What do you do about the microphone?

This struck me as odd, seeing as the Brits seem to venerate German engineering, so I went digging. All the sites I read said that it pre-dates WW1 and has nothing to do with Germans.

Do you have a reference which says otherwise?

If the author is surprised (by the grades, not the security), it is because he has never been a teacher.

1. Teachers have to ensure that their class marks have a certain average and median before they submit them. There can't be too many failures either.

2. Teachers know not to give a grade of 49 if the pass is 50 since the student will argue to get that missing point. If you want to be safer, just don't give out anything in the forties.

3. If a test gives letter grades, that equates to a particular number. A = 85, A- = 83, and so on. In that case, no one gets an 84, ever.

My favourite FTL power source is bad news, from Mostly Harmless:

Giampaolo Giuliani is not a seismologist. He is a retired lab technician who used an unapproved radon gas test as the foundation for his predictions.

our growth is almost entirely based on the use of oil [...]

Cheap energy and exploitation of the new world's crops (esp corn) seem largely responsible for the "recent" population explosion. Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is well worth reading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed

Sharing implies that you split something rather than duplicate it!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the matter.

No, I wouldn't. America is geography so the concept of "un-American" applying to a person's behaviour is incoherent. I suppose my 'u' in behaviour gives away that I am "un-American". :-) I wasn't singling you out for using the term; my hackles raise every time I encounter it and yours happened to be the post in front of me when I decided to speak out. As for the choice? Gov'ts are ephemeral and can only form from principles (for good or ill), so I would think that basing one's decision on principles would be more productive.

A) This stuff should never have been secret, and anyone who would hide it is un-American or B) These secrets are property of the government, and anyone who would divulge them is un-American

The term "un-American" should only be used ironically or to recall the dark times of Joe McCarthy. There's not really any such thing as "American" in this sense. If there is, then it is antithetical to the notion of freedom. The fact that it sees such wide spread use is disturbing to me. This is not the vocabulary of a free country.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization."

A 3TB USB2 drive is like sticking a slim straw into a McDonald's milkshake.

He's obviously not talking about the total costs to society, so put your straw man away (and take something for your blood pressure... if you can afford it).

It needs only 160 milliseconds to latch on to the body shape of a new user stepping in front of it.

I think I dated Natal once.

One of the main things which excites me about this dungeon finder is that it'll make finding groups for lower lvl instances much easier 'cause you'll be drawing from a large pool.

There were many hijackings in that period. "Take this plane to Cuba" ring any bells? It's a cliche for a reason. The only thing new with 9/11 was the hijacker's use of the plane as a weapon. And, now that we're aware of this tactic, it very likely won't happen again.