. Microsoft frequently is not an innovator, but rather is chasing others. My point was on tabbed spreadsheets. "Microsoft has yet to innovate anything, ever." is a strong (and IMHO incorrect) statement.

It is innovation. It provides benefit to the end user that reduces the amount of effort a user has to make in checking a document. It may seem trivial in hindsight (many innovations are), but it was innovative when introduced.

This is where business and technology meet, because I think you're confusing invention and innovation.
People often refer to the inventors of technology and fret that they are not sufficiently recognized for their invention. (e.g. Xerox PARC on the GUI). What matters to users, however, is not the idea or the invention, but the successful application of that idea or invention. (e.g. Apple Macintosh)
This distinction between invention and innovation is why you will see companies refer to "innovation" as a key area where they need to spend effort. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Innovation refers to an invention that is successfully applied.
In that sense, Microsoft was an "innovator" in many areas because it was often the first to successfully apply a technology.

XBox Live (more generally a console w/ services and playability across the Internet)
OLE
Tabbed Spreadsheet
Pivot Tables in Spreadsheets
On-the-fly spell checking in word processor

All first successful applications by Microsoft.

The article (and a lot of comments I have read so far) are only talking about casual navigation GPS, as in vehicle GPS units. The current crop of phone GPS solutions is inadequate for backpacking, camping, exploring or basically any outdoor activity that takes you very far away from a cell tower or a charging station.

Most non-dedicated GPS units do not have a compass (the new iPhone 3GS is a notable exception).

Most non-dedicated GPS units have pretty wretched sensitivity and accuracy compared to dedicated GPS units, especially in rough terrain or heavy tree cover. Anybody who does much geocaching will know this. It's no big deal while driving, but it can be very annoying to take the time to claw your way up a steep hillside only to realize you are 100 feet away from where you want to be, on the other side of a deep ravine. Even with driving, inaccuracy can be annoying, which is why TomTom includes another dedicated (more accurate) GPS in the vehicle mount for the new iPhone.

Most phones do not use standard AA or AAA batteries, making it more difficult and expensive to carry spares out away from electrical connections.

Some (most?) phone-based GPS solutions do not even install maps locally on the device, instead relying on cellular communications to download maps live, making them totally useless outside of cell coverage. AT&T's recently announced product for the iPhone is one example.

Rain (or anything else that might get the unit wet). There are many dedicated GPS units available that have various levels of water resistance.

Better pieces have Mortise/Tenon or dado.

Actually, it's not even that simple. Most "high" quality furniture is still only about mid-range IMHO and subject to weaknesses in design. Ethan Allen and others who "mass produce" furniture - even "high quality" furniture will use jigs that result in shortcomings in the final structure. DerekLyons is correct. While they use a dovetail joint on corners, their half-blind dovetails tend to be rounded on the inside, and not completely square. Look at the half-blind illustration and then look at how it's done with a jig. Note in picture 5 how the insides of the pins are taken out with the use of a jig. That makes it harder for the glue to grip and makes the joint weaker in the long run.

Really good furniture only needs glue to secure it for long periods of time (if at all). Screws are typically used to hold on the top, in order to allow the wood to expand/contract with different moisture levels and avoid cracking. I have a desk & filing cabinet I built by hand and the glue is a formality. I could sit on them before they were glued and they didn't budge.

My water company is the town government, so the bill is sparse in the amount of detail it provides. My sewer charges are based on the number of gallons of water used. The sewer capital charge when building a home is based on the legal number of bedrooms (rooms with closets) in the home (I know this because I have a "study" that I didn't turn into a bedroom :) )... not sure what the capital charges on the water side of things is based on.

It is actually different from other utilities - the electric company doesn't cap how much electricity you use...

Citation needed. I say that because I believe they DO limit how much electricity you use. Here's the proof: I'm on a residential rate, E01, to be exact. I can't exceed 5kW load under that rate, nor can I exceed 7600kWh per month consecutively while remaining on that rate.

Any other big names I'm overlooking?

I wouldn't think anything special about Apple being missing given that IBM/Lenovo (depending on how the suit would hit based on time of filing), Sony, Cisco/Linksys are missing. A host of others would be potential targets, too.

In 1988, during the height of water cooling technology, 92% of mainframe shops were using water-cooled technology

It's not like water cooling is new.