Look, you're only calling her the "mystery woman" because you can't remember her name, and it was 50,000 years too early to get her phone number.

Identifying animals by species is usually convenient, but it's really an shorthand for clades of individuals. Are two individuals close enough to reproduce and have offspring that are capable of reproduction? That's a different question from whether Species X and Species Y are close enough, and the boundaries are a lot fuzzier than they taught us in high school. Lions and tigers aren't the same species, but they're close enough that ligers or tigons can be fertile, and there's at least one liliger out there. (It doesn't happen in nature, because lions and tigers don't live in the same areas, at least in modern times, but they're still close enough relatives.) And even mules are occasionally fertile.

"anti-capitalist"? Are you one of those Rand-worshippers who thinks that any decision a corporation or corporate executive makes is automatically correct? You've obviously never worked with real businesses before; they make dumb decisions all the time. (If that weren't true, you'd have gotten to this link by clicking with your Cue-Cat, or looking it up with Excite or AskJeeves.) One of the core things that makes capitalism work is that when dumb decisions get made, businesses (or parts of businesses) fail, die, and go away, and the people (and sometimes the resources they were using) can go do different things.

I'm boggled at hearing that Groupon still even exists, much less has that much market cap, because they were seriously tanking after they went public, and I haven't seen a Groupon or Groupon-like daily deal in ages.

They don't need any changes related to corrosion because they're made with those changes already included - it's mostly picking the right kinds of rubber for the seals and hoses. That doesn't mean an old motor boat engine will have been designed for that, and as the earlier poster said, there's also the problem that boat engines often sit unused for half a year, with the fuel evaporating away.

Yup. They don't have to catch criminals and terrorists significantly more often than chance, and even catching them less often than chance is just fine, as long as most people submit to the bullies and they can beat up the ones who don't. (Occasionally they fail, like the other week when some loser decided to shoot up the TSA because he had a problem with authority.)

I'm skeptical about the "scientific study", though, because TSA is almost never actually dealing with terrorists; they're much more likely to be dealing with people who are carrying politically incorrect plants and pharmaceuticals, or reading politically incorrect books, or worrying about the TSA thugs rooting through the underwear in their carryon bags.

They're not banning gatorade because it's dangerous - they're banning it because there are liquid explosives that you can dye unnaturally fluorescent colors and carry in a Gatorade bottle.

On the other hand, even pre-9/11 you couldn't bring an open beer onto a plane at most airports, because the US has silly laws about such things. Even though there's a bar in the airport right across from your gate, that'll give you your beer in a to-go cup so you can drink it at the gate while waiting for your plane.

Google reportedly offered Groupon $6B and was turned down; the company's probably worth about $6 by now.

Facebook offered SnapChat $3B? As long as it's in cash, not Facebook stock, there's only one right thing to do, which is to take the money and run. (Or take the money and stick around, if that's the deal, but take the money. Do not play Go, Do not pass up $3B.

XKCD 1057.

So are you saying that fake Twitter followers increase your Google page rank? How does Google connect a Twitter user to a web page? I can see how posting a link to your website and having lots of people click on it is potentially useful, but I don't see how having a bunch of fake robotic followers clicking on the links you tweet about does anything other than look suspicious to Google. And maybe I'm cynical, but I don't see how anybody can sell "getting real people to be interested in the stuff you Tweet and pay actual attention to it" for fractional pennies per human follower.

If you're a 3D-printing company, and you need to get your name in the press, making Yet Another Plastic Head of Cory Doctorow just isn't going to do the job, even if you 3D-print the googles and red cape all in one pass. The first 3D-printed gun was mostly done to make a political point (certainly not to be a useful gun.) This one's probably a lot better manufacturing, and that's going to generate some technical hype and possible demand for printing other metal things that previously had to be made using more traditional technologies (like low-cost CNC milling machines :-) but it's the fact that guns get lots of people to freak out that gets their name in the press. (And even if you don't remember their name, if you're looking to get something made of metal that's a similar complexity, you'll probably remember that it can be 3D-printed now and Google will find them for you.)

