I work on one of the telescopes that is on Mt. Graham. My father was an astronomer who did the initial site surveys for the Mt. Graham observatory and spent a good bit of time on Mauna Kea as well. He took his family to several observatories in Arizona and Mexico; I never thought of observatories as "desecrating the land". Rather, they are quiet places in which solemn work gets done to better understand our place in the universe.

My current boss's husband is the guy who made the special legislation happen that allowed the scopes to be built. He's proud of his underhanded accomplishment. I'm also friends with several Earth First!ers who were on the other side of this fight.

I think both sides on this war are assholes.

If it's the current version, he'll need a Nixie watch. I know just the guy to supply that. (I already sent one to the folks making the movie.)

Exactly! This guy's hoping to make money fixing stupid devices. It's just rewarding the companies who make the stupid devices.

The part about the website viewer being the product rather than the customer is lost on most people. I'm just being a clever mouse, eating the bait without springing the trap.

I worked at a Byte Shop in 1978-9 as their repair department. I was in high school. We sold Apples, TRS-80s, S-100 bus stuff, etc. The Apple was the most impressive machine, by far. It was apparent just from looking inside it, that the design was the way of the future.

Exactly how does HFT benefit anyone other than the people who extract money from trades? It's a zero-sum game (gambling), completely unrelated to the long-term purpose of a market.

For me, it's the Kessel Jog.

Speed of light is not such a big deal. Packet forwarding is. If the speed of light is affecting how much money you can make, then you are not doing society a benefit by making that money.

My wife has more than I do. My 1958 Chevy is not GPS-enabled. My 2011 MBP laptop is not either. My older Nikon DSLR, nope. That leaves my iphone, and the iphone that a friend found on the street and gave to me. I suppose I could include the GPS receiver I bought for the never-finished SCRA [cathodecorner.com] Scope Clock project.

If the lawmakers were treating all countries fairly, then this would not be an issue, as no country would be offended by the deal given to another. Only stinky laws need to be kept secret.

I got my DSL line in 1998. Recently my family members decided that it isn't up to snuff, and made us get Cox a few months ago. I still need to get the old one shut off, while retaining our email addresses.

I've heard of averages, but "4211 BTUs per person" is meaningless. I often drive either my 1958 V8 Chevy by myself, or my Prius full of 4 kids and me. Neither uses 4211 BTUs per passenger mile, or anywhere near it. Same thing with buses. In Tucson, buses often have 2 or 3 passengers. My Prius beats those by a lot. Commercial aircraft are the only vehicles that have a fairly consistent passenger mileage, because they are always full and all are designed to fly with about the same efficiency.

Considering the amount of stuff that TSA agents are reported to steal from airline passengers, why is this not a reasonable question of risk?

Are you being asked to do this because it's the hip thing to do, or because the school wants to turn out more well-rounded graduates who can actually do things with their hands?

The iPhone bottle opener case would have solved their problem. they could have opened their beers like civilized people instead of on each other's heads.