Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students.

If you haven't been paying attention this summer -- fat people are the new terrorists. It seems a lot more plausible to me that a school is implementing a weight control plan than that they're expecting a gym teacher to diagnose cardiac abnormalities with a heart rate monitor, something a cardiologist couldn't do usefully.

Thinking this over some more, though, I'm more sympathetic to the asker's paranoia than I was at first. If school's can embrace policies of publicly weighing and humiliating children, they might well decide that the heart data might be shared in some inappropriate way, although the insurance thing seems unlikely.

Back in the olden days, we used to monitor our pulses in gym class using a finger and a clock. No, there's nothing suspicious about this, and anyone who used common equipment in gym should understand the benefit of buying your own strap instead of digging through a box to find the least sweaty one from the period before.

Last night, Evan unprotected his twitter account and Reifman began to follow him, under the disguise of a fembot.

Twitter seems as appealing to me as gluten-free pizza, so presumably a "fembot" is some Twitterism with which I'm unfamiliar, and not an actual fembot?

Don't talk to the police, or the FBI, or any authority without your lawyer.

Everyone knows that, but how many people have the number of a criminal defense attorney when they've never needed one before? Talking to the police (especially if you think your innocence is obvious) is an attractive option compared to sitting in a police station while you research lawyers or wait for Legal Aid to show up.

Of course, if I'd accidentally walked out with ultra-secret Goldman Sachs code while trying to download vi from an internal server, I'd be one of those people!

The men, who appeared to ProtesterHelp to be either Iranian or Lebanese...

I'd take that to mean that he's guessing that they were Iranian or Lebanese. There's no common element in those two ethnicities that distinguishes them from Jordanians, Syrians or what have you. You might recognize an Iranian by face, dress or (obviously) language but not "either Iranian or Lebanese".

A "blue moon" is a second full moon in a calendar month.

so if Linux can be considered directly responsible for killing Microsoft, which I think is some peoples objective, that puts their market capitalization at $400B - $153B = $247B.

I'm thinking there's more to the decline in Microsoft's market cap between the peak of the dot-com bubble and today's apocalypse than just Linux.

Sell those things for cash on the street. Don't sell in the same area that you bought the items. Stick to big cities, as the police have way more to deal with than small-time theft. Once you get a big enough stash, use it to start a cash friendly business or find a way to get it to a trusted party in the third world and do the same thing.

In other words, crime is more work with less reward than just keeping your day job writing Java middleware.

What are you talking about? He's using "e.g." perfectly correctly.

My friend had money that Obama would say "Always bet on black" for his opening speech (paid 700:1) and that he would use the word 'banana' in his speech (paid 800:1). He lost them both.

Can I propose a simpler scheme where your friend just mails me money while being a racist nitwit? As long as that's his idea of a hobby...

Now, let's get over the word "brick" and agree that its meaning is not necessarily "permanently broken" but its meaning is "non-working shiny which may or may not be reparable."

Except that you're wrong and it *does* mean "permanently broken" despite any reasonable intervention.

The main reason being, you then have an easily-scriptable commandline version, and an easily-usable GUI version.

Huh? Whether the application is scriptable has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a layout tool was used to create the GUI.

Is this even a supposedly true story? I'm not sure what we're supposed to conclude from n=1 cases of what appears to be a parable.

Among other problems with this date, the fact that there's a foot of freaking snow outside rules out a lot of worthwhile (albeit non-computer) volunteer activity...