Actually, as with most class action settlements, everybody is opted in by default, and you must explicitly opt out in order to retain your rights to sue on your own. Didn't hear about the settlement in time to file a claim or opt out? Gee, that's a shame.

From the table at the bottom of the official settlement page:

Exclude Yourself: Get out of the Class You may ask to get out of the Class and keep your right to sue on your own about the claims in the lawsuit.

Do Nothing: You remain in the Settlement. You get no money or compensation and give up your right to sue about the claims in the lawsuit.

Here's a bit by Schneier on how to recognize plaintext. Basically, plaintext looks like plaintext, either because it's intelligible lanugage, or because it matches the characteristics of a standard document format (headers, layout, etc.)

How one would go about programming a computer to recognize plaintext, I have no idea, but presumably somebody smarter than me has worked it out.

Never happen. All it takes is one accident after the cuts, and all fingers point back to the Congressmen who championed the cost cutting bill. No politician worth his salt will put himself in the position to be the target of a statement like this:

Actually, it probably would be more like coupons for $50 off a retail purchase of Windows 7. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs' lawyers, having successfully consolidated the various claims into a class action, would receive several million in cash under the terms of the settlement.

Loost. Duh.

It's actually usually an internal control imposed by the auditors as an anti-fraud measure. The idea is that individuals with certain levels of access and responsibility sometimes are in a position to defraud their employer and cover it up by cooking the books. It can be extremely difficult to uncover such a scheme if the employee is always at their desk. By forcing everybody to take vacation, the company makes it much more likely that any such schemes will be uncovered while another person is doing the thief's job.

I hadn't heard of being forced to take your leave at specific times on short notice, but that would make the control more effective by limiting the ability to hide things from the guy who covers the job while the thief is away. That being the case, it's not surprising that the companies with such policies include banks.

"Don K"?

Right - this is called a trusted path.

Could be worse. Try <Left Shift><Right Shift><Alt><Esc>.

However, a person of the 18th century wouldn't have any context in which to evaluate the relative planet-shrinking abilities of cars vs. planes. Ballpark it at 500 miles per day for a car vs. 10,000 miles per day for a plane. To a Parisian commoner of that era, that's a matter of being able to travel to Turin vs. Tokyo, both of which are just names of far away places to him, if he's even heard of them.

For comparative purposes, imagine that somebody from the future were to show a modern Earthican two forms of space travel - one that could take you to Polaris (430 light years) in a day, and one that could take you to the Orion Nebula (1,500 ly). Sure, if you know the distances it's obvious that one's faster than the other, but what does that mean to you? Both are so far from anything you know, and so far beyond any distance that you ever imagined travelling, that the difference is meaningless to you.

However, changing the query to "airspeed of an unladen African swallow in furlongs per fortnight" returns this:

Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

...but removing the unit conversion from the query:"airspeed of an unladen African swallow" returns this:

there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)

Hmmmm...