but WHY? why do the testicles need to be outside the body? it seems to make no sense: you have a vital organ dangling outside the body. should we also carry our livers in skin pouches out the side of our abdomen? should our spleens be held in little sacks on our chest? does that make any sense to you?

OBVIOUSLY there is a good reason for it, evolution has produced us to be this way. but what is that reason?

I've never seen ubuntu crash, but I have seen ubuntu applications crash and unable to restart without restarting ubuntu. In my experience so far, ubuntuand windows 7 seem to have about the same stability. Neither one crashes but applications sometimes lock up or crash.

Tesla proposed this back in the 1800's, and now somebody is bringing it into reality. +8 to the genius who proposed it.

Ya, it does, it's the whole point of her whole couch story.

Why she feels that relates to tech at all is beyond me, except that she doesn't like being around men apparently.

I could care less if there are more women techies or not, but then I'm functional outside the technology world as well, so don't have problems interacting with women in other environments.

"GUI responsiveness" that you and other poster mentioned is a time of memory allocation. You are running way too much crap, so system had to get rid of allocated pages before giving RAM to Firefox process.

Yes, but those same vendors also have a space on the exhibition floor for which they have paid the aforementioned $10,000 fee to the conference promoters. If they want to have a fancy suite(s) for VIP guests and "high-roller" types to demo gear and network in a more private setting (away from the riffraff on the convention floor) in addition to the floor space; nobody minds. The problem here is that some vendors who have NOT paid for floor space were attempting to hustle people into their hotel suites instead (i.e. taking advantage of the conference promoters efforts to bring everyone into town for the show, but not paying the exhibitor fees).

Its a problem because these vendors did not also pay the $10,000 exhibitor fees. They are "free-riding" off of the event promoters' efforts to organize, advertise and bring a large and interested audience into town for a couple of days without paying the exhibitor's price of admission. I can understand why the event promoters are upset in this case; especially since they probably paid these hotels extra for exclusivity deals as part of their contracts.

"So how do countless DVD manufacturers get away with xvid-capable players?"

Because xvid is an open source compatible four-cc codec BASED upon the MPEG-4 ISO standard and not exactly copying the original codec itself?

Implementing a standard is trivial - using software produced by the standards operating body is not, so making your own compatible format is the way to go.

How do you think a lot of MP3 players get made? I know of two major companies that use their own MP3 codec, not the official Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft one - they just follow the standards and make a compatible codec.

I don't know why, but this made me chuckle.

There might be some confusion here. You're referring to JQuery UI, which is not the same thing as the core JQuery language. 19kb is referring the gzipped, minified version of JQuery. What you're seeing is probably the JQuery UI script (which is pretty large, even if you cut out the extra stuff).

If you just want a simple calendar, I've found Unobtrusive Date Picker to be quite nice. It also doesn't take up a whole lot of space, AND is keyboard friendly! Oh, and it plays nice with JQuery (a big plus).

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Okay, so Defense is explicitly named. And I'm not taking sides or anything here but it could be argued that "the general Welfare" could be understood to mean that the health of the Nation's citizens is of some importance to the Federal government.

As to education, I don't know about you but I would count that as one of the blessings of liberty as well as a means to provide for domestic tranquility. It's hard to claim that you have liberty if you are unaware of said liberty or of what having that liberty means. And a reasoned, rational discourse will always be a more tranquil solution to any problem. It's impossible to have a rational argument with someone who is totally ignorant, as they cannot hold two conflicting ideas in their minds. So an education is the way to go to get there.

Just my two cents. Perhaps before calling someone a dimwit and insisting on them referencing some source material it would be wise to be familiar with that same material.

No - under (3a), the iPhone would be exempt if used "in the ordinary course of [the business of a communications common carrier]" - i.e. as a phone. This exception was included so that people wouldn't get in trouble for using a public payphone while people had loud conversations nearby. Using the iPhone as a recording device would not be in the ordinary course of AT&T's business, so 3a wouldn't apply.

Now, as for being fine, here's the important part:

All that's required in Massachusetts is that you inform the other party they're being recorded. He didn't need their consent. Had he said "I'm recording this," then there would have been no problem there.

Pennsylvania is one of the states with such a law. However, the Pennsylvania statute explicitly excepts those locations where a person does not have an expectation of privacy, such as a restaurant. I think that there is a good chance that this case would fall under such an exception

As far as I know it's a common practise among police, perhaps worldwide, to try to find out who is a hothead and who isn't. When a cop is called to a dispute or fight, not always but often, s/he will ask each participant a few pointed, even brusque questions. Those who answer the questions calmly and act in a restrained manner are usually given the benefit of the doubt in terms of who started or heightened the altercation. Those who respond to a cops questions antagonistically, and/or don't calm down, are usually seen as hotheads and tend to get the shitty end of the stick. If you're stupid enough to react to a cop aggressively rather than addressing any wrongs later through the courts or a police complaints board then you're likely gonna get charges laid against you that otherwise might be let go.

Street sense isn't just how not to get robbed and beaten in the wrong part of town, it's also how to deal with cops when things are going bad. Street sense in today's world is as necessary to basic existence as a high school diploma, although I wouldn't suggest going onto any "higher" centres of learning.

I'll add to this that passive security measures don't mean "nobody needs to take action to turn off the reactor", or even "no computer is needed to shut the reactor down". Passive safety means "this reactor cannot undergo a meltdown because it is physically impossible". Just like you can't walk through walls or damage tank armor by throwing eggs at it, passively safe reactors cannot melt because the laws of physics say so.

This GP nugget is funny. What fossilized into uranium? Fire-breathing radioactive dragons?

They won't do this, and they'll forward all the same arguments that MS uses to explain the reason that the Windows APIs require backwards compatibility and can't be broken.

I'm absolutely totally pro-Linux. I use it all the time, but what's good for the goose must also be good for the gander.