In my experience, it's the buttons and/or the scroll wheel that die.

    OG.

Well, the windows 8 upgrade cost is announced to be $40, so it's not considerably more.

And yes, $29.99 is upgrade since you're only allowed to use it on mac hardware, and such hardware is always sold with a copy of osx.

    OG.

Errr, Europe has the same non-interference/resistance to interference laws that the US have.

    OG.

Wow, and here in France for $27/month we get unlimited voice, unlimited text and 3Gb of data. And you can stop whenever you want without cost. You guys are really getting fucked sideways.

    OG.

That's what the appeal process and supreme courts are for. There's only one supreme court per state (for state issues) and one federal supreme court so that the final saying is, well, final and non-contradictory.

    OG.

That's where it can get interesting... Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, a *way* more efficient one than CO2. If they manage to reduce the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, that is going to reduce the greenhouse effect.

Interesting, 'innit ?

    OG.

No it isn't. A full reproduction can be fair use. What you do with it is a large part of the definition.

    OG.

That's incorrect. The first ariane 5 exploded because of correct, reused ariane 4 code becoming incorrect in the new environment. More specifically steering code which results are used at the start of the flight and unused but left running afterwards. The code was still correct in start-of-flight conditions, but in the afterwards condition noticed speeds way over what it was supposed to see and triggered a security abort (ariane 5 is a tad faster than ariane 4).

So no sign errors, no feedback, just correct code running at a time it shouldn't have and untested there.

    OG.

The differences are going to come from the memory management, i/o paths, disk i/o speed/scheduling, etc. Which is what the kernel is about, after all.

Too bad Hurd is still so limited that you can't really run it on real hardware, otherwise the benchmark differences would probably be much worse...

    OG.

That's called "Alien vs. Predator".

    OG.

One of the numerous problems with hydrogen is that you need very high pressures to store any decent amount of it in a container. And anything at very high pressure has the protential to be extremely dangerous. So more dangerous in handling stored than natural gas. As a transfer medium or as buoyancy though, I agree.

    OG.

I even happen to know that. Sleep, I need more of.

    OG.

Out of the $20, there's approximatively $6-8 for the library (amazon being the worst there, they want $10 iirc), $3-4 for printing, $2-4 for shipping and the distributor if there is one (and in NG's case, I'm sure there is). So that's $4-9 left, i.e. $2-7 for the publisher (and closer to $2 than to $7). The publisher is definitively not ripping him off.

    OG.

That's because the high-end server world accepts level of single-core performance the consumer world doesn't. These processors are not something you want on your PC. You want something with better memory management, way faster I/O with ram and GPU, etc. OTOH, you usually don't care about multi-processor.

But faster I/O usually means putting more things on the die (hence amd's integrated memory controllers, now followed by Intel) and having larger busses/more efficient protocols, and acting on that means changing the socket. And the north bridge, if one is left. And the memory, for a faster one. You wouldn't get enough speedup from changing the cpu alone with everything else pin-compatible to make it worth it.

Meanwhile, the itanic spends its time waiting for the ram to answer... but since you put a lot of them in the box, in aggregate they can be useful.

    OG.

Niiiiiiice. $19 trillions just for the wind turbines (around 5M each), $100 trillions for the rooftop PV systems (around 60K each), but there is no economic issue. Right.

Only $135 billions for the dams (around 500M each)... if you can find 270 new places in where to put them...

    OG.