They don't have to use refusal as probable cause. There are plenty of signs the officers can look for to see if someone may be drunk- bad driving, glazed eyes, inability to walk in a straight line, smell of alcohol, etc. These methods are often used in addition to a breathalyzer test because the test by itself may not be enough to convict someone (there is some chance the machine was malfuncitoning, for example), but the test combined with conventional signs of drunkenness can prove that someone is drunk beyond reasonable doubt. The same signs of drunkenness can be used as probable cause to get a warrant. If the officer doesn't think you are drunk, he/she will probably just let you go and not ask you to take a test at all.

In many places some kind of test is mandatory. You can refuse the breathalyzer, but instead you have to take a blood test. Probable cause is not involved- it is written into the state laws that if you have a license and drive you consent to either of these tests if asked by the police.

Where I live, there's no DSL or cable, only Clearwire (an early wimax technology inferior to Clear's service. I can't remember if Clear and Clearwire are the same company or not), satellite, or cellular 3G. None of these are particularly good options, but I have Clearwire. It's been OK until recently during peak load times I start getting 1000-2000 ms ping times (around 100 is average) and extremely slow download speeds.

Why is it just "newbies" that purchase small high value items from Microcenter? A while back I got a new, retail Q9550 processor for about $170. It was probably selling for ~$250 on Newegg or anywhere legit at the time, and today it sells for $275 at Newegg.

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=610809

A USB CD drive and support to boot from it solves all of those problems. I'd gladly pay $50 for one and not have to carry it around in my laptop all the time. In fact, I put a SSD in my laptop and put the old hard drive in the optical bay, and it's great! I get all the speed of a SSD and all the capacity of a HDD on the cheap. On the rare occasion I need to use a CD (like when the SSD died and I had to restore the OS on a new one), I plug in my massive external DVD burner from 2004, and it boots off it just fine. If I need to burn a DVD, I use that or my desktop computer.

I think they are using crypt(). There is a table out there sorted by email address (I can't remember where though). If you just commented without creating an account they probably only asked for your email address, which was used for verification. Apparently I had given them two of my email addresses based on the emails I got from them, and now I'm worried about excessive spam and I'll probably change my emails. They were semi-throwaway anyways.

This is more like bombing their parking lot, or dumping large amounts of garbage in front of their building (gigabytes of garbage every second). Marching in front of a store is relatively harmless, but a DOS attack, or vandalism I mentioned above, causes real damage and costs the company money (bandwidth costs, downtime, paying more sysadmins to deal with it, etc).

Wouldn't everyone sending out sonar chirps be just as bad?

There is no need to require something as complicated and expensive as a camera. I have driven a Toyota 4Runner, and it has two convex mirrors, one on each rear pillar, near where the rear hatch hinges are. These two mirrors allowed me to see essentially everything up to the bumper when backing up. If there's anything on the ground behind the car, no matter how short or close to the back of the car, it's visible. This is much better than the alternative of not being able to see anything shorter than 3-4 feet since the rear window is so high.

I have an 08 MBP and the audio quality sucks. The noise level is very high, like -64dB order of order of magnitude (if that makes any sense). In 16 bit mode there is extreme quantization noise at low volume levels. If a song fades out, you will here weird digital artifacts. I set the volume to the lowest level, played some music and recorded it with a loopback cable, and it was actually an interesting effect, but not something I would want to listen to. Setting it for 24 bit mode fixes the quantization noise, but the noise floor is still high enough to be almost distracting for at most reasonable volume levels.

I don't know much about the new MBPs- I'm sure they are better, but I think they are still not great. They most likely aren't going to beat the integrated card in this article. Luckily some of them have optical out, which is nice since you can use an external dac if needed.

The ads have some value even if on one clicks them. Just seeing them has some value, like billboards. If someone reads the ads but then decides not to click them, I bet they would still be more likely to click an organic link for something that was advertised because it they have already seen it once on the page, and it may be somewhat more familiar. Also ads may increase the legitimacy of advertiser's sites, whether the user clicks the ad or the organic link, since some people may perceive an ad as a sort of endorsement by Google (even if it's not).

The majority of the population isn't educated enough to make decisions on issues like this (or most issues for that matter), which is why we have elected representatives. Unfortunately the system doesn't work very well, and our representatives are not much better than us, especially on very technical issues. They can't be experts on everything, which is why they have staff and advisers.

Plus most of those servers are run by competent admins who would likely notice if botnet traffic started showing up.

Why is it astounding to be able to watch 1080p video while the system is working in the background? Isn't that how priority is supposed to work? 1080p video is interactive and realtime, so it should get a high priority, and the background tasks should get a low priority. It doesn't matter how much CPU time the video takes; the background task should just use the rest. There's no reason a pegged CPU should ever slow down something with a higher priority.

I haven't had a situation where I "can't do anything on other pages", but when I have tons (hundreds) of tabs open, Firefox regularly consumes 30% of my CPU time doing nothing. I have flash blocked and animations set to not loop, so you can't blame those.

And don't tell me I should have fewer tabs open. I should be able to use the browser however I want. Sure hundreds of tabs is not the normal use case, but I know there are others out there that do the same thing. Provide a better bookmark system and maybe I won't need so may tabs.

Just today, Firefox "forgot" all my bookmarks, so I had to delete my places.sqlite file to get them back. When I went to delete it, it was 124MB! No wonder the awesome bar was always so laggy. It is much faster now, but all my history is gone (not that I ever really use it, but I like to keep it). At least I got my bookmarks back.

I stick with Firefox, though, because I like it, I like the extensions, and nothing else I've tried has been a good enough replacement. Google Chrome can't handle the number of bookmarks I have, or the number of tabs I like to keep open (at least on my mac, I haven't tried the Windows version). Opera lacks extensions (though it's getting them in version 11) and is still a niche browser. Maybe it's time to try Safari again now that version 5 has extensions, but I still don't like that it is somewhat limited, like most Apple products*.

*Yes, I use a Mac, but that's because their OS is really solid and works well. It doesn't have audio dropouts like my Windows 7 PC, for example, and it doesn't have most of the hardware problems I've had with Linux (mostly video driver problems) and more commercial software works on Mac than Linux. I don't like the direction Apple seems to be going, making everything more closed, but I will stick with it until something better comes along or until I'm forced to switch.