If a bulb comes loose or gets twisted, that can still take out the whole strand. I bought a strand recently that wouldn't turn on. I had to pull out each bulb until I found the one with the bent leads. If the strand wasn't attached to a Christmas tree that I bought on clearance, I probably would have returned it to the store and it would have ended at the recycling plant in China.

I think google still made the right decision. Users expect the address bar to behave like a tab specific widget. It has different contents on each tab. If the user starts editing the address and then switches to another tab, they expect their changes to be restored when they switch back. Putting the address bar under the tabs clearly shows the relationship between the tabs and the address bar. For users that haven't used tabbed browsing before, the layout in chrome is more intuitive.

Chrome could include an option to change the location just because 50 people complained about the default on a bug, but that approach to design often leads to a crowded preferences dialog that is difficult to find anything in. Chrome often provides better default behavior that can't be reproduced by any combination of firefox settings. For example, Firefox has several different preferences that control tab behavior, but no combination of the preferences can produce chrome's behavior.

Chrome opens new windows as tabs in the foreground, but tabs explicitly opened by the user load in the background. I believe that I can use 'open in a new tab' to open a new web page in the background even if the page author requested it to load in a new window. Last time I used Firefox, using 'open in a new tab' on a link that the page author wanted to open in a new window didn't do anything at all. The behavior in Firefox doesn't make any sense to people who don't know the difference between a regular link, a link with a target attribute, and a link that uses javascript to open a window. I believe that the Firefox developers closed the bug about fixing 'open in a new tab'.

The Arab League may support the action, but that doesn't mean that the majority of the citizens in Arab League countries support it. A substantial number of those countries have large protest movements pressing for democracy. Some of them would rather shift the focus away from their own efforts to suppress dissent.

I don't think that the objective is clear either. We say that we are acting to prevent harm to civilians, but I don't think anyone really wants to indefinitely enforce a partition of Libya. If the rebels don't win in the next few years, the countries enforcing the no fly zone will probably expand their involvement just like the US did in Iraq.

Unfortunately, I don't think that will happen after the movie wrapped up the story line and killed off major characters.

It may not be part of the budget, but the treasury bonds held by the social security administration are definitely part of the national debt. The fraudulent accounting schemes used to hide the size of the national debt might prevent the government from making social security payments. When the baby boomers start retiring in large numbers, the government will have to issue bonds to the public in order to redeem the bonds held by social security. Unless we get the budget balanced soon, we won't be able to afford to redeem the social security bonds.

The lottery system probably logs ticket sales and ticket checks to a central server. Attempting to check tickets before buying them would probably raise a red flag.

They probably want customers to use native ipv6 so they can eventually stop supporting native ipv4. I believe they are planning to let people run ipv6 exclusively and proxy outbound ipv4 connections which seems like a better long term strategy. I don't think that giving customers a new modem and router will complicate the rollout too much.

I just bought a house that has 50mbit service from comcast, but no dsl. The house is on the edge of a mid sized town in an outer suburb of a major us city. I am too far from the central office and they can't set up another office closer to my neighborhood. Because the radius of the town is about the same as the maximum distance for dsl and area around the town is sparsely populated, everyone who lives at the edge of town probably has the same problem.

Because comcast can install fiber directly to each neighborhood, they can easily offer fast internet to anyone who has a cable connection. Since the whole town has cable, I would guess that everyone in the town can get comcast internet.

The information is public domain by definition because neither Wikileaks or the US government claim copyright on it. The government usually can't prosecute the general public for distributing classified information they get from a government employee, a web site, or a newspaper. They can try to get an injunction against publication, but once it has been published the public can generally use the information freely. In this case, there has been no discussion about prosecuting the new york times or even an injunction to prevent publication of the leaked documents. In the case of the pentagon papers, the government only prosecuted the employee who leaked the information, not any of the newspapers that published the leak.

I agree that they shouldn't have published the cables about how our diplomats think that certain foreign leaders are dumb because it didn't provide any useful information. The cables about Iran do provide useful information about how the middle eastern governments ignore the will of their own people. Bombing Iran is very unpopular in the countries whose leaders were secretly advocating for an attack on Iran.

Isn't that why we send new prisoners to Afghanistan now?

The information may destabilize the governments of the gulf states. I would guess that endorsing an Israeli or US invasion of Iran would not be popular with the citizens of the gulf states. This knowledge might lead the public to overthrow the king and establish a government represents them better. I personally think that this kind of destabilization could be a good thing for the region. Our government worries too much about the stability of repressive governments. They prefer having friendly dictatorships over potentially unfriendly democracies.

Clearly the north didn't go to war to abolish slavery, but the south was fighting to preserve their right to hold slaves. The right to hold slaves was the primary right the southern states were fighting for. Using the claim that the north was fighting to abolish slavery as a strawman to distract people is a standard right wing tactic.

Unfortunately, BP gas stations are mostly franchises. I believe that they pay an annual fee to use the brand name. BP still gets their money unless the gas station goes bankrupt. Because there isn't much excess refining capacity in the US, BP could still sell their gas to the other stations. A boycott would hurt BP's public image, but wouldn't cost them much money.

I'm not sure that foreign intelligence agencies do have all this information. I would imagine it is much easier to find a whistleblower who will release classified information to the public than it is to find a person who will betray their country by giving information to the kgb. The whistleblower believes that he is serving his country, not betraying it. People are probably more willing to risk life in prison for a good cause than for $100,000 from the kgb. In addition, actually spending the money from the kgb would draw attention to the leaker and increase the chances of being caught.

Of course the 3/5ths rule was bad, but having slaves counted fully for the purpose of representation as the southern states wanted would have increased southern representation in the house. With more representation for southern states, the conflicts over slavery might have been settled in favor of the south and the south might not have succeeded. This would have delayed emancipation. Clearly the constitution should have outlawed slavery or forbidden counting slaves when allocating representatives because each representative was supposed to represent an equal number of citizens. Clearly congressmen who owned slaves couldn't honestly claim slaves as their constituents.