Ok. So what all those ads mean is that all the work is done in California, unless it is done somewhere else. I get it now.

But but but... For weeks now, Apple has been running huge ads telling me that their development work is done in California. I never figured out why I would care about that, but they assured me it was really important. Now you're telling me they are lying???? How could Apple do that to me??

Assuming the city really is making money (and I agree that needs to be determined), what is wrong with using red light cameras to do that? If people want to make a voluntary contribution to the city coffers, let them go ahead. There is no need to run red lights - if someone decides to do so, and accepts the risks and penalties, that is their right (at least to the point where they put someone else at risk).

Watfor/Watfiv. QED and its predecessors. TRofff/Nroff and their predecessors. And lots more.

We have always assumed that humans are essentially a very sophisticated and complex version of the most sophisticated technology we know. Once it was mechanical clockwork, later steam engines, electrical motors, etc. Now it is digital logic - put enough of it in a pile, and you'll get consciousness and intelligence. A completely non-disprovable claim, of course, but I doubt that it is any more accurate than previous ideas.

I have been investigating the state of the maple syrup industry for a number of years now. I have determined that this year a new record was achieved - it was at least the 243rd successive worst year in history for maple syrup production. (The best year in history occurs approximately three times per decade on average.)

Why in the world would one be "proud" of a crater? It is a fact (maybe). It happened a long time ago. No one had anything to do with it. What is there to be "proud" of??

OK - this study: https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=chronic%20illness%20canada&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CFUQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gpiatlantic.org%2Fpdf%2Fhealth%2Fchroniccanada.pdf&ei=VBN6T4-5N8rp0QHn3vGoDQ&usg=AFQjCNFkNG2k1ReuE_oxF-pMf78NLvowgg&sig2=g7Vzwd5KJiWRC0tr1_UfAQ&cad=rja says 35% of deaths in Canada are due to heart disease, stroke, and atherosclerosis, 29% to cancer, etc. The study isn't directly comparable to the CDC study, since the methodologies differ, but the numbers are fairly comparable.

The article is talking about comparing US and Canadian hospital outcomes. Why do you think your reference would explain this? I doubt that there is very much difference between lifestyle-related chronic disease issues in the US and Canada.

No - most of the work in most modern code is done in the (presumably) highly-optimized libraries. The application-specific code typically has little effect on performance. (The application design probably does, though.) That's a lot of the reason programming isn't as interesting as it used to be. Young uns just don't know what they missed.

Donald Knuth made this point in 1971, in his Empircal Study of Fortran Programs - virtually none of most programs has any significant effect on performance.

The rest of the world tends to follow more sensible date conventions - by increasing significance (14-3-2012) or by decreasing significance (2012-3-14). The latter works best for sorting.

Slashdot seems to post a lot of stories about improved solar cells, but solar cells never seem to improve.

Only if you can find some way to make the economics work, and we don't seem to be able to do that. Most people do not want to push wheelchairs and wipe butts for a living, and even those jobs are being substantially automated. Virtually all manual labor can be eliminated with current or easily foreseeable technology, and our society doesn't like paying people who don't work, needed or not.