When you accept work that requires government clearance, you are subject to a number of rules regarding the export of technology and know-how that is of importance to National Security. You're probably told repeatedly about such things. Sorry, I don't want the Iranians making their own UAVs off our designs. Guy's an idiot for taking sensitive material overseas in his laptop in the first place. Military and Defense technology isn't something we should be "open" about when there's real regimes out there who don't believe in the same freedoms and basic human rights we take for granted. Crap like this is why we the Russians got the bomb, why the North Koreans have the bomb, etc... Why would you be in favor of these places that don't prize freedom or equality getting their hands on this stuff?

Passwords and security experts are the last things making the Internet frustrating and difficult to use for a lot of people. Both are a waste of everyone's valuable time and someone could make a lot of money by finding a reliable way to get rid of them. Having to have 27 different passwords to get to one's email means that people frequently have to ask the support people to reset passwords, unlock accounts, etc. because they can't remember how many X's they added on to the end of their 14 letter password that doesn't contain any dictionary words this month.

There's how many people in India? Over a billion? Maybe it should just redirect to "Did you mean to search for Birth Control?"

Sounds like someone should've figured that out before they bought something they expected support for off ebay.

What a whiner. Take it up with the seller and ebay.

You should not define your job by the tool you are using to do it. The fact that you use HTML is meaningless; you are a web front end designer who has experience using HTML, and whose job requires him to use HTML.

People who use telescopes are not "telescopists", we call them "astronomers" because of what they are doing with their tool, not the fact that they are using that tool. You are designing the look of web pages, and happen to be using HTML to do it.

If Sun were a good company, they wouldn't shopping around for buyers and their stock wouldn't have lost 99% of its value in the last decade.

There are good companies and companies that make good things. IBM is a good company -- one that makes money and provides good services. Sun is a company that makes some good products, but if all you have is that, a CEO with a pony tail, and no money in the bank, then are you really a "good" company? If anything, employees at Sun should be pissed that their company failed to do a better job of making money off their great products and services.

I went to Supercomputing '08 in Austin. Sun's booth had a custom motorcycle in coffee brown with the Netbeans logo on it, and a magician doing card tricks. IBM's booth was very boring -- it only had salesmen and spec sheets. That seems to represent a lot of the difference between these two companies.

That statement is actually pretty logically accurate. Part of it was inconsequential and part was left out or implied.

2) He believes the Bible.

Add: 3) The Bible states "God created the heavens and the earth."

Therefore, by 2 and 3, he believes that God created the heavens and the earth.

Please Google "logical inference" to see how this works, and stop being a dick to random people on the Internet.

Texas was an independent nation when it was annexed by the United States. Texans had already fought and won their independence from Mexico. The United States did not provide any overt help to the Texans in their War for Independence; many Americans did come to join the cause of Freedom in Texas, however. It is still an open question as to whether the annexation of Texas was a constitutional act.

The United States then went to war with Mexico because the Mexicans believed that the border with Texas was a few hundred miles North of where the border actually was based on the treaty that ended the Texas War for Independence, and kept crossing over it. The United States kicked the hell out of Mexico and took everything from Texas out to the Pacific.

You might be thinking of how Cuba became a United States territory. We were pissed at the Spanish and one of our ships mysteriously blew up just off the Cuban coast. So we went to war with Spain and took Cuba, the Phillipines, and a lot of other oceanic territory from them. We gave both of those nations back their sovereignty in fairly short order.

This is dumb. They created an open platform for people to develop on and which allows for their users to *voluntarily* get that code and use it to make their game experience better. And while Blizzard can change that platform however they'd like, they should not be able to control the content of what their users voluntarily download and use.

If someone wants to make a Quest Helper add-on that doesn't ask for donations, I'm sure they're more than free to do so.

The problem here is that Blizzard is expecting high quality work for free, and won't even let the people who create that work remind people that it continues to be supported and enhanced for free, and request help to continue their work. Past a certain point, Blizzard may want to consider assisting these developers because they add significant value to the game.

Many patients want a test to be done to ease their mind about it, or a pill they can take that will make it better. Even a placebo effect is better than nothing. People don't just wander into doctor's offices - some physical condition prompts them to go, and they expect the doctor to "fix it".

A good practitioner of evidence-based medicine would probably need to present their patient with the same data they are using to make their decision not to treat in a more condensed and easy to understand form. When you go against expectations, it's important to have a rationale can be understood to back up your response. Otherwise it almost sounds like you're lazy and just don't want to do "your job", which is to "fix it".

Uh..the PS3 consumes more power when idle than active? Is there an explanation for that somewhere?

If we're talking efficiency, it's better to talk about something like FLOPS/Watt. The Wii certainly uses less power, but how efficiently is it using that power to deliver compute performance?

The Wii supposedly has 2.9 GFLOPS of processing, the 360 has 115, and the PS3 has 218. With that in mind, the processing efficiency of each is:

Wii - 0.18 GFLOP / Watt
360 - 0.97 GFLOP / Watt
PS3 - 1.45 GFLOP / Watt


(from http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37621/128/, May 2008)

That would mean that the PS3 has the best compute bang for your energy buck. (8x the Wii's GFLOP/Watt)

The Wii really isn't in the same compute class as the other two, which doesn't mean it can't be a lot of fun, but the SNES and PS1 were a lot of fun too. I don't think anyone should be lauding Nintendo for their efficiency here when most of it is due to their tiny CPU.

The top green supercomputers all use Cell processors, so I'd assume the power / FLOP is pretty darn good.