Close. Try "I left naked pictures of myself in my car, in individual envelopes in a folder called DCIM. When I got back to my car the envelopes were all opened and some of the pictures were covered with fingerprints". Yay, a car analogy.

Read it here. Sometimes parody is the purest truth. I'm also partial to the Bokononism of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, especially:

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land,
Man got to tell himself he understand.

It's not only insightful, it's also got a good beat that you can dance to.

Without reading the research, coffee is hard to carry while walking because the regular pace of your walking creates a resonant frequency that increases the sloshing until it spills over. If you take irregular steps or move your cup around in a random motion you can overcome this. However, you won't look cool doing either of these.

Like Social Security numbers? Like the names of embedded spies?

Tatu Ylönen has garnered fame in technology circles as ... the dick who tried to trademark the term SSH in a move to try to shut down OpenSSH as a free alternative to their commercial product.

The concept is different from an algorithm when your patent is on the end result and not the process. That's the problem; there is no way to work at a different solution because the patent covers EVERY solution. What patent abusers really want to patent is the idea -- an auction, meeting scheduling, one-click ordering, etc. (on the INTERNET!, to boot) - but those aren't allowed. So they describe what are obvious (to anyone learned in the art of software design) steps to perform their idea. This is where I see the problem. It's an evil fusion between unpatentable ideas and obvious implentations that falsely appears to be a novel process.

As an example, Shazam paid a settlement to Tune Hunter over the idea of music identification. If you read Tune Hunter's actual patent, they only described in detail a method where you hear an interesting song on the radio, press a key fob usb, which can be used to look up the song based on the time and the station's playlist (this sounds like something NPR had given as a promotional item a few years ago, but I'm not sure). Obviously, what Shazam does is nothing like that. Their patent does also include a claim for identification based on sound samples, but they offer no actual process to accomplish this, other than "uses a central processing unit and search stored information as known in the art to analyze the music segment" (emphasis mine). Thus, they flat out admit in the patent that what Shazam is doing is not something they invented. But still Shazam felt threatened by a patent on the idea of "music identification".

Fun fact : those "meager" 10.8% would multiply your money by 2 in less than 7 years, and by 28400 in 100 years.

Funner fact: With 900 million active users at a 13.4% growth rate, there will be 230 trillion users in 100 years.

Then, six days later they returned to the store, put the burrito back into the microwave, reheated it, and left.

Nobody has mentioned anything other than a few math questions, so I assume few people RTFA. I think his comment on the reading portion is spot on:

On the FCAT, they are reading material they didn’t choose. They are given four possible answers and three out of the four are pretty good. One is the best answer but kids don’t get points for only a pretty good answer. They get zero points, the same for the absolute wrong answer. And then they are given an arbitrary time limit. Those are a number of reasons that I think the test has to be suspect.

This is true of standardized reading tests, and as an analytical-minded person with good math skills, this always troubled me about these tests. Many times there is more than 1 correct answer, and you have to somehow make a judgment as to which is most correct. Whether this comes from intuition, ability to weigh qualitative factors on the fly, or taking a lot of practice tests, it's not a skill that comes easily for many people. It's not just with reading comprehension but also in grammar questions, where there are no clear grammatical errors, but one choice of phrasing is supposed to be "better" than another option that can also be perfectly acceptable.