According to the BBC article, they simply guessed the age. The sub-brown dwarf or rogue planet seems to be travelling with a group of stars, and they've estimated the age of the stars to be 50 - 120 million years. It's a form of extra-solar profiling: That thing over there isn't a star, but it's hanging out with those other stars, so it must the same age as them. (Which is apparently OK to do for stars, but not people?)

It's easy for most of us to be above average, if the people at the bottom are far from the mean. Take five students writing a test: four of them score 50/100, one falls asleep and scores 0/100. The average score is therefore 40/100, and so 80% of the students scored above average. When you were thinking up the saying, you must have meant the mean not the average?

He didn't even look. NewEgg is selling it for $99. A 30 day WoW subscription is listed on the Blizzard store for $15. So your OS costs less than 7 months of playing just one of the games you listed - tell me again what's expensive?

So, hot on the heals of a Slashdot story about Australia moving to fibre so they can push VOIP, we now get a story that states that they want to:

Yeah, don't worry - they're not related though. Really, we just think VOIP will improve everyone's lives.

As of this posting, the port linked in the article doesn't work on Opera 11.64 (Win 32). Luckily, Wolfenstein 3D has already been ported to a 4KB Java applet, for the 2011 Java4K competition. Go play it there instead.

Because you're only allowed to go through security if you have a valid boarding pass. I worked an extra three hours that day so I could take them to the airport and see them off.

Mistype a few letters and auto-correct gets to turn a serious comment into a joke. Not quite DYAC quality, but I'm sure it will happen to us all at some point.

This isn't just happening in the US anymore. My wife flew from Ottawa to London, Ontario with our two kids (2 month old daughter and 2 year old son) last July. They made my son take off his jacket, hat and teddy bear, put them through the x-ray, then wait on one side of the metal detector while my wife went through with our daughter. At that point he starting crying and trying to pull away from the big stranger forcefully restraining him from his mom. After verifying that my wife and daughter didn't set off the alarm, they waited for all the items to go through the x-ray. Only then did they sent my son through the metal detector, on his own. I got to watch the whole scenario from the dining area on the next floor up, and I've never in my lunch wanted to just hit someone as badly as I did then.

Can anyone venture a plausible reason why they couldn't have sent my son through with my wife, and then just scanned them individually in the event that the detector went off?

There may be a lot of farming in PEI, but our two main population centres have plenty of IT opportunities. My company is looking for a half dozen more senior Java developers, CGI employs twenty times more staff than we do (at various skill levels), and the local government has been advertising the island as a good near-shore location. It's pretty nice to be able to buy a house near the beach, for a reasonable price, and commute to downtown in only 15-20 minutes. And get paid almost what I would get in Ottawa.

[offtopic_shameless_plug]My company in also needs some senior developers for our PEI office, mostly for Java client/server work. Don't email me, just click the Careers link on our website.[/offtopic_shameless_plug]

On topic, I'm glad to see at least some of our justices are taking their jobs seriously. Appointed by Stephen Harper, yet curtailing government invasion into private lives. A nice breath of fresh air in a recent gale of anti-privacy legislation. (Thanks Michael Geist, for keeping us abreast of all the government's IT shenanigans!

They may be new to the supreme court, but they're hardly rookie judges! Michael Moldaver was a judge on the Supreme Court of Ontario 20 years ago, and Andromache Karakatsanis was a judge on the same court 10 years ago, after being Deputy Attorney General of Ontario.

Yes, most of the tax programs include both. There are some exceptions, where certain programs don't support some schedules (schedule = supplementary form.) e.g. StudioTax is totally free, but doesn't support schedule T1273 - the AgriStability / AgriInvest Programs. Since that's only for certain farmers, the majority of filers could use that software to prepare their taxes. As far as I know, filing in Canada is always free: either by phone, electronically, or by hardcopy snailmail.

I realize most of you will assume this question is USA related (I see the firehose story got tagged with "usa" quite quickly), but it applies to lots of other countries too. In Canada, we're supposed to use NETFILE certified software, most of which is free up to a certain income threshold. The Canada Revenue Agency has a list of all software certified for your 2012 filing (i.e.: 2011 tax year). Some of those same companies are probably certified by the IRS for filing taxes in the USA too.

I think your property value has doubled because you live a few blocks from the lakeshore in Toronto. Without the windmill, perhaps it might have increased even further in value.

PS: That windmill went in 10 years ago; home values in many other major cities without windmills (e.g.: Ottawa or Brampton) have nearly doubled in that time too.