Everyone should really check the lifetime maxium on their insurance

Soon, though, you won't have to worry about it. One of the major provisions of PPACA (that's Obamacare to haters) is the elimination of lifetime caps on coverage.

In which case the category that's likely to be your largest expense is "taxes". That's not to say that the health care situation* in the USA is worth emulating. We would probably spend a lot less to get equal or better care if we had a centralized, government managed system, but that would still have to be paid for by taxes.

*I refuse to call the way we handle healthcare in the USA a system. We don't have a healthcare system here, we have a whole bunch of overlapping ways of providing care and payment that grew up over the past hundred plus years with no system at all. That lack of a system is both cost inefficient and lets people fall through the cracks.

Building a house isn't a one-time endeavor. Much like code, houses are never 100% finished. They're frequently repaired and less frequently remodeled, renovated, or expanded. If you look at photographs of the same house over the span of a century or more, it's sometimes hard to believe that the final version is the same building as the original. And when people work on their houses, they usually go for the most cost effective approach, even if that means leaving no longer used stuff in place because it would be more expensive to rip it out. Look inside the wall of an old house, and you'll be amazed at the stuff you find.

I'm pretty sure that they don't want to automate it. One of the first things Libre Office did after they forked from OO.o was to come up with a list of "easy hacks" for people who wanted to get involved but didn't know where to start. That includes stuff like dead code removal and translating comments from German to English. By leaving that stuff marked out but undone, they hope to ease new people into the project. That may not be the most efficient way of doing this kind of thing, but if it helps to recruit new developers it will do a lot more for the project in the long run than just getting rid of the cruft. It's a big difference between a project run by paid coders on a tight budget and one that depends on a variable number of volunteers.

Most people are a bit imprecise about the use of "lunar" when talking about calendars and use it to include lunisolar calendars. That's because almost all real-world calendars are intended to be used for agriculture and have to take the seasons into account. The Islamic calendar is a real oddball for not taking them into account.

Cities depend on farms, the reverse is not true.

Farms don't depend on cities only if they're willing to fall back to the level of subsistence agriculture. Modern agriculture is completely dependent on manufactured items that are made in big cities. That's where the trucks, tractors, combines, and other heavy equipment is made. That's where the fuel that heavy equipment needs to run is refined. That's where the fertilizer the crops need to grow is produced. That's where the thousands of common household items, including processed foods, that farmers depend on to make their lives livable are made.

According to the article, this is about employees with unvested shares. That means they don't actually own the shares yet; they're only promised the shares if they meet certain conditions, usually continued employment. If they're at will employees, Zynga has the right to fire them at any time for any reason, including firing them to keep their options from vesting. That may be sleazy and underhanded, and it's likely to cause them serious loss of reputation (more of a problem for the VCs, who will have to deal with other startups, than Zynga), but it's technically legal. Demanding the return of the options is just giving the employees a choice: get fired and lose your options because they haven't vested or keep your job and give up your options as the price of continued employment. Again, it's sleazy enough to make pond scum resent your comparison to Zynga management, but it's probably legal.

That may be Microsoft's plan, but it's a real loser for expensive specialty software. At my work, we have plenty of technical apps that cost more than the Windows machine they're running on, even though they require fairly hefty hardware. There's no way a company writing a $10K app is going to be willing to hand over $3K to Microsoft to get it on their appstore. They'd rather port to another, more open platform. Stealing those kinds of apps away from Unix workstations was a big win for Microsoft 10-20 years ago. It will be an equally big loss if they drive them back to Unix/Linux in an attempt to cash in as a gatekeeper.

And that's not the only big loss. Many larger businesses have their own custom apps and packages that they've written in-house and depend on to keep their companies running. Making Windows depend exclusively on something like the appstore to install software will kill that market and push Windows out of big business. Unless there's some kind of Windows for Business solution that lets you set up your own software sources, Microsoft will be killing the golden goose.

The Turing test, as originally proposed, wasn't just a test of casual conversation. It was supposed to involve skeptical questioners doing their very best to separate human from AI, with no limit on conversational topic. The hypothetical questions in Turing's original paper included ones about math, chess problems, and poetry. If you held a Turing test under the original rules, with a reward for testers who successfully told human from AI (and for humans who successfully proved their humanity) you would find that no AI would get anywhere close to success. Because everybody knows that, public tests like this one have repeatedly watered down the original concept to make things more interesting. But that just proves how far AI has to come, not that it's getting close to succeeding.

It isn't just the OS that makes the system open or closed; how easily you can do other things is very important. Apple has a much more tightly locked down application environment. Getting an app into the iOS Appstore is much tougher than getting it into the Android Marketplace, and installing unapproved apps is much easier under Android. From a user standpoint, having access to outside apps by setting a single checkbox contributes more to real openness than being able to replace the OS.