It's hard to understand because..

a) most people probably have little understanding of military awards outside of hollywood and might be forgiven for thinking they are all given for combat

b) most managers, whether in the military or not, seem woefully clueless about the impact of cumbersome poorly designed systems and the payback on well designed ones (or well designed hacks running on top of the poor system) So that someone even noticed he was more productive, didn't freak out because he did something different, didn't freak out because the different thing involved "programming" *AND* gave him a medal... seems pretty remarkable.

If you don't think the US should sell oil to foreign markets, why do you think Canadians should? Or Saudi Arabia for that matter?

I agree with this 100% but I hope everyone realizes that with no ability to force customers to stick around, there will be a dramatically reduced incentive for carriers to offer subsidies on fancy phones. I think this is fine but I wonder if there will be an uproar when $600 iPhones cost $600 instead of $200 + contract and/or lock.

This is a problem of expectations, not economics.

Nobody needs a new car every 3 years, nobody needs 1/4 acre and nobody needs 4 bedrooms unless you have about 12 children, which no one on LI has.

Adjust your expectations and I suspect you could live well on 65k, even on LI.

Boric acid is to stop the reaction, there is no indication the nuclear reaction is still ongoing. The issue is residual decay heat can be many megawatts and needs to be dissipated. If they can't dissipate it, mother nature will take of that but the results will not be pretty (molten core, possibly breaching reactor vessel, etc etc)

They generally have a backup inertial navigation system to fall back on if GPS is unavailable.

Parking spots in most cities in the world are scarce because they are priced well below what they are worth. By letting demand set the price (i.e. raise it dramatically) you deal with several problems all in one fell swoop:
- parking unavailability
- people polluting the air and causing congestion endlessly circling for a cheap/free spot
- enforcement of time limits currently in place for free spots
- using space age technology to detect free spaces

The tech sounds neat but it's just over-complicating an already over-complicated situation.

Telco's have no interest in selling new hardware except as a means to attract new subscribers. Most smartphones sold in North America are heavily subsidized by the carrier, meaning they *lose* money every time they "sell" a new phone. The only people in North American telcos who will be upset at the loss of the upgrade imperative will be their marketing department - they'll lose their easiest grab on people's attention.

Seriously?

With this logic, you would be against any sort of more efficient process ever developed.

ok so it's not the car crash evolving but it works out the same:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_homeostasis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

uh...

revenue from 1000 barrels of oil they are collecting with their "straw" = $70,000/day

Cost to BP in the last 30 days for cleanup, drilling, etc = $33 million/day (http://blogs.wsj.com/source/2010/05/13/bp-cause-and-effect/)

Cost to BP if they don't get this sorted ASAP and scenes of oil slicked beaches up the eastern seaboard galvanize support to ban offshore drilling = priceless

I'm sorry but the idea that the "straw" is any sort of attempt to goose revenue from this situation is ludicrous.

As poster said, this hole is toast and everyone knows that. It cannot be rehabilitated or repaired.

I can assure you that 99.9999% of Windows users have no idea what Control or Alt are for, or that you can accomplish anything at all without a death grip on the mouse.

too bad he was wrong about the sunscreen.

99.99 % of the people on the internet:
- do not read /.
- have no idea what end-to-end connectivity means
- have no idea they don't have it with ipv4