Here are some additional details for those of you so inclined.

Consider a simple binary choice question. This is easily modelled by the binomial distribution which has well understood distributions. (Other distrbutions may be relevant but the principles remain pretty constant across them all.) The standard deviation is given by sqrt[np(1-p)] where n is the sample size and p is the probability of the observation you are interested in (the mean is np so in what follows I will be dividing by n to talk about percentages if you are taking notes). For example, are you male? If the true p is, say, 75% then you need a sample size of approximately 833 to get a 95% confidence interval (2 s.d.) of +/- 3%.

You might also note that the closer the true p is to 50%, the larger the sample size needed. If the true p is 50% you need a sample size of approximately 1100 for the same confidence interval. Furthermore, if you want to get it within 1%, the sample size goes up dramatically - to 10,000.

The population size is pretty much irrelevant. The population matters for ensuring that your sampling is truly random, but political pollsters can use the same sample sizes in Australia (pop ~20 million) as in the US (pop ~300 million) for similar accuracy. (Sampling bias is the reason that political polls can be out by so much - if you call households during work hours you are going to get a very different sample of people than if you call at dinner time.)

Because they didn't accept foreign drivers licenses and insisted on passports from foreigners. They had a book of all US state licenses and wouldn't accept anything not in the book (because it could be a forgery and they'd never know). Some bars also rejected the Massachusetts official non-drivers license IDs for some bizarre reason. Some bars accepted foreign licenses some of the time (depending on whether they had been busted in the past 3 months or not), so it was kind of a crap shoot. And it is no fun to go out for a drink with friends and have to sit there watching them drink while you sip on a Coke.

I spent a number of years in Boston as an Australian.

The only time it was necessary to carry a passport was when I wanted to have a drink at a bar. They card everyone. Unfortunately, carrying your passport and getting drunk are not circumstances that generally lead to a happy conclusion.

No. Apple displays competitive behaviour. 'Comptition' is pretty cut-throat and there is never any love lost between competitiors. Such behaviour only becomes 'anti-competitive' (i.e. contrary to the Sherman Act or similar) when you have a monopoly. For example, a new startup wants to get their product out there so they give away free samples; fine if you are a startup with no market power, but not if you are a monopoly who is thereby foreclosing competition.

Apple also displays control-freak behaviour. Being a control freak and being a monopolist are two very distinct things. Not all control-freaks are monopolists and not all monopolists are control freaks.

Now you come to mention it...

One of the cool things I liked about the Apple ][+ was that the text screen was mapped directly from memory. My first assembly language program was written to count to 1,000,000 on screen as fast as possible - it was a big loop with an INC in the centre. It took about 6 seconds to complete because you were just changing memory locations. Writing characters to the screen was magic.

PRINT "HELLO WORLD"; just didn't have the same amazement to it.

And these days... I'm older and busier and don't tinker in the same way and wonder how much someone can grok a computer when you are doing the equivalent of saying PRINT "HELLO WORLD" by calling some pre-written routine to generate onscreen content.

Peer review and the journal acceptance procedures do not check this. Peer review is merely a sanity check. Papers in climatology journals are not rejected because you don't provide enough detail to reproduce the result - referees don't check this. Furthermore, some climatological journals do not believe it is their job to require data archiving either before or after the fact of publication. See here, here, and here.

The policies for journals should be as good as they are at the American Economic Association: Data Availability Policy. Anything less is inadequate.

It is standard practice in Economics and Econometrics journals to require just this. This practice was instigated by the non-profit academic societies journals. See: http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/submissions.html

9. All data used in analysis must be clearly and precisely documented.
10. All data used in analysis must be made available to any researcher for purposes of replication. See Data Availability Policy.

If they can do it, I don't see why others can't.

(Don't cry for Elsevier - they make huge amounts of money from libraries. There have been calls to boycott Elsevier journals because they use unpaid reviewers but charge the libraries at the academic institutions the reviewers work at an arm and a leg for the journal.)