What kind of "heating products" are you talking about? Because the projects I've worked on located in earthquake-prone areas used essentially the same products as elsewhere, but added more bracing, additional/independent hangers for ceiling-mounted items, constrained vibration isolators, etc.

Is it because they're whores and will do anything for loose change? That's pretty much my standard answer for any headline in the format "Why is blank blanking?"

Actually, in this case, TFA gives a different answer: Because McCarthy has been pushing patent reform legislation.

RTFP before you complain, it already addresses your concerns. The point is about assuming that disk write will be slower, when, in real life, some specific programs can be sped up by writing directly to disk. They mention that the OS takes care of disk buffering for you and note a lot of stuff that is happening behind the scenes in memory, especially with immutable strings in high level languages.

Investigative techniques used in this case are not proven and may cause enough false positives to be detrimental to serving justice against the actual perpetrators.

they have a DNA-sample . . . from the crime-scene, for which no matches exist in police databases. Currently they have to look for him the old-fashioned way — and the sample is only useful to (in)validate the people.

Unfortunately in this case, they did not use the sample they had to invalidate the suspect they wrongfully convicted, but instead came up with a theory on how three men assaulted and murdered the victim in her small apartment room and only one of them (the one they couldn't identify) left physical evidence.

Errr.... prices dropped because DEMAND dropped. And why did demand drop? Because consumption dropped

Wrong . . . Prices dropped because SUPPLY rose. And why did supply rise? Because prices rose enough to make hard-to-get oil worth investing in. So, don't expect prices to stay low when fracking investments, etc. decline.

. . . if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.

But is not a choice of the choices you were going to decide on, so you still haven't made that decision about which choice to choose.

if they sell at the local rates of ~14cents a kwh (24 in the winter) they aren't making any money by selling power to the locals because its really 14-24cents kwh for offshore wind, there is no profit margin there.

$0.14 per kWh has little to do with it. They are saving money because they can shut down the expensive ($0.40 to $0.50 per kWh) diesel generators that is their only current generating source. The cost of the wind power generated is well below that regardless of connecting to the mainland or not. Also, they plan to sell excess wind power to the mainland through the cable - that's wind power that would be wasted otherwise, so even at a losing rate of "~14cents a kWh", it's a gain to bottom line (assuming the cable is going to be there, anyway). If the cable to the mainland was the only valuable part of this, why wouldn't someone have financed the cable without the wind power?

No, the reduction in price comes from not burning the diesel required by the generators that they currently use.

The big bang was "an expansion" of space itself, rather than an expansion of things within a space. Therefore the big bang was the center. And every point in space is at the center of expansion.

You miss that it isn't like that in Windows either.

Actually, it is like the GP said: "On Windows, extensions are meaningful to the operating system." I get your point that the user and thier "trusted" programs can set what opens/runs what extensions, but the MS Windows operating system uses the extension to look up what program is associated with it and opens the file with that program.

The filetype is now contained in the icon.

Wrong.
The executable assigned to open the file is "contained" in the icon.
Even that is not always true: the wrong icon can be used intentionally by malware, and in the past I've had MS Windows mess up icon assignments.

Can you also tell me how do we renew the sun?

I think by modifying the photon torpedoes and launching them into the interior of the sun, you can bring a dying sun back to life, but you have to watch out for neutron drift. It was described on TNG, but I can't remember the details.

. . . the climate on Earth is in no way static . .

True

. . . has been changing and various ways for millennia . . .

True

. . . and there's very little humans can do to effect[sic] it one way or the other.

You're impressively naive.

We're talking about analyzing a few sentences that were jotted down by an interviewer, but still, Mr. Nye's attitude is not so impressive.

Actually, almost all of the comments I've read so far are about the Slashdot summary, not the actual article. The actual quotes in the article are not quite as likely to stir up outrage as the misleading indirect quotes in the summary.