www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_lhm/IEEE_Guide.pdf

Not an electrician, but I thought a Ufer ground was basically required by NEC these days(??). Basically, just put it in the foundation footer, or slab for slab-on-grade, and you've got a really good local ground for the house (concrete is a pretty good conductor, relative to dirt). Making sure all the utilities enter the building in roughly the same area, all with short-as-possible low-resistance connections to the ground goes a long way too.

Yup... I posted this before: comment from 2008.

And for the curious... The salary ranges that I posted have basically been increased ~2% (cumulative) over the intervening 4 years (2007 range vs 2011 range), and average employee salary probably increased ~5% (also cumulative), based on data I've seen from HR. Also, no, my company's HR department isn't refreshingly transparent. They're just completely clueless...

Hmmm... not sure if it was the "official" way to deal with a child's passport, but when I was a kid, my mom printed my name, wrote "Signed by mother" above my name, and signed her own. I traveled all over Europe, to Egypt, Canada, the US with that passport. No one paid it any particular attention. But that seems so much more sane, in my biased mind, than having small kids sign it themselves.

Indeed... and the relevant metric here is latency, not bandwidth. I guess really good ping times are in the 15-30ms range. So assuming the server is close (in terms of network topology), and that the server has the required data in memory, such that disk latency is 0ms on the server end, that's still going to be noticeably slower than loading data from the local disk for many (most?) users.

I honestly think some people have no usable perspective on how large their car is, or where it is within the space of the road as they're driving. Stopping so far back illustrates that they don't really know where the front end of their car is, so they're likely stopping such that they can see the stop line (probably with some arguably-excessive margin) beyond the hood of their vehicle.

Isn't cancelled/forgiven debt accompanied by a 1099-C...? In that case, this hypothetical $1B is recognized as income for tax purposes, no?

Not necessarily... see RFC 2817.

points are all valid, but you only specified the largest DRAM manufacturer (samsung), and the 4th largest (micron) by market share, but missed #2 (hynix) and #3 (elpida).

Palladium is ASIC-based, not FPGA-based (the way older IKOS boxes were; yes FPGAs are ASICs...). So far as I'm aware, the ASICs used are basically "verilog accelerator" chips, supporting a limited subset of the language (mainly just synthesizeable constructs, with some exceptions). The verilog is compiled into a bytecode that the processors handle natively. It's analogous to the "java accelerator" ASICs that have been discussed here off and on. That grossly understates the complexity of the system, but from my exposure to it, that's basically what it is.