I haven't delved deeply either, but I've had cause and occasion to casually study the code. Compared to some things I've seen, it certainly screams Legacy Cruft in a few places, but by no means does it reek of unmaintainability.

Hah! I measure accuracy in milli-arcseconds.

With a gas-powered car, you can drive to the next town or next state and fill up. Maybe even the next street if the gas station has backup generators. If the "gas" station relies on the same grid, you're up the creek in a really bad way that you aren't right now.

I can see the logic behind shortening the length of the wire carrying 'clean' power and getting it away from all the other components (read: noise sources) on the motherboard. It also takes the thinking burden away from the chip integrator and motherboard designer (which is a non-negligible bonus for both marketing and engineering).

First-ish vote/post and I'm at 40 msec. Shouldn't the first vote have come from the 1 msec crowd?

It's still funny today, when Java is slower than C, C++, Fortran, and pretty much any other fully compiled language.

Yeah...watching porn on what's 9 times out of 10 a company-provided phone seems...unlikely.

Or, you know, try to escape to Japanese disneyland like his brother did...

To my semi-trained eye, it looks like if you stare at the data long enough, you can convince yourself there's an upward trend in temps, you stare at it a little longer, you can convince yourself that there's some longish timescale periodicity too, all within the error bars. Looks like a bunch of noise to me, and I look for weak signals in noise for a living, so I do know what I'm talking about to a certain extent. That said, I do remember people predicting about 10 years ago that melted ice caps can act as a negative feedback mechanism for high latitude temperatures, and thus, global warming->longer/colder winters at high latitudes.

when you pry it from my cold, dead, fingers!

Probably a good half or more of "good" high schools just plain ignore programming and CS, and the people who pass the Google interviews learned most of what they know in college, whether from lectures or from working through it while doing homework and projects.

The JPL-built Mars rovers run VxWorks, as do some other NASA probes. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.

I take pride in being mean to freeloaders.

Microsoft is still dealing with the fact that their flagship products throughout the 1990's are almost universally associated with crashes, poor performance, and overhyped marketing. It bit them with the Zune, and now it's biting them with the phones. You know why XBox is so big? It doesn't have the word 'Windows' or 'Microsoft' in its name, and it had (still has?) its own business unit with its own management structure not tied to Windows.

Because those 33m were stolen from the people on the street. Childish tribal mentality: I have something and you don't, therefore I owe you a cut, just because.