<rant>
The bleedin' slideshow requires Flash 9 , for crying in a bucket! Why the hell do you need Flash to show a sequence of static images in succession!? And to download the slides, you have to have two accounts: one on Facebook, and one on something called Slideshare.

Screw it.
</rant>

(Be glad I'm sparing you my take on Javascript.)

Justice Kagan wasn't recused. She recused herself.

A vast difference, especially when you check the sorts of cases in which Justices Thomas and Scalia have failed to recuse themselves.

The summary you see is a heavily-edited version of the one I submitted. My submission read

In a [...] 4-4 non-decision

:-/

Remember that any technology looks best a) when in development, and b) to its originators. Take any and all numbers and promises and scale them back from 50 to 80%.

Random thought: Put one in the water upside down---can it right itself? Because it's guaranteed that in heavy seas they'll be flipped over every so often.

On the other hand, given that the waves could flip it back up, as well, on average you'd have 50% of them rightside up at any time. It might be easier to double the number of gizmos than to design them to be self-righting.

As shown, there's no provision for navigation lights.

I believe under the maritime Rules of the Road [PDF], one of these would be classified as a ``vessel not under command'', in which case it should display two red lights, one above the other, at night, and two black balls ditto during the day. (Rule 27 (a)) I don't know whether these are large enough to require such displays, but hit one of them in a sailboat at good speed, and you could be in real trouble.

Additionally, a radar reflector would be a Very Good Thing. Unfortunately, that might be impractical due to wind resistance.

Can I turn my head?

Sourceforge, perhaps?

"The government should end all subsidies, including allowing industries to pass external costs to others"

That would be a step in the right direction, but I don't think it is enough.

In addition to all the other factors stated in posts above, we have to consider the massive infrastructure in place to support the status quo.

Without subsidizing alternative energy, it might end up taking 50-100 years to completely replace all the infrastructure that currently supports coal and oil.

If I were to try to compete with series of coal-->electricity plants by building up a series of say, wind farms, I'd face pretty large obstacles that coal does not face.

Where to store the energy for later use or low wind times?
Not being able to build near existing lines if there isn't wind there.
Power grid not designed to handle spikes in power,
etc etc etc

Likewise if I wanted to start an electric car line. No 'recharge stations', no bulk battery makers, battery technology research needs to be furthered, etc..

Subsidize should be used to encourage industry to move in the direction the benefits the public. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be used in that fashion very consistently.

This is a very important point that is often overlooked.

The counter-argument is that many software companies offer student discounts. Very significant student discounts. However, any student studying graphics today needs many different apps from many different vendors, they also need to upgrade each year to the latest and greatest version. So even though software is priced well for students you can easily be talking about a grand or more per year and at the same time the students still need good hardware which you can't pirate.

I pirated a lot of software while in college. I got a job and now I own thousands of dollars in software that I upgrade every 1 - 1 1/2 years. Had I not been able to find all that software for free and invested the vast amounts of time learning it I'd probably be working as an insurance broker and would not have bought any of the software I now own.

Quit paying the BSA for a service that alienates your future clientele and remember, the software that is too difficult to pirate will never be purchased by the "student" because the "student" in question didn't become familiar with it...

which should be fun (but less so for the virus)."

The concept of detecting multiple levels of viruses' sense of fun makes my head hurt. I think I can deal with a single level: ``Are we having fun yet [yN]?''

Among a certain crowd, that program passes the Turing test.

Because statistics are hard and outrage is easy.