You can skip the "screen saver" pictures of authors by holding the switch in the off position for ~5 seconds when turning it off. The screen goes blank (no picture or text). I don't think it saves any power, but at least I don't have to go around with an advertisement for a famous author I don't enjoy.

It seems like the thing for the Russians to do is to buy lottery tickets under the name of the asteroid. That way, if the asteroid 'hits,' then everybody in Russia is rich. No problem.

Yes. See "Cloud seeding" on wikipedia for some details.

The article in Time says Moscow usually spends about $12M on removal, twice the $6M cost of seeding for this exercise.

The real issue of concern for me would be that many uniforms are associated with either semi-skilled jobs (fast food) or positions that require special garments to perform work (soldiers, firefighters). Most help-desk people that I've known (and the one I used to be) think of themselves as office professionals. What message does the uniform send to the non-IT staff with whom the help desk has contact. Clearly, you don't want to send messages that amount to either "semi-skilled" or "willing to move filing cabinets."

It's different because users of paid merchandise or services can seek legal remediation if something goes terribly wrong. The payment creates and obligation. In free software, there's no corresponding obligation, because there has been no payment. Of course, paid OSS (e.g., from RedHat) falls somewhere confusingly in the middle.

I think a lot of comments above miss a more important point, that knowing the attacks follow a power law distribution (for argument's sake) still doesn't help predict individual events. Really, unless you're placing bets on terrorism (google for "futures market terrorism Poindexter") this won't help you much.