Yeah, agreed. I migrated three times ever: DOS to Windows in '95 (pre-Win95 doesn't count as an OS), Windows to Linux in the late 90s, and Linux to OSX almost 10 years ago. How many times exactly is someone expected to do the same migration??

Oh to have mod points... come on someone, read this one and think about it!

Do you need scrollbars eating screen real estate when they aren't needed or you aren't scrolling? They appear when you scroll if you need them, just scroll a tiny bit and poof, there they are ... and they get larger if you hover near them so they are easier to hit. What EXACTLY is your complaint?

You're the first person I've heard who doesn't think this is the most vile thing ever done to their OS. Yes, you do. They provide information - where are you in a document. I don't want to need to change where I am in a document to find that out.

To any of you who think this is cool science and want to make sure more of it gets done: The GBT is under very severe threat of shutting down. In the recent NSF Portfolio Review, it was recommended that given the "current" funding situation (this was last year), the NSF divest itself of certain observatories including Green Bank. That means the telescope will shut down, unless a private consortium (i.e. of universities) can scrape together enough money to take it over.

Note also that the "current" funding situation referred to was even before the sequester, so the chances of getting the NSF to change their minds have dropped significantly - there is just not enough money in the budget. But please lobby your congressional representatives to restore funding for basic research if you think this is important!

If prepay is setup to do a la carte on the plans, then why does AT&T require a data plan for smartphones *even on prepay plans*? I don't have a cell phone right now because AT&T is the only carrier that has decent coverage at home, I only make about 2-3 calls a month so a monthly plan would obviously be ludicrous, but I want a smartphone to use wifi, which is available most everywhere I spend time.

The problem is that a lot of his uncertainty comes from systematics, not statistical error. If it was pure statistical error, then you could definitely do that based on 3 elections, but he was either going to get essentially every state right (if the systematics were small) or every state wrong by about the same amount (if they weren't).

Oh my, that brings back memories... thank you. Or maybe damn you. I'm not sure.

I suspect that Apple is not legally allowed to own record companies, as part of the settlement with Apple Records.

Scientists should always, always use metric.

Real scientist here... astronomer, actually. And while we often use metric, and we never ever use Imperial units, we do often use units that are the natural scale. Mass is usually in solar masses; length can be in Astronomical Units (=the radius of the Earth's orbit around the sun), parsecs, or solar radii; power is in solar luminosities. And there's a good reason - knowing that a mass-to-light ratio is 2 M_sun / L_sun tells you a lot more than knowing that it is 10000 kg / Watt.

[TMB]

I get direct transmission into the aural receptors of my brain, you insensitive clod!

What are these texts of which you speak? ;-)

(seriously, I really don't understand the point. Why text instead of send an email, which doesn't have a character limit???)

Yes it is. It's not that modern medicine doesn't make mistakes, it's that it learns from them. If a treatment is demonstrated repeatedly to do no better than a placebo, or even worse to do harm, it stops being used. Homeopathy says that if it doesn't work for you, you're doing it wrong.