The Marina IUD is actually 0.3% more effective then a tubal ligation, the Paraguard on the other hand is 0.1% less. Really about the same though.

As fun as it is to blame women for getting pregnant, the fact is there are always going to be a non-trivial number of women who get pregnant through no fault of their own. Even if every woman in the country got a tubal ligation and didn't have willingly have sex, we'd still see about 450 pregnancies from the 92,000 rapes that happen each year combined with the 0.5% failure rate of tubal ligations within the first year.

You apparently don't live in Washington. Everybody in a huge radius of this bridge wants it replaced ASAP. It causes huge traffic problems every day and is ready to sink into Lake Washington on a moments notice.

Ironically, replacing it benefits the average MSFT employee less then the average Seattle resident as the MSFT employee can scoot through on the Microsoft connector bus in the carpool lane at any time.

Not quite. Most of the MS employees in Seattle ride the Microsoft Connector bus in to work. The existing one carpool lane is more then sufficient to accomodate the MS busses. I live right by the 520 bridge and I'm with MS on this one. More carpool lanes and/or light rail will just increase the time and cost of the project and add little to no benefit. We need a new bridge now.

Or better yet a car analogy!

From the TFA "Inside the box, one disc can produce energy to "power a lightbulb" (60 W, assuming a full power lightbulb). The discs are produced from baked sand and then painted on each side with the special ink. In between the discs an inexpensive metal (not platinum) is placed. According to Mr. Sridhar, 64 discs could power a Starbucks."

That said, even without platinum, these things are damn expensive.

Yeah right now the ROI (3.3%) doesn't even keep up with average anual inflation (3.4%), but I think they are cutting it some slack as it's a very new technology that has yet to benefit from mass production and innovations in the production process. Later on it could prove to be an excellent investment.

The problem here is with wikipedia not F#. The characters are normally a way of typecasting integer literals, however it it not necessary (nor even valid) to do that in a match statement. The wikipedia example should be:

let rec factorial n =

        match n with

        | 0 -> 1

        | _ -> n * factorial (n - 1)

or even more simply

let rec factorial n = if n=0 then 1 else n * factorial (n-1)

Stock price probably isn't the best way to demonstrate that a firm is doing well or poorly as it is based largely on speculation. I like to look at profit per employee. If you take that metric:

Microsoft: $156, 656
Novell: - $59,083,
Red Hat: $28,107

or if you're looking to actually invest in one of these companies, price earnings ratio (smaller is better) is a useful metric:

Microsoft: 15.63
Novell: N/A
Red Hat:69.37

So you can see while Red Hat stock price is doing pretty well, Ret Hat itself isn't making a ton of money. Though it is beating the pants off Novell for what thats worth...

agreed

C# has pointers, a larger class library then objective C, and no dependency on the win32 apis... You are correct that the syntactic similarities between c++, java, and c# lead to a win for C# though.

Microsoft
employees 93,000
revenue 58.4 billion = 627 956.989 per employee
net income 14.5 billion = 155 913.978 per employee

apple
employees 35,000
revenue 32.5 = 922 857.143 per employee
net income 4.9 = 140,000 per employee

oracle
employees 73,000
revenue 23.2 billion = 317 808.219 per employee
net income 5.6 billion = 76 712.3288 per employee

red hat
employees 2,800
revenue 0.65 billion = 232 142.857 per employee
net income 0.078 billion = 27 857.1429 per employee

Even when I divide by employee's to account for the size differences, the closed source shops are making way more money then Red Hat

IE 6 hasn't been Microsoft's flagship browser for 4 years.

• Printed books: The blind cant use those either
• Music programs: discriminate against the deaf
• PE programs: quadriplegics can't participate
• Art involving the colors red and green: the colorblind can't participate fully
• Advanced mathematics: the mentally handicapped can't keep up
• Milk with lunches: the lactose intolerant can't have any

I'm all for accommodating the disabled, however denying privileges to the able bodied because not everybody can participate is asinine. No matter what activity you select, there will be somebody unable to participate. Do what's best for 99% of people and then do your best to accommodate the remaining 1%.

I actually didn't have any of the traditional complaints (headache, blurry, gimmicky, etc) with Avatar in 3d. My only issue comes from me forgetting that it wasn't actually 3d, trying to focus on items in the background (or any place where the camera wasn't focusing) and finding that it wouldn't work. Most the time I naturally looked where the camera was focused, but when I didn't it was a strange sensation. In the entirely CG scenes without a traditional camera focus this issue was greatly decreased.

Can't and won't are entirely different. Maintaining a branch of a software project takes time and money. Since very few people use powerPC now and even fewer will in the future, the project will be better off by devoting those resources to something that will actually be used. (Also, just FYI the number of bits the processor supports isn't really relevent to this discussion so you can probably skip typing it out each time :p )

So Silverlight can't possibly compete with flash because it doesn't support a hardware platform that hasn't been produced in 5 years now and already has negligible market share?

The only differences I'm aware of between mac and windows silverlight 3 are quite trivial

In the works . Admittedly, MSFT is dissapointingly behind schedule on this front.

Some of your complaints with Silverlight have merit. It isn't perfect yet, but it has made remarkable progress in the 2 years it has been out and most certailnly is a rival to flash. Flash had an 11 year head start and Silverlight already does just about everything it does and a few things better. Silverlight lags behind flash in market penetration and platform support, but at the rate it is going, it will catch up quite soon.