My father has very poor eyesight and is also hard of hearing. He relies on hearing car engines to help him judge his surroundings when walking near or crossing a street. He's mentioned to me that hybrids give him trouble because he can't hear them.

I don't know that emulating the existing behavior of other cars is the best solution, but this definitely targets a real issue for some people.

Show me some real research on the topic and I'll call it interesting. Did I mis-click and wind up on idle?

Before I read this reply, I thought the grandparent was just stating that something was For The Lose.

You missed the last bullet point: "Quality Software...Priceless" (or perhaps in this case, timeless)

How, exactly, do you kill a civilian with a terrorist? Do you drop the terrorists - like bombs - from a high altitude in order to crush the civilians? Perhaps you use the dismembered limbs of the terrorists to beat the civilians to death? Maybe something more like the Human Cannonball routine, except with terrorist corpses?

That's a double-edged sword though. You might think it would be great if you were simply judged based on a metric like how many bugs you fixed or how many requirements you completed the code for, but metrics like that can also hurt productivity. If employees know they are being judged by these metrics, they will often search for ways to inflate their appearance as far as the metric is concerned. This almost always comes at the cost of actual quality, and can really get in the way.

Managers that know this tendency might very well fire a developer that's leading in resolutions and completed requirements if that manager goes beyond the metric to see the real quality of the work that developer does. Not that I disagree with your final point (skip the drama and get to work), but ass kissers and bullshit artists often make it difficult to do.

Change Orders really are a myth where I work, unless "Oh, we changed our minds about that piece of the project. We need you to add a whole new section of logic and a new report by the end of the day," counts.

I like to read some of the realistic sounding reviews at every level. The crazies go both ways, and as long as you can pick them out you can get a pretty good overview of the product.

As nerdy as it is, I think the real reviews of a product tend to make a normal distribution (bell curve).

That's interesting. I didn't think of it that way. My thought was that they'd turn off the jamming in the event of an emergency so that the students could call their parents, not so that the faculty could notify each other or the students.

It looks like the paragraph Palm is referencing can be found towards the top of the second page of the USB-IF Membership Application, specifically this sentence:

Although, at the same time, the way Palm restored iTunes syncing with the Pre was to have it use Apple's Vendor ID Number, which is also expressly prohibited by another couple of sentences in the very same paragraph:

So unless Palm has already acquired said written approval from the USB-IF, they are also in violation of their agreement.

It looks to me like Palm is very clearly in the wrong, and that Apple may or may not be, depending on who gets to be the official interpreter of the phrase "unauthorized use." I have to say, in a world where "ID" is normally short for "identification," using a "Vendor ID Number" to identify devices that came from that vendor sounds pretty standard.