Plus Mozilla doesn't also own Linux and isn't trying to get you to shell out another $100 for the latest and greatest Linux.

Until recently kilo = 10^3 except for one easy-to-remember exception: a kilobyte was 2^10 bytes and similar for mega. Then the marketing departments at hard drive companies decided that they could provide 5% less space by calling a MB 10^6 bytes instead of 2^20 bytes. Before then, everyone knew that a kb was 1024 bytes. Now people don't know for sure. (For example, my computer reports that I have (and is sold as having) 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive, but I'm pretty sure my RAM is actually in base 2. Is the 10MB attachment limit in base 2 or base 10? In other words, now that we've all gotten used to a kb being 1024 bytes, why are we changing it?

Would an exception saying 1kb = 2^10 bytes etc. be too complicated? Other SI rules and their exceptions: Prefixes for exponential factors greater than 0 are capitalized, except for deca, hecto, and kilo. Don't capitalize symbols for units unless the unit is named after a person, except for the liter (L).* Put spaces between the number and the symbol, except for %, degrees, arcminutes and arcseconds.*

Not to mention various ways of spelling liter/litre, country-specific abbreviations (amps), and country specific plurals (Henries), and it's ok to still use Celcius even though the SI unit is Kelvin.

*Liters, degrees, arcminutes, and arcseconds aren't really SI, and are on a separate list of non-SI units that are ok to use with SI.

I edited my display preferences so this slashdot article would appear as white text on a black background, thereby saving the photons inside my monitor for a later time.

64.0wpm should be enough for anyone.

Get a netbook with an ULV Core 2 Solo. It'll run circles around even your dual-core Atom and not use too much more power. The downside is that I think it only comes in 11.6" 'netbooks' but maybe soon it'll come in 10" netbooks.

Sure you can pick one bad thing and say to live away from it, but can you avoid everything? How many places are above sea level (and will be in thirty years), away from major fault lines, outside tornado alley, isn't a desert but doesn't get fathoms of snow, outside of West-Nile Virus / malaria areas, away from volcanoes, near to a decent job, have a decent school system, and have a reasonable cost of living? I'm sure there are more factors, but I haven't looked to buy a house yet.

Just submit it as homework.doc.txt and I'd bet he won't notice it's not a word document.

It depends on the orientation of the axis of the flywheel. If you try to place the flywheel so that the axis is horizontal, you'll end up with needing to apply a lot of torque in order to turn the vehicle left-right, making it harder to turn. If you place the flywheel so that the axis is vertical, the amount of torque necessary to flip the vehicle would go up, probably making this a safety feature for SUVs, and would have very little effect on the torque needed to turn the vehicle left-right.

The rule with (single-axis) gyroscopes is that the only axis it isn't harder to rotate the whole gyroscope around is the one around which it's already spinning; any non-parallel axis is harder.

My wife and I have a bread machine, which can be used to produce awesome HFCS-free bread. I did the math once and I think a loaf of bread costs about $0.25. I recommend it for anyone who likes too cook/bake but doesn't have the time to make bread from scratch in the oven.

I also recommend avoiding most masonry houses near major fault lines, if you can even find any.

I walked into a Starbucks, bought a Hot Chocolate and then wanted WiFi only to find out that you need to buy a Starbucks (cash) Card. Total BS; I don't want to give them $10 for WiFi after giving them my service. Why they can't just offer an hour of WiFi to someone who buys something is beyond me. If I liked coffee I'd boycott them; as it is, I'm never going into a Starbucks to try to get WiFi again. So Starbucks may not be charging for their WiFi, but it sure isn't free to anyone who isn't a regular customer.

Wait, the same NY Times which is having its readership obliterated by free news on the Internet (DNA registration required) and ad revenue plummeting is observing that people like TV shows more when technology allows them to not have to watch the ads which fund the shows?

So basically, you are saying that because it's a little bit of work for us right now, we're not going to bother and our grandkids are going to be stuck with these annoying units unless they decide to get off their lazy asses so their grandkids don't have to deal with manned missions crashing into Mars.

It's not that hard to get used to new units. The trick to remembering new units is to not convert them into the old ones but to imagine the represented quantity. Every time you think about a centimeter, practice spacing your thumb and index finger a centimeter apart and pretty soon you'll have a good idea of what a centimeter is without thinking about inches. Already Americans have a pretty good idea of how much liquid is in 2 liters because instead of converting to quarts, they think about soda in 2L bottles. As soon as the road signs on the freeways all say 105km/h people will have a good idea of what 105km/h is. Similarly when residential roads are all labeled 40mk/h. When you hear a temperature in Celcius, don't convert to Fahrenheit; 20C is comfortable, 37C is body temperature, and of course 0C is freezing and 100C is boiling.

If your application requires charging up and down electromagnets regularly, that boils helium regardless of how good your insulation is. You'd much rather be boiling nitrogen.

While they're currently expensive there are a lot of applications that just use a small amount of material (and low current and low field, which can be a downside at high Tc). For example, SQUIDs that can be cooled with LN2 instead of helium cost way less to operate and are just as good.

But adding a middle name and other information only helps if the article includes a different middle name (unlikely) and age (likely out of date).

I'd like to also mention that many job applications ask if you've ever been convicted of a felony so any competent HR person should see apparently conflicting information and research a bit further.

On a more realistic note, try contacting the newspaper and explain that you'd like them to add his middle name to the article so that when you add your middle name to your resume/CV it will be obvious if it isn't you. If they refuse, I would probably threaten to sue them for libel or contact the legal department or the "agent for service" and generally try to make it clear to them that it would be far easier to update the article with additional details differentiating you from the pedophile than to debate how the thousand-year history of defamation law applies to two people with the same name in court. Obviously consider consulting a lawyer if you're thinking about actually suing them. I'm pretty sure that if you sued the newspaper for libel it would make a pretty interesting court case because on one hand the article is defaming you and yet everything printed is (presumably) true about someone else with the same name.

PS. A good strategy to bump it down a couple of notches might have been to get a slashdot article about this above it in the search results by mentioning your real name.

Our qualifications for slashdot posting are way too slack. We let plenty of people who don't use proper grammar on the tubes.