I've got an older HTC Android phone with lots of crapware, and a Coby Android Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with almost none. The HTC phone includes one really important feature that's not included in the extremely vanilla Coby, which is syncing the calendar and contacts with MS Outlook over USB. There are some non-free apps that claim to be able to sync the calendar (haven't tried them), and a couple of freewares (one couldn't connect successfully; the other is a "limited to 20 events" demo that worked very well once.)

Yes, I can sync my tablet calendar with Google Calendar and theoretically sync my work calendar with Google Calendar also. But I don't want Google messing with all my data and metadata, and I don't think work really wants me to sync calendar entries titled "Name of Secret Program" with "SecretProgram.ppt" and "SecretProgramRequirements.doc" attachments. I just want to export an iCal calendar and have Android's calendar app import it.

If you don't like working for somebody else, don't. Or if you're going to do that anyway, head to work early in the morning, and send your boss email so he sees that you've been in and productive early, and go home early as well.

Set the clock so high noon is at 12:00 for somewhere in the middle of your time zone and don't mess with the clocks.

If you like to get up in the morning, get up in the morning. If you want to get up early while pretending you didn't, hide the screen on your alarm clock and get up anyway, or set a timer so your bedroom lights come on the morning before your alarm. Don't go telling the rest of us to change our clocks just because you're a wimp about getting up in the morning.

At least now that DST is over I don't have to start my East-Coast-Morning phone calls in the dark this week.

For phone calls, I need either a headset or speakerphone, and when I'm at an office with other people or lab with noisy hardware, or working at home and my wife's around, the speakerphone's impractical. I used to be on the phone for an average of 2-3 hours a day; with my current work it's usually a bit less, but there's still a lot.
  And switching between different kinds of headsets is annoying, so I usually don't bother.

Noise-cancelling headsets are nice if I'm not going to talk to people much. The Bose set I have is good enough that I can actually talk to people with them on, but it looks weird to them so I usually don't.

For some kinds of work I can listen to music, but it mostly has to be instrumental, not anything with lyrics; programming's too verbal to have other verbal distractions. And sometimes with spacier music (some jazz, or Grateful Dead instrumentals), I'll occasionally notice that I've floated off into the music instead of concentrating on work.

For mostly-physical jobs like cabling or especially driving, I really want radio or music to keep the monkey-mind busy so I can concentrate.

This Bad Idea has been floating around for a few years. Some idiots built a product and have been aggressively lobbying governments to take them up on it, and even though governments really like being able to do big brother tracking of everywhere everybody drives, they still haven't bought it. They've tried selling them to Oregon and California, they've tried selling them to San Francisco for congestion pricing for drivers in the crowded downtown business district, they've tried selling them for highway toll collection, they've tried selling them to the Feds. They've tried selling it to states as revenue enhancement ("People buy Priuses which use less gas, so you're collecting less gas tax, so buy our thing instead of just raising the tax rate!") There's always at least one legislator or bureaucrat who likes the idea and tries to convince their fellow legislators or bureaucrats, which is enough for the pushers to put out a press release.

But because these guys really want to sell their product, the good guys have to keep squashing it. It's usually not hard, because it's a terribly unworkable idea, but the Big Brotherness of it is really obnoxious, and as far as I can tell, wasn't even the purpose of this system.

Dude, it is a free market, for most people in the world; if you're a draftee into some army that only uses X.400 email, or your country only allows unencrypted SMTP to pass through their Great Firewall, then I'm sorry, and I can recommend some good anti-censorship tools for you, which you can get from a guy named Bennett Hasleton.

But otherwise, you're free to use tools other than SMTP/POP/IMAP/Webmail, and we'll be happy to see your running code and give you opinions about whether you'll get rough consensus from anybody else about using it.