as a rock

Funny that Apple sell so many retina MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs when they're the most expensive machines you can buy in those form factors. Could it be that a race to the bottom, cutting corners to reduce costs, ISN'T what people want? What happened with Netbooks again?

Steam: US$69.99 - still not cheap but that's two cocktails less than EBGames!

So Stephenson's "solomonic gold" may be based in fact?

Really, a football table. Like soccer. You may not like to watch it on TV but it's an excellent way to blow away some cobwebs and unlike most games you do it standing up.

Idiocy. CSIRO is nothing like a patent troll. CSIRO developed the technology...

Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students.

If you haven't been paying attention this summer -- fat people are the new terrorists. It seems a lot more plausible to me that a school is implementing a weight control plan than that they're expecting a gym teacher to diagnose cardiac abnormalities with a heart rate monitor, something a cardiologist couldn't do usefully.

Thinking this over some more, though, I'm more sympathetic to the asker's paranoia than I was at first. If school's can embrace policies of publicly weighing and humiliating children, they might well decide that the heart data might be shared in some inappropriate way, although the insurance thing seems unlikely.

Back in the olden days, we used to monitor our pulses in gym class using a finger and a clock. No, there's nothing suspicious about this, and anyone who used common equipment in gym should understand the benefit of buying your own strap instead of digging through a box to find the least sweaty one from the period before.

Last night, Evan unprotected his twitter account and Reifman began to follow him, under the disguise of a fembot.

Twitter seems as appealing to me as gluten-free pizza, so presumably a "fembot" is some Twitterism with which I'm unfamiliar, and not an actual fembot?

Don't talk to the police, or the FBI, or any authority without your lawyer.

Everyone knows that, but how many people have the number of a criminal defense attorney when they've never needed one before? Talking to the police (especially if you think your innocence is obvious) is an attractive option compared to sitting in a police station while you research lawyers or wait for Legal Aid to show up.

Of course, if I'd accidentally walked out with ultra-secret Goldman Sachs code while trying to download vi from an internal server, I'd be one of those people!

From what I understand the reason people get offended is that M$ implies there is something evil about making $$$.

I just get offended by people saying 'M$' because it paints the Linux community as a bunch of pimply-faced teenage dorks that think that calling Microsoft 'M$' is like the greatest insult in the world. I use Linux at work. It's a great developer platform. I use it t home for my server. Great at that, too. Just have a windows box for games. So you can call me a Linux geek... but I hate two things about the linux community:
Those that insult proprietary companies like a kid would
Those that insult others trying to learn Linux (if someone was to say "RTFM" to a newbie in real life, I'd kick him in the nards)

The men, who appeared to ProtesterHelp to be either Iranian or Lebanese...

I'd take that to mean that he's guessing that they were Iranian or Lebanese. There's no common element in those two ethnicities that distinguishes them from Jordanians, Syrians or what have you. You might recognize an Iranian by face, dress or (obviously) language but not "either Iranian or Lebanese".

Really? 401k is a retirement, long-term investment. The market goes up and down, so unless you plan on cashing out your 401k TODAY or next year, I say now is the time to put MORE into the 401k. It's the stock market! When it's low, put in more money, when it's high sell off!

Never ever ever react to a sudden change in the stock market on a long term investment, unless it's something like enron...