Slashdot's Beta has proved that it is possible for information to be sucked in and never get out.

WTF is up with article titles that only the first 3 words are visible because of the huge font used?

Slashdot beta - the artificial blackhole created by Dice that Slashdot will be sucked into

Covenants are usually imposed by someone else, usually the local government, to allow the project to go forward. If they were easily changeable by the HOA it would be a bylaw not a covenant.

Covenants are usually created by the HOA - usually by the developer who is creating the homes and has 100% control of the HOA at it's beginning. If the local government wants to impose a restriction, they create ordinances.

To change covenants usually isn't "easy" - but it's doable. The problem is getting everyone to agree to the change. (or at least a lot of the people).
For example here's an article on doing it in CO: http://www.cohoalaw.com/your-governing-documents-should-your-covenants-be-amended.html

The difference between by-laws and covenants is that the bylaws are for the group of people - they specify how often meetings should be, how many people on the HOA board, etc. And those bylaws are often more easily modified.
Covenants are attached to the property and are just about what can be done with the properties (ex. no raising farm animals on the property, all utilities must be buried, etc)

As for the OP - I'd try a letter to the cable company from all the homeowners who are interested - give the cable company the names and addresses of the 15 properties who are planning to sign up, and most likely that'll get them to consider it.
If not - paying for it yourself seems like a good option...

No-till doesn't mean RoundUp Ready seeds.
It's common to do no-till planting with same seeds that have been used before in modern tillage planting methods.
If using Roundup, the field is sprayed before planting, or before the seeds emerge from the ground (same as modern tillage method)
And postemergence other herbicides are used (ex. a broadleaf killing herbicide on corn fields)
Here's a list of "do's" for notill that came up in a very quick google search:
http://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/AY/AY-313.pdf

There are other studies looking at how no-till allows for use of fewer herbicides.

Are body shops going to be able to fix the composite panels?
Corvette body shops have been doing fixes for fiberglass panels for years. I would expect carbon fiber repairs to be very very similar. Possibly even using fiberglass cloth in non-visible areas to repair the carbon fiber. Sure fiberglass might be a little heavier, but no one's going to care about the extra 3 ounces when it's an extra pound of epoxy on that crack/hole. And if it's $50 cheaper, probably the body shop will take the cheaper method.

One example of non-flammable oil is Silicone Oil

You don't even have to go non-flammable - large transformers that you might see next to buildings have been using oil as a coolant and insulation for decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_oil

I can understand if TSMC, or anyone else, were moving from 8" to 12" wafers.
This is going to 18" wafers. (~17.7 inch - close enough that I'd assume it'd be called "18 inch")
300mm wafer are sometimes called 12" wafers. And is what many/most use now.
If someone were moving from 8" to 12" (200mm to 300mm) it's not news at this point - they're years behind others in moving.

get a program to disable the keyboard.
For example:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/11570/disable-the-keyboard-with-a-keyboard-shortcut-in-windows/

It won't solve problem of her hitting the power button - but depending on the model, you may be able to disable the functionality of the power button in a separate program.

So as long as she is just mashing keys, not popping keys off the keyboard, that should solve your problem.

If you really want a separate machine, so you can read a recipe for dinner on your laptop (or whatever) while she interacts with grandma/grandpa, there have been other suggestions that look like good options.

You don't seem to realize how the economics of this really works out. Nobody will set up a production run before hand and say "this line only needs to produce 3 usable cores". Nobody will do this because no fabrication process has 100 % yield... in fact, most cutting-edge runs have far less.

I don't think you realize how this works out in practice.

In practice there are multiple stages to testing.
And a part may be down-binned for numerous reasons.
1> Frequency - ie. some part of the chip doesn't function at the freq./voltage specified.
2> Power - ie. the part would function but it would consume more power than spec.
3> Functional - ie. some portion just doesn't work (ex. part of the cache is so messed up that the repairing mechanisms can't compensate, and have to disable that section of cache completely, so a part that has patterns for a 8M cache is used as a 4M cache. Or maybe one core doesn't have it's branch prediction operate properly or maybe one opcode doesn't give the right result in a certain corner-case, so one core is disabled.)
4> Supply/demand - ie. the actual yield is higher than the actual demand at the top bins, so parts have to be down-binned to meet the demand in the lower bins. This may mean that certain lots of parts - or parts with certain characteristics get run through a test program that automatically jumps to a lower bin if there is already more than enough supply at the top bins. (Testing is expensive, and if you can shorten test time by an average of 10% because on 30% of the parts shipped you shortened the test time by 30% it's a multi-million dollar benefit.)

If the parts get downbinned in an earlier stage of testing (because there are normally multiple stages) normally that portion that's disabled won't be tested at the later stages. For example, if you test at the wafer level, and determine that you need to downbin some parts because they're almost certainly going to consume too much power, you only test those parts at the lower frequency/core-count once they're in packages. Then Joe Q Hacker gets the part and re-enables a disabled core - he doesn't know how much that part was tested. It is quite possible that the core he re-enabled wasn't tested as thoroughly as the ones that were enabled when he got it. Since he's got a liquid cooled setup though, he doesn't have issues with the power dissipation - but maybe there was some other latent issue that was never even encountered.

Or maybe it gets disabled when it's socketted in a Credence Sapphire ATE (Automated Test Equipment) but the next stage is a more PC-like environment, and at that stage it already has a core disabled, so the 4th core doesn't get the full testing in that PC-like environment.

In your example you didn't put what the demand was - if the demand is 10% four-core, and 90% two-core, it makes sense that you meet demand by skipping over the four-core testing 3/4 of the time, and jump right to the 2-core testing. It'll save time, and that means it saves money because maybe you can get by with 8 ATE platforms instead of 10. And the code to implement that took maybe a month of engineering effort to implement and test (spread across 2-5 people), which is much much cheaper than even 1 ATE.

Without knowing the actual test-flow AMD uses and the yields, (neither of which will be revealed to the public) it's impossible to know how likely a core that was sold disabled is actually good, and how thoroughly that (disabled) core was tested before it was shipped out to customers.