I'll give you a coding standard that's worth having: use a prefix to clearly identify your module statics and globals. If in an OO language, your class statics and member variables, too. If I'm looking at your code and I see an assignment to a nonlocal variable, I shouldn't have to go off analyzing the entire source tree to find out what it is.

Massachusetts got rid of the Registry Police in 1992.

The change of font is horrible. On both my 11" MacBook air and my big 1920x1200 cinema display it looks blurry, hard to read, and is too large. I've read that it looks nice on a retina display, but for the rest of us it's illegible crap with no way to correct it except by manually editing the plist file and crossing your fingers you don't screw it up.

There are other bottling facilities in New England. Pepsi has one in Cranston, RI. Coke has one in Londonderry, NH.

It's not just the cable company. It's the production company, too. I have Verizon Fios, and on my TiVo, an hour of a 1080i AMC show like The Walking Dead is 3.25GB, while an hour of the ABC show Once Upon a Time is 5.86GB. It's very obvious, too, The Walking Dead looks blotchy, full of glitches and artifacts.

I was shocked I had to scroll down this far before seeing a reference to Crack in the World. Too many young'uns on Slashdot. The Core is a terrific movie when compared with Crack in the World. You want bad science? How about blasting a new moon out of the earth, eh?

I love the fact so many people still refer to it as “Tin Foil” despite the fact we've been using aluminum foil, not tin, since the middle of last century. This gives me hope for such phrases as “dialing the phone.”

iPod Out was a special feature that allowed the iPod to generate a display on, say, a car's video screen. It has nothing to do with the audio stream or with being able to control song play. It goes away because the analog video out signal goes away. I think only BMW and Mini actually used the feature.

You are correct about Zones. They're even lighter-weight than paravirtualized VMs, which in turn makes them ideal for some things, and not others. Solaris also has Logical Domains (LDOMs) which are very much like VMs. They see only the hardware that has been mapped into them. If you need something to be visible to multiple LDOMs (like your network interface) you have to have a control LDOM which owns that particular piece of a hardware and virtualizes it for any other LDOMs that want to see it. They're not the easiest thing in the world to set up, but work well (on larger hardware) and are nicely isolated.

If you're a white male, and you were there, would you have offered this guy your shirt to wear, and then worn his shirt? Looked the pilot and Delta employees in the eye while you put it on?

Maybe not a big deal on a Linux system with an older G++ already installed, but this could be a serious issue for bootstrapping GCC on non-Linux platforms. Where you might have only needed the native C compiler before, now you will need the native C++ compiler, which may be an expensive product.

Unless they're going to make it a multi-step bootstrap where the first pass is only C code. I highly doubt that.

We did this in the late 1980s with SunOS diskless boot of 3/50 and 3/60 workstations. They didn't get their "preferences" from a separate server, though, which would be enough to not be prior art for the patent.

“Pay With Square, Square’s cellphone app, which eliminates even having to take the phone out of your pocket or sign a receipt.” Okay, so how does the cell phone app work if I don't actually unlock the phone or run the app? And while you're at it, if I'm inside a shopping mall, the GPS location is going to be completely wonky and it will have no idea what store I'm actually in.

"Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw. The concept of slow glass was excellent science fiction, while the story line was heartbreakingly sad. I read this in an excellent collection which included Godwin's "The Cold Equations" mentioned earlier, as well as the great Asimov story "Nightfall."

Sure you did. Once you enter the line you must complete the security scan. You can not say no thank you and turn around. It's a $10,000 fine, too.