In most cities, when the snow on streets/sidewalks melts, the water and contaminants don't go into the river, but go into sewage where it's filtered and otherwise treated before reaching the river.

From the same wikipedia page - a kilogram of molybdenum costs about 30$, so it's just as abundant as dirt for any practical chip production purposes.

42nd most abundant element in the universe means that it's about average, as about half elements are rarer. You could call it rare if it was a couple orders of magnitude less abundant, such as gold, palladium or others.

Around here first DUI offense is ~$1000 + licence revoked for six months; repeat offense is 10-15 days in jail + confiscation of car + permanent revocation of driving licence.

When it was implemented a few years ago, it really did wonders in changing the attitude of people I know.

No matter what solutions you use for backups, the admin will be able to corrupt or bypass them in some way given enough thought and motivation.

However, for sane though disgruntled people it would be sufficient for them to have the common sense understanding that malicious actions will have strict consequences - people generally don't risk going to jail just to annoy a manager or company. And in the cases where someone would really be prepared to risk that, I'd rather worry about them coming to office with a gun, not tampering with a pile of pictures.

What was the aftermath of the previous cases you say of people leaving in anger and presumably doing something damaging? Your previous reaction in these cases forms the expectations in your admins about what they can get away with when leaving in anger.

The issue with unions is not that 'teachers are overpaid'.

The issue with unions is that poorly performing but tenured teachers are relatively overpaid and unfireable compared to good teachers just entering the system.

If you pay everybody the same or on tenure basis, then the good performers are severely underpaid and leaving while bad performers are relatively overpaid and staying in the system.

Well, as the discussion is about decent IDE's, then you can safely assume that none of these users actually type 'end' by themselves, as the syntax structures are autocompleted anyway.

As long as machine is doing the typing, slightly easier reading is much more important than length of writing.

As the article says, it's not the power requirements but the heat that worries them.

67 MW of heat spread out in 50 buildings is ok; 67 MW of heat in a shared-memory device that needs to be physically small and compact for latency reasons may make it impossible.

Just as the poster above said - 'some idealistic kid', which most often happens to be a middle-class guy in/after college.

If there is any correlation between top singles and innovation, it is negative - in order to reach the most, most mass market, innovation in songs is suppressed and conformity favored.
For any artist, Black Eyed Peas included, their most innovative songs reach lower results in the charts than their non-innovative songs - marketing to the mainstream simply doesn't work any other way.

Invoking Godwins law is not an argument for or against it. As I said earlier, I don't know any nice way of achieving it - the nicest way seems to be a millenium of regulated/reduced/taxed population growth, as China has attempted, and that has a load of ethical drawbacks as well.

I do feel however that the natural evolved tendency of hairless apes would be to multiply until growth becomes limited by sustenance - i.e., until the average family doesn't grow because it can barely feed itself and can't feed extra mouths - not speaking about luxuries such as healthy food or consumer goods. Now THAT is a complete dystopia that we must avoid.
Optimistic technology scenarios avoid that automagically, but pessimistic scenarios state that after 100-200 years when oil has completely run out, and we can't sustain fertilizer-heavy agriculture, then sustainable food limit will be much lower than current population, forcing population reduction by starvation and/or resource wars.

The whole point of the consumer watchdog is that if consumers for whatever reason can't conveniently prove it and get the refund, then the bundling and any agreements between retailer and Microsoft are illegal. The fact that it's inconvenient or unprofitable for MS, or killswitches are lacking or people might cheat doesn't really matter in the eyes of the law - forcing a purchase this way is illegal in EU according to the consumer laws.

"desire to opt-out of third party, advertising-based tracking" - how about we skip a few words, leaving "desire to opt out of third party advertising." ?

If I'm going to use AdBlock plus cookie/flashcookie/etc skipping in any case, I won't see the ads anyway and the browser may as well broadcast it to the server and skip the downloading of ads entirely. There's also no use for them to track me, as their targeted ads just as hidden as random untargeted ads, so no use to bother with precise targeting.

For the living. Who else?

Well, I could argue that an earth with only 600 million inhabitants would be a nicer place to live in most ways.

It would require to eliminate 90% of population, and that wouldn't be a nice process nor a nice time to live in, but afterwards.... pretty much any sustainable process that can support 6 billion bodies in a nice way can also support 600 million bodies in a much, much nicer way.

The 40 million corpses were recycled as fertilizer in an ecologically friendly manner. The nutrients they had robbed from Mother Earth and defenseless plants have been returned to nature.