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.

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.