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.

I am admin for a good-sized group (>1000 fans). We see about a 50-50 mix of real humans and fake accounts requesting to join the group. Curiously, the fake ones have similar structure: Photo of a lovely young Asian lady, and a weird name, and male sex.

Happiness has a lot to do with attitude. I find that being generally happy is easy if you use your abilities to put yourself into situations that make you happy. I used to work for a place that got to be more and more like Dilbert. Instead of drowning in it, I broke loose and made a new life, using my brains to create interesting, fun things. I found part-time work in the sciences, and have extra time to make wacky inventions and volunteer with kids, teaching them how to do similar things. I am careful to take on projects only if they are likely to make me happier. The latest was building the red telephone for this...

My darn online banking system does not let me download any data from early last year, so I may have left some huge vendor payment off my list of business expenses.

If any of you work on websites that provide banking data, please bear in mind that having the complete previous year available to your customers isn't just a courtesy, it's essential these paperless days.

Given that I view programming as something that I have to to do make my hardware work, I don't consider myself an expert. Although when I look back at code I wrote 5 or 10 yeas ago (which I usually have no memory of having written), I am impressed by what I see.

Disallowing security updates to run on non-genuine copies of Windows is not exactly in Microsoft's best interest.

I was wondering when this would be brought up. Once the word on the street gets around that you need to remove a millimeter of metal under the serial number for it to be really obliterated, Dremel tool sales will go through the roof.

A 200 MHz signal isn't detectable in the audio realm unless it has a large non-random low-frequency component.
I would hope that Sony knows how to shield the digital circuitry on their MP3 player. I'm still not convinced that you'd be able to do anything about audio noise level by redesigning the micro SD card. The only source of audio noise would be slow things such as page read-related current pulses, and there's not enough real estate on a micro SD board to provide a low frequency filter.

The charge pump is on-chip in all modern flash chips. There's nothing that Sony could do to make their memory card better than any generic SD card in terms of sound performance, other than printing the words "for Premium Sound" on the front and charging more for it.

There are all sorts of jobs these days that do not need to be done, such as writing advertising jingles or maximizing the number of times that a person clicks on an ad. Oh, and most of that work being done to build the JSF. I'd rather have us enjoy that leisure time that we were told (by those utopian si-fi novels) would result from robots doing all the essential work.

In Arizona, we have a type of swamp cooler called a MasterCool which uses a single, big paper cooling pad instead of the shredded wood thing. Ours lasts for several years before needing replacement, and we have plenty of dissolved calcium in our water.

The same argument can be made against the Muslims who think that their religion applies to people outside of it. I am not Muslim, so I am not going to hell for displaying a mockery of their prophet. After all, would the Muslims want to be held accountable to the rules of every other religion in the world?

This is the real problem, and it's on all religious people to behave as if every other religion (and every form of non-belief) is as valid as theirs is. Oh, and Thou Shalt Not Kill.