You've got to be kidding. My Palm III ate batteries like a fiend. I was lucky if they lasted a week, and I hardly used the thing. I'd guess I got about 6-7 hours of functionality out of a set of batteries. And I'm not talking rechargeables, but good quality alkalines.

Yup. It's one thing to offload a bunch of the processing and systems to a third-party, but one should always keep one's finger in the pie, at least in the form of backups or DB mirrors. One might not be able to go operational instantly if the cloud provider goes down, but if one's data is intact then one can either spin-up with some capital investment or can migrate to another cloud provider. If one doesn't have one's data, one can't do that.

Uh, the airlines are well aware of the geopolitical situation, they could have chosen to alter their flightpath if they wanted.

The fiber optic cables carrying the data had no problems being immersed

For the immediate emergency, no, they didn't.

Long-term, fiber is susceptible to water damage. I had a site that needed fiber replaced because the Christy vault was placed too low in the ground and got inundated with irrigation water. The fiber didn't even splice in the vault; it was just a pull-point where the conduit stubbed up into the vault and a new conduit dropped back down, but the conduits filled up and the fiber degraded fairly quickly despite being gel-filled OSP. For awhile we kept testing and moving to different strands as the ones we were on failed, but it didn't take long before it had to be replaced. Fortunately the contractor was able to eliminate that particular vault entirely, splicing the conduits together after getting the moisture out, and we haven't had a problem since.

Are you saying that Khan wouldn't, himself, look to continue to apply the same projects to others that created him? With his support for eugenics he'd want to replace the entire human population with engineered individuals.

I suggest an autopsy to determine the truth. :P

I was saddened when he died. He could no longer autogragh the owners' manual for my Cordoba...

Friend of mine did that with a shotgun when he was ten, outermost joint of his index finger one one hand. Several years later when he was in shop class he knicked the nub with the table saw and it started bleeding. The nurse came to the room and passed out when she saw what she thought was a freshly amputated finger...

So the results can be highly entertaining, even if only from time to time.

...the initiative, led by Khan Noonien Singh, looks to improve the quality of life and longevity, strength, and memory for all humans, over the entire planet. On the goals of his project, Khan replied, "Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity, but improve man and you gain a thousandfold."

Well, if you look at Africa, which probably has the largest population living in rough conditions, and there's a lot of habitat destruction for firewood for cooking fires and generally any animal that can be caught goes into the pot. Sure, there's poaching for precious material like ivory, but there's also poaching simply to not starve.

This is something to consider with the widespread ranching of cattle- we want our meat, so it's either a matter of raising it ourselves with a few sets of monolithic species where we manage to use the bulk of the carcass for something, or catching wild animals where we don't fully utilize the animal and leave a lot of waste. Right now, by mass, Beef if the dominant life form on the planet.

An Israeli defense company, eh?

Well, no one is quite the expert at mass murder that the Israelis are, as they're proving in Gaza right now by butchering 4 civilians for every enemy "soldier" that they kill.

Can you imagine the uproar if 80% of those killed in Afghanistan by US forces were civilians?

How does "sycophant" work here?

If you want to see my surgery from the surgeon's end of things, Here you go!
Yes, they gave me a DVD of it.

iLASIK is done with all lasers, one to make the flap that was previously done by blade, and the usual LASIK after that. Fewer reported complications than with the older blade style. At my six month checkup I was seeing 20/10 from my left eye and 20/15 from my right. I'm 48 and previously wore progressive lenses. They adjusted my right for a closer focal distance.

It all just works, I love it.

No, you've hit the nail on the head about the problem with "agile" development. Agile is a team of programmers hacking at a code base without rhyme, reason, or structure. It presumes there are (usually non-existent) regression tests to catch any breakage, and makes no allowance for the fact that without some overshadowing "big picture", people who are new to the team will spend months just trying to figure out what the hell the project does and where to find the pieces of code that need to be tweaked when enhancements are requested.

As far as I'm concerned, agile is the lazy coder's answer to "I hate writing documentation."