There are many ways of being taught about evolution. You can have it presented as yet another dogma, which is different from the dogma of your parents and community and so easy to ignore. Or you can have it presented as a set of observations that clearly show strong evidence for evolution and discuss why each of the competing theories failed to explain the observations and so was discarded. This is one of the problems with removing Intelligent Design from schools: you can't teach evolution properly without the historical context and the competing theories, just as you can't teach special relativity without looking at the luminiferous aether and how Michelson and Morley demonstrated that it could not account for observations.

There are several references to other gods in the Old Testament, although all of them in the context that the Jews' god is more powerful and therefore better.

I bought a machine with similar specs (second hand) for £100 around 2006, so I don't think you can credit tablets with the fact that second-hand laptops have fallen in price by a factor of 3-4 over 6-7 years.

I have an ASUS TransformerPad which has the advantage of a dockable keyboard with an extra battery in it, which is great for when I'm going to be spending a long time on trains / at airports / on planes, because the keyboard also works well as a stand and fits on the tray table in most places. It can play back films for 7 hours and can show PDFs and run vim. There's actually a nice LaTeX app for Android that will load the packages you use on demand (a feature I'd love to have on the desktop, to avoid the 2GB TeXLive download for the few MBs of LaTeX that I actually use, without having to manually work out what they and their dependencies are).

It doesn't replace a laptop, but it does augment it nicely.

And what happens as a result? Will anyone stop shopping at Safeway? Or will it get a little bit of a brand recognition boost?

Math fail.

Canadians and Mexicans don't like being walked over regardless whether they are staying in low cost accommodation or not.

There's a lot of history involved. OSS was originally contributed to Linux under the GPL, then to *BSD under the BSDL. It was maintained in both, but then the original author took it commercial. FreeBSD just forked the last BSDL version and kept maintaining compatibility with new versions. Linux ripped it out and replaced it with the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).

One of the drawbacks with early OSS was that you had a single /dev/dsp and so only one application could play sound at once. With ALSA, you still only had one /dev/dsp, but if your card did hardware mixing, and you rewrite your applications to use ALSA, then you could get mixing. Unfortunately, most things weren't rewritten to use ASLA and most cheap cards back then didn't do hardware mixing, so userspace sound daemons started appearing. Unfortunately, GNOME and KDE each had their own (incompatible) ones. Meanwhile, FreeBSD just implemented in-kernel sound mixing.

Over 10 years ago, this was why I switched to FreeBSD. I wanted XMMS to play music and my KDE IM client and GNOME mail client to be able to make notification bings, and maybe have a game in the foreground playing sound. This was trivial with FreeBSD, impossible with Linux. Now, it's possible with Linux, but only by requiring every single audio-playing app (or, at least, library) to be rewritten with the Linux fad-of-the-day API. This underlines the philosophical difference between FreeBSD and Linux, and is why I remain a FreeBSD user.

Or via some other mechanism. Email works fine for long messages and really doesn't need yet another incompatible reinvention. For short messages, there's IM, SMS, and so on, and Twitter does the broadcast version of these. Facebook tries to be the broadcast version of email and largely exists because email sucks if you want to share photos and setting up a mailing list is hard for non-techy people (even with Yahoo / Google groups).

That's basically how cardholder-present transactions work. You enter your pin, the card produces a hash of the recipient, time, and amount, and a shared secret. The merchant then presents the hash, the time and the amount to your card issuer (via some layers of indirection) and they confirm that the transaction is valid. For Internet transactions, unlike in-person transactions, you can guarantee that the recipient has network connectivity, so it's even easier for them to communicate with the bank and verify the hash.

Some of the schemes for one-time CC numbers actually allow the CC number to be re-used, but it's only valid for one transaction of a specific amount per day. If you want to use it again, you have to correctly guess the amount that it's valid for that day, and put in your fake transaction after the next person to be issued with it requests it, but before they use it.

My mother got a Windows 8 laptop just before Christmas. This holiday has involved a lot of listening to her swear at it. Her desktop ran XP and Win8 is so different that she finds is almost unusable. 8.1 is marginally better, but still does weird things (like pop up the People app and ask her to sign into the Microsoft account that she doesn't have, in the middle of her typing a password in a web page). I hadn't realised quite how bad 8 was until I saw her trying to use it.

That's more or less true, but it's increasingly untrue. For example, there haven't been updates to the open source mail or web apps for a while. All of Google's effort goes to the GMail app and Chrome. The same thing for the music player app. Google abandons development in favour of their proprietary ones. This makes it increasingly difficult to create a Google-free Android. Samsung and Amazon are both interested in a Google-free Android platform though, so there's hope that they'll start collaborating...

American cheese usually doesn't, that's why it tastes of plastic.

It seemed odd to me. I believe that their idea is that you should use an Apple display with the Ethernet provided via Thunderbolt. In this setting, you don't need the GigE connection on the machine, because it appears as soon as you plug in the display, and whenever you're not at your desk you use WiFi. I almost never use the GigE port on mine anywhere other than at work, so it's not completely silly (I don't have the Apple display, but I leave a Thunderbolt GigE adaptor connected to the network cable, so I just plug it in when I arrive).

No, but they will cost you more money. I replaced 60W incandescents with either 15W or 20W CFLs[1]. Assuming the 20W ones, that's a 40W saving, so to convert into electricity-company units, that's 25 hours to save one kWh. The cost of a new CFL is, for me, around the same cost as 2-3kWh of electricity. If I buy a new CFL today and install it replacing an incandescent that is on for an average of 2 hours a day, then it takes me less than two months to be better off, including the initial outlay.

[1] A lot of the complaints I've seen seem to be from people who replace 100W incandescents with 10W CFLs and then complain that they're dark. Don't trust the 'Watt equivalent' numbers that manufacturers put on the boxes - they're pretty much nonsense.