Everybody knows cruise ships lose half their value when you drive them off the lot.

The same soldiers who followed an illegal order into Iraq? The same soldiers who follow illegal orders to abduct, torture, and hold without charge people, including American citizens? The same soldiers who follow illegal orders to execute anyone declared an unlawful combatant? Need I go on?

That's my problem with it. I have a previous generation Momentus XT 500GB, and you described what I want it to do. Sure, it's great that the cache learns what you're doing, but I rarely do the same thing repetitively. Some days I'm running VMs, some days I'm working on video, some days I'm just messing around on the web. If I could tweak to say "optimize for boot time" or "optimize for application loading" and tell it what to keep in the cache, that would be great.

If we could look at it like a traditional HD with a small, dedicated SSD, that would be ideal. Just let me tell it what to put on the SSD and leave it alone.

I think that's kind of the point. Eight million people were affected by 9/11. What possible sort of disaster, natural or otherwise, could necessitate notifying everyone from Alaska to Hawaii, California, Texas, Florida, Maine and Minnesota? I can see maybe a huge earthquake needing notification of the entire West Coast, but at that scale, what are the odds that the radio station towers will still be operational?

Or, take the Republican standpoint: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

They could take a lesson from IKEA and ship the parts to build the car to the U.S. It would be one hell of a big box, though.

Microsoft introduces the Start Menu Ribbon!

That would be a useful addition to the Tom's test: cross-platform performance (although adding the test suite to Windows 7/Vista/XP/OS X/Ubuntu would make the test much bigger).

Anecdote: I just updated to Firefox 7 this morning and already had a page that didn't load correctly. I don't recall that ever happening with Firefox 6.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/

Most of the current global land ice mass is located in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (table 1). Complete melting of these ice sheets could lead to a sea-level rise of about 80 meters, whereas melting of all other glaciers could lead to a sea-level rise of only one-half meter.

So a 15% melting should show a 12m rise in ocean level.

http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/article/2009/climate-change-sea-level

Measurements gathered by tide gauges through the 20th century show that global sea level rose at an average rate of 1.7 mm per year – this translates to about two-thirds of an inch per decade. Satellite altimeter data gathered from 1993 to 2003 indicate that the rate of global average sea level rise increased to 3.1 mm per year, or about one and a quarter inches per decade.

There has been an 18 cm rise since 1900, and the rate of rise is increasing.

I expect it to be staffed by Homer Simpson.

Homer: [reading screen] "To Start Press Any Key". Where's the ANY key?
                I see Esk ["ESC"], Catarl ["CTRL"], and Pig-Up ["PGUP"]. There
                doesn't seem to be any ANY key. Woo! All this computer hacking
                is making me thirsty. I think I'll order a TAB. [presses TAB
                key] Awp...no time for that now, the computer's starting.
                  [reading screen slowly] "Check core temperature, yes slash no."
                [types] Yes.
                "Core temperature normal." Hmph. Not too shabby.
                "Vent radioactive gas." [types] NO.
                "Venting prevents explosi-on." Heeheee...whoa, this is hard.
                Where's my Tab? Okay, then, [types] YES, vent the stupid gas.
                  [Cut to a farmer tending his corn. The gas release blows away
                part of the crop.]
Farmer: Oh, no! The corn. Paul Newman's gonna have my legs broke.