Sexual selection is most likely an additional element in the facial features as it has been theorized to be one of the primary driving features of some of the physical statue difference between males and females of many different species. Hence Darwin's explanation of the ornate peacock.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Very good to hear different sides of a similar story. I think it is just such a personal experience and journey that people can complete to in many different ways.

Very true but you can still teach an old dog new tricks. I went back to school for the third time to get my under graduate coursework in CS out of the way so I can apply to a MS program when my youngest starts 1st grade (in about three years). I started taking CS classes in my late 30's and have 2 more courses to go and I am now in my 40's with 2 kids. What I found is that even though I have a minor in Mathematics it provided me almost no help in Discrete Math. Honestly Discrete Math taken at a large engineering university was an eye opening experience for me. The only thing that helped me was Linear Algebra and some graph theory I already knew. And it really made me angry that the US education system had shorted me so severely on what I would call classic mathematics. To catch up I put in many, many hours to do well in that class. And I did OK with with a B+. Going back to doing proofs after 20 years was a a challenge but it was not impossible. I already have a MS in Computer Information Systems but my heart is in Computer Science and so is the type of work that I do. You can take challenging courses later in life and I think it can be very rewarding. In my Data Structures class the final project was an impossible task for undergraduates. I spent hours working on the project which combined graph theory, and many different data structures and related concepts into a large final class project. I put the effort in and got a 100 on the assignment along with a single fellow classmate also in his 30's taking coursework for another masters program. We both got A+ grades in that class. The class average for that assignment was a 45 which included our two perfect scores. I then went on to take Computer Architecture and Assembler programming and had a similar experience. The undergraduate kids did pretty well on the tests and it was difficult to beat them but when it came to the projects the older students like myself could beat them hands down. We simply have many more years of experience in building things that work as well as tenacity in completing the projects to our best ability. It takes a lot of work to go back to school and complete challenging coursework but I personally have found it very rewarding.

Economists call this "opportunity cost" and as you are able to earn more money your opportunity costs increase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

This isn't anything new except they now have to do it Paris. Florence (Firenze) Italy was doing this when I was there in 1997. It was pretty interesting because they even had high smog alerts (No Traffic Zones) that required people with certain license plates to actually pull off the road during high alerts on Sundays. This apparently has been expanded to other days of the week. Italy also banned many vehicles from inside the Florence. At the city gate you had to have a special sticker to get in with a car or moped. It was very difficult and expensive to get a sticker for a car.

http://www.expatsinitaly.com/n...

Tape backups are the cheapest way to go as far as media and surprisingly is making a comeback due to high storage requirements. It can be expensive as far as hardware and software depending on what you buy. We backup about the same amount of data in our production environment for offsite storage. Latest tapes can hold 4 TB per tape.

Not the only typo in my post but thanks. I should have also said "objectively" and not "subjectively" as well as some other grammatical errors. Just the nature of unedited posts. I would love to have an editor follow me around though. That would be awesome.

Once people inside the publication or organization get wrapped up in these stories they can no longer think subjectively. They convince themselves they have it right and sometimes they don't but it is hard to convince yourself otherwise.

Two months is not a huge amount of time to do research for a story that no one else has come close to cracking. Just because the guy's bio sounds plausible doesn't make it so. Heck a few years ago a lawyer in the US was a partial thumbprint match on a bomb that exploded in Madrid. In the end his fingerprint matched the bomb maker's partial print and the FBI had to apologize but not before they put him through the ringer. Everyone was convinced he was the guy. They just couldn't see past the finger print match.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/5053...

Another example is Dan Rather's early career retirement due to back research on then president Bush military service. Dan just couldn't let it go and it ended his career.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_military_service_controversy

Another FBI example was the Atlanta Olympic bomber suspect Ricard Jewel. FBI got that one wrong as well but plowed ahead anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell

There are many more of these example.

There is only one terminating DOCSIS gateway which most likely will only support the assignment of a single IP address. So although the internal switchable network will be on a VLAN or something similar, most likely all the data traffic will traverse across the single DOCSIS gateway and hence be indistinguishable on the Internet from your own network traffic.

It is interesting you bring up OS/2 since it was originally a joint development effort between IBM and Microsoft. It was taking a long time to get the product out of the door and Microsoft did a fast release of a less than stable version of Windows on DOS before IBM. Microsoft later released Windows NT. What first eroded OS/2 was the price tag which was about 4 times that of Windows and Microsoft OEM licensing. In reality OS/2 had some features that were far better than Windows (non NT) at the time (like flat memory, execution in protected mode, multiple DOS execution in OS/2 2.0, and high stability) but IBM being IBM couldn't put the product together into something that made economic sense. And then the developers targeted the larger install base (Windows 16 bit) and that was that. Microsoft figured out how to bundle Windows with new PCs and that was the golden ticket for them. Both OS/2 and Windows ran on PC hardware. Interestingly OS/2 was used in many important infrastructure systems like bank ATMs and train ticketing systems up until relatively recently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Now you are comparing fresh water and salt water in an attempt to save your argument. Unfortunate for humans on planet earth we require fresh water to live. Salt water makes up 97.5% of all water on the planet. That leaves humans and other animals only 2.5% to live on including agricultural and industrial usages.

http://www.grida.no/graphicsli...

For obvious reasons. They didn't want to reveal the carcinogens they are using in fracking fluid which includes a long list of zene named chemicals such as Benzene, Ethylbenzene, Toluene, Xylene, Naphthalene, as well as Formaldehyde, Methanol, Ethylene glycol, Glycol ethers, Hydrochloric acid, diesel fuel, and Sodium hydroxide. These discharges would most likely never be allowed if the clear water act could be used to sue the government to compel compliance of the gas industry. Since they are exempt they don't have to comply and can classify the composition of fracking fluid ingredients as "trade secrets."

That is true. Hydraulic fracking has been in use for many years. The main difference here is the magnitude and scale of frack drilling in the past 10 years. And as most people on slashdot know, not everything scales without consequences.

Of course all of the water usage you are citing in comparison is sent back into the water supply system. A lot of fracking fluid is injected into deep disposal wells and does not re-enter the water system. The industry is trying to move to more recycling but is complicated and costly due to the chemicals and minerals in the fracking water.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03...

One of the big differences in water use with fracking wells is that the water is contaminated with many dangerous chemicals including benzine as well as natural elements like salt. That water is so nasty it is hard to reclaim back into water that can be used again. Therefore most fracking fluid water it is taken out of the water supply system forever in many cases by injecting contaminated water into deep wells for permanent storage. In other words the fresh water is contaminated for a one-time-use and then stored in deep wells forever (hopefully). Contrast this with other uses of water such as agriculture where the water does re-enter the water supply system - abet not free of agriculture contaminants but certainly not locked away in deep wells. So in this very arid regions water is being consumed and never returned back into the water system. Not good.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03...

There is some movement in the industry to reuse fracking fluid but of course that drives up costs and this is an industry no known for spending money when not required to do so.