And of course, you can't go near a tropical fish tank without hearing some parent saying "Look! It's Nemo!"

I was at the smithsonian recently, and saw off in the distance a tropical fish display. I bet the person with me that if we went over there we would hear a parent say "Look! Nemo!" within 15 seconds. It only took 4.

Technically, the company does exist. Nuvomedia, the maker of the Rocket, was purchased by Gemstar, who merged with TV Guide to become Gemstar TV Guide, who then merged with Macrovision Corp to become Macrovision Solutions Corp, and finally, just this past month, changed its name to Rovi Corp ( http://www.rovicorp.com/ ).

Sprint DOES prorate the ETF for all contracts signed after November 2008. However, there is still a minimum of $50, so your ETF after 18 months would be $87.50

See http://nextelonline.nextel.com/en/services/termination_fee/early_termination_fee.shtml

The added factor in the second case is that a couple with two daughters has twice as many opportunities to name a daughter "Mary" as a couple with only one daughter does.

The reason there is a greater chance in the Mary case, as opposed to the girl case, is that a family with two girls is twice as likely to name a child Mary as a family with only one girl (since they have two opportunities to name a child Mary instead of one).

In the first case, if we choose 1000 couples, on average we get:
250 with Boy/Boy
250 with Boy/Girl
250 with Girl/Boy
250 with Girl/Girl

Since we can eliminate the 250 Boy-Boy couples, the odds of Girl-Girl are 250/750 or ~33%

In the second case, lets assume that 10% of girls get named Mary. In this case we have:
250 Boy/Boy, of which 0 are Mary/NotMary and 0 are NotMary/Mary
250 Boy/Girl, of which 0 are Mary/NotMary and 25 are NotMary/Mary
250 Girl/Boy, of which 25 are Mary/NotMary and 0 are NotMary/Mary
250 Girl/Girl, of which 25 are Mary/NotMary and 25 are NotMary/Mary

Therefore, the odds of a Girl/Girl couple having a Mary is 50/100, or 50%

It's not Penske vs. U-HAUL, it's anyone vs U-HAUL. The last few U-HAUL trucks I've been in have had between 300,000 and 400,000 miles on them, and they were just cut-down pickup trucks with a box crudely welded on (they even still had the rear-view mirror on the windshield, pointing at nothing). The AC didn't work in any of them, and the shocks were long, long gone. However, when I've rented from Penske or Budget, I've gotten purpose-built trucks with under 30,000 miles that were clean, in great condition, had working AC and radio, and drove as well as the average van would. The guy at Penske told me that like most rental car companies they sell their rental trucks once they reach 36,000 miles, so their stuff is always in good condition.

I was just going to post that. Assuming power consumption/light output is linear, a 1.75 increase in luminosity is equivalent to a 42.9% reduction in power since (1.75-1)/1.75 = .429

On further study, it NSS DOES use process IDs and many, many other factors to generate the seeds. Searching the additional file locations ("C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\History", "C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files", "C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\My Recent Documents", "C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Temp\", "Recycle Bin", and "Network Neighborhood") were added because some older OSs (Win2k and WinCE) didn't have strong enough build-in pseudo-random number generators.

This patch changed NSS to use the built-in PRNG in Windows XP and up which uses "process ID and thread ID, the system clock, the system time, the system counter, memory status, free disk clusters, andthe hashed user environment block".

NSS (Network Security Services) 3.12.3 is using IE temporary internet files to generate seeds. Sounds thoroughly stupid to me, as it means that if you never use Internet Explorer, your cryptographic seeds won't change. How about using the process list or something not Hard Drive dependent to generate the seeds instead?

Because of the way that JPEG compresses images, file size is directly proportionate to quality. Therefore, bigger file size = better quality.

The word you are looking for is an "initialism", which is like an acronym that you pronounce as individual letters.

However, I'm not sure about ones like JPEG or MSDOS that are part initialism and part acronym.

You also have ones like SQL which some people treat as an initialism (S-Q-L) and others as an acronym (sequal).

Finally, you have ones like AAA, IEEE, or NAACP which are neither pronounced as a word or as the individual letters (triple-A, I-triple-E, N-double-A-C-P, etc.).

How about we just call them all acronyms and get over it. Do we really need single words to describe each case?