Here's the trick that I use. When I'm particularly stumped, I start assembling an e-mail asking an area expert for help. The process of putting it down in writing really helps me spot weak hypotheses or poorly understood concepts in a way that thinking through the problem never seems to. Sometimes, seeing these weaknesses is enough to get me on the right track. Sometimes, it's the research I do to get my terminology correct that clues me into subtle behavior or the thing I'm working with. Either way, approximately 90% of the time I don't have to hit the send button because I'll solve the problem on my own after this exercise. And for that remaining 10% of the time, I have a very clear and well organized question that won't waste the expert's time.

Since the industrial revolution, we've released about 375 gigatons of sequestered CO2 through burning and cement production. There are 3.67 tons of CO2 from a ton of carbon so we need to capture on the order of 100 gigatons of carbon to reverse this.

Dry wood is about 50% carbon by weight. So I need 200 gigatons of wood to sequester the necessary carbon. Amazon tells me this chair weighs about 20 pounds, or 0.01 tons. Seems high, but I just need a rough estimate.

200,000,000,000 (tons of wood) / 0.01 (ton of wood/chair) = 20,000,000,000,000 chairs.

That's like 2800 chairs per man, woman, or child on the planet. Maybe then my daughters won't cover one of mine with legos and dolls.

Every major operating system allows multiple representations of the same path. For example, \Windows and C:\Windows or "/home" and ".." from my home folder in Linux. Casing is just one way that OSX and Windows allow differences, but path length, relative folders, character encoding, etc. can all create many possible paths to the same file as well. Any time you take a path from an untrusted source and perform operations on the file system based on this, you have a potential security problem. One defense is to run some validations against the canonical form of that path. It didn't happen here.

Not that converting to the canonical path is always straightforward, but I do think it's safe to say that this sort of problem is by no means specific to Windows or to casing in file paths. I am 100% sure that there are tools with similar security defects on *nix as well.

The novelization of Asimov's "Nightfall" had a preface along these lines. It's probable been 20 years since I read the book, so I won't get this completely correct, but in a nutshell, Asimov (or possibly Silverberg) pointed out that he could have gone out of his way to invent a new language and a new culture for the characters in his book. However, doing so wouldn't have added to the story. The story tells us something about humanity. He had to invent a specific star system to do this, and since it wasn't Sol, the main characters had to be alien to make the details work. But in every other way that mattered, the characters were us. Drastic changes to language or culture would have only muddled the underlying story. This preface changed how I viewed science fiction. I still prefer hard science to fantasy, but if the story has someone 500 years from now using modern-day idioms in dialog, I can live with that. It helps me understand their thoughts and actions, and that's why I'm reading it after all.

Perhaps because we no longer need to complete a game to feel a sense of accomplishment. When I played Super Mario Brothers, there was only one real goal; rescue the princess. The same game today would have a "100 Mystery Blocks" achievement, which means that I wouldn't necessarily have to make it to Bowser to feel like I've beat some aspect of the game.

Did you even read this article? The claim Wired is reporting about is that Windows 7 security isn't such a big leap over Vista that you can ditch your anti-virus software. They go on to conclude, "Clearly, the company is sensationalizing its findings in order to sell more anti-virus software.".