Just you hope Oracle maintains the batteries properly, especially since an emergency save-to-disk is going to take more than a few minutes...

Of course, depending on when it was bought it may have come with all of the "animal books" about Perl on CD with it (mine did anyway). And, your local library may have a Safari subscription - mine does. No need for paper in the majority of cases. As a teacher its great because I can assign just a few great chapters from various books and not cost the student $250 in books for a 3 credit class.

9 to 10 per week? Beer guts are usually associated with people who drink 9-10 beers a day or more. I got mine years ago when I generally drank a 12 pack a day.

Wow, I don't know if I could survive that for more than 3 days. The most I ever drank on a regular basis was maybe 3 large strong beers and a quarter bottle of scotch a day, and I couldn't stand that for too long without gaining a ton of weight very quickly.

What gives you the idea that I'm not already older? :)

Hint: I was in my late 20s when I registered on /. You have my UID number, work it out.

This. my BMI is 21, I exercise a lot, my belly is flat as a pancake, yet I drink at least 9 or 10 brown Belgian trappist beers per week (and those are loaded with alcohol at over 10 percent). I've been doing it for years too.

I know you're being sarcastic, but it's not just nuclear power plants that generate revenues. Where I live, there's a large wind farm that pays millions a year through council and business taxes: they make my small sleepy town mega-rich and pose zero threat to the environment, save for a few birds that think they can fly through the spinning blades now and then.

linode.com does month to month, prorates per day. disclaimer - very long time customer, very happy.

Yes, that's the conventional wisdom with open-source. But tell me: when was the last time you went inspect the code deep in the kernel? How many open-source code users do you think have the time, desire and ability - and probably paranoia - to go and inspect the code in *any* open-source project of reasonable size, let alone something as complex as the kernel?

I don't think someone could slip funny code in the main kernel tree - too many specialists reviewing the patches - but I'm convinced that if Canonical, SuSE or RH wanted to distribute a tainted kernel, they could do it undetected for a very long time, if not indefinitely.

And now that the panic is over, you can get one brand new for your $700 price point....

I may for things as much as I can in CASH. Cash is anonymous and won't snitch on you.

All sorts of great computing technology available to them... including up to 386 CPUs. Dialup existed then as well (BBS, etc) so intertoob access is still possible.

Pharma companies make boatloads of money selling lifelong drugs to HIV sufferers. The last thing they want is a cure that'd kill the cash cow. Same reason why people with total kidney failure still can't benefit from artificial kidneys (too much money in dialysis machines, ambulance trips, special vacation packages... And no, kidney transplants don't kill the cash cow - patients are still on drugs for the rest of their lives) and why people diabetes still can't get artificial pancreata (too much money in insulin, needles...)

So there is really such a big difference between one big balloon and lots of small balloons containing the same volume of helium?

The former takes just one BB gun pellet to bring down.

So this guys is wasting one of humankind's most precious resource on a useless stunt to promote his company. That's real slick, that.

Note to self: never do business with Accenture.

Yes, but allowing it and taxing the hell out of it would bring some of that money back into the government's pocket - or see it another way, the financial sumbitches that are bleeding most countries' economies white without any remorse today would have to start paying back some.

If a tax is levied on the speed of trading, at some point an equilibrium would be reached at which traders would consider the level of taxation acceptable: they wouldn't stop speed-trading, just doing it at a speed/cost that they're willing to bear. Better to collect money that way than to ban the activity altogether and collect no money at all.