An even bigger ISP in the Netherlands uses/used the very same password for people who forgot their original more secure password.

Error correction does not always fix everything. The bits used for error correction can have errors as well after transmission. And sometimes there can be too many errors in the signal to be fixable with error correction.

That is either for short amounts of time or with proper equipment (G-Suit). When I flew glider planes, we used to go up to 6.5 -7G and it is really hard work to stay conscience. I have doubts about the elegance and euphoria described though, above 7G things really start to hurt, your nose will be dripping, ear wax will pop out of your ears, ... If you're physically weak, you'll probably have small arteries in your legs burst too due to the increases blood pressure.

Because many pre-compiled packages use conservative optimization flags and may lack specific code paths for certain processors and instruction sets. They might also have chosen a compiler which doesn't produce the fastest code around. I'm not sure how it stands today, but a few years back, ICC produced code up to 30% faster than GCC or MSVC.

The difference all depends on the type of application of course. Overall, you might only see a performance difference of 1-5%, but for specific parts of the application, performance increase may be anywhere between 10 to 200%.

Last, compiling yourself also means you can choose what gets compiled and what not. Which in turns reduces diskspace and memory usage of the executable and may increase security and performance a bit. For things like Kernels and such, you need to compile it yourself if you want support for specific things (ALTQ for PF under FreeBSD for instance).

Where I live (the Netherlands), below 100km/h there is a 3 km/h correction (3% correction above 100km/h), so driving 54km/h in a 50km/h zone can get you a fine. Granted, a police officer isn't likely to stop you, but driving past a speed trap (which we have a LOT of) is going to land you a ticket.

I'm using the Scarangel mod by Stulle, which has Maella bandwidth control + NAFC (network adapter feedback control). Plus, cFosSpeed trafficshaping which puts all packets of eMule.exe in the lowest class. Works like a charm, uses 99% of available bandwidth and I can still play EVE Online, login to servers with SSH or browse the web without lag.

Major problems HAVE been reported, especially with people already using their own Traffic Shaping solutions. I've never gotten v2 to work properly. Uploading fluctuates and uses only half of my upstream on average. Even though 100% of the upstream is available without congestion issues. eMule otoh has absolutely no issues using 99% of my upstream bandwidth.

"Greater good", "greater evil" and context are very relative terms and often abused to disguise acts which are just bad or evil. You mention a pretty good example, the CIA.

Impulse is good, IF you live in North America. Many (popular) titles on Impulse are US, Canada and Mexico only.

Parachutes don't work well in downdrafts, or very turbulent conditions where the risk of a parachute collapse is high. But I doubt he would have had the height and time to jump. Which is one of the reasons flying near mountains is so dangerous.

Not only that, it also means we will need to trade in some of our opinions, morals and values.

A nice example; Recently, the Dalai Lama made an unofficial visit to the Netherlands, without meeting important people like the Prime Minister and such. The reason: China would impose trade restrictions if the meeting was official or he would meet the Queen or Prime Minister. Now they only impose mild sanctions on us, such as restricting Visa for politicians.

A better example even: If you'd go to a local department store here in the Netherlands and purchase a Globe (not sure what the proper English name is; a soccerball sized globe with the world map and a lamp inside), produced in China of course (what isn't), you'll notice that some borders around China have been moved. Taiwan is no longer an independent country either, but it is part of China.

On Windows, Hibernate dumps the RAM to the disk, but it DOESN'T use swap space/virtual memory (pagefile.sys). It has its own file (hiberfil.sys).

Well, a tomato is (oversized) berry, which makes it a fruit. But it is (was?) taxed in the US a vegetable. Things are what they are, unless the government says otherwise.

And because a popular package used in games, http://www.radgametools.com/, has very good support for ogg. So there is little reason why video games shouldn't use ogg. Better, cheaper and usable.