As annoying as that is, at least I understand the commercial desire to maximize profit.

If it was about contrails, most of you guys would still be wrong. Contrails aren't caused by the turbines, they're caused by the air passing the wingtips of the aircraft. If you want to learn more, there's wikipedia for that.

Contrails (play /kntrelz/; short for "condensation trails") or vapour trails are artificial clouds that are the visible trails of condensed water vapour made by the exhaust of aircraft engines. As the hot exhaust gases cool in the surrounding air they may precipitate a cloud of microscopic water droplets. If the air is cold enough, this trail will be comprised of tiny ice crystals.[1]

The wingtip vortices which trail from the wingtips and wing flaps of aircraft are sometimes partly visible due to condensation in the cores of the vortices. Each vortex is a mass of spinning air and the air pressure at the centre of the vortex is very low. These wingtip vortices are not the same as contrails.

Very, but they still get to vote. Three guesses as to which way "they" lean.

Seriously, I want to laugh (and I do) but this (TFA and the sprinkler idiot) is troubling. Not just because these cops are stupid, but because it reflects a general failure of critical thinking across our society. The intellectual capacity required for a reasonable skepticism seems to be escaping a larger and larger swath of the populace, a swath which apparently now takes in those in important public safety roles. We're doomed.

There is some very interesting research that indicates even the tens of thousands of years of farming prior to the industrial revolution may have altered global climate significantly enough to be detected.

Self-taught programmers might not know design patterns by name, but they will likely stumble upon the more common ones on their own. When they finally learn about design patterns, they will understand the topic better because they "invented" some of the design patterns themselves. That's how it was for me at least. One day I was explaining something to another programmer, and after my long explanation he just looked at me and said "Oh, so you're using the visitor pattern." I tilted my head, went online, and learned a new name for something I had been using for years.

Besides, doesn't the claim "no hypothesis can be proven" invalidate itself?

If you fly to Australia (presumably from the U.S. and not from NZ or something) and need your laptop the whole time, invest in an airline power adaptor and check to see if your airline has connectors here. Or you know... buy a different laptop.

[...]because of the limited amount of power draw per seat, it is possible that your laptop won't get enough power to both operate and charge. Some airlines, like Continental Airlines, specifically state that battery charging is not allowed and ask you to remove your rechargeable battery from your device.

If the BBC author "knows what it does," he and other journalists would stop referring to Pirate Bay as a "file-sharing site." Use of that term is tantamount to referring to O.J. Simpson during his murder trial as "The murderer O.J. Simpson."

Dammit Palm, you had a complete market cornered, why did you have to drop the ball so stupidly? If you had developed a decent OS (with a f**kin filesystem!) for your devices 5 years ago, you would still be relevant today...

Firewire is actually fairly common on even budget PC notebooks, including Dells, so this omission by Apple is all the more perplexing. And Apple still doesn't offer Blu-ray drives or 3G wireless at any price on any model. (No 3G wireless option from the iPhone company!)

It also amazes me that their latest hardware refresh still caps RAM at 4G maximum. Even Dell has figured out how to go to 8G max on a notebook.

That said, there is some great design in these new MacBooks. But Apple engineers waxing eloquently about "unibody" construction (it isn't, by the way) when they forgot the damn Firewire port is a bit too much to stomach.