I've lived south of Seattle for 30 years, and predictions like these have been coming for years and years. I've personally felt 2 earthquakes, and seen dust from Mt. Saint Helens. While this doesn't minimize the likelihood of another big earthquake, I just question the reason this is news - especially on /.

I lived in New Orleans for 15 years, and predicitions that a massive hurricane with flooding would cripple the city had been coming for years. I'd personally felt half a dozen hurricanes, had my house flooded, and been evacuated on no less than 4 occasions.

While this doesn't minimize the likelihood of another big hurricane, I just question the reason why this is news or that anyone would be prepared for it.

And that's why no one was ready in New Orelans either. We had family that was very prepared and family that was horribly unprepared. Fortunately for us, the family that was unprepared didn't see hardly any damage.

A password written on a piece of paper is not a good password. It may be a complex password, but it is never a good one.

The GP's point is very valid, you cannot force a user to create a good password.

The USPS is funded by postage revenue, not tax dollars. As they have been losing money, you may have heard the disucssions about whether or not to reduce delivery from the current 6 days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service - About the USPS

10 Print "No"
20 Goto 10

Please hand over your geekbadge...

10 Print "No"
20 Goto 10

So Johnny 5 didn't want to be turned into assembly code?

Can't blame him, I wouldn't want that either.

IANAL, but what unlawful activity/felony are they committing/intending to commit?

Also, when you sign contracts at most places that ask for a SSN, they say things like "we will collect certain pieces of information about you and hold them forever" - isn't that the consent needed?

Isn't the real issue that with a Unique Identifier for you, it's trivial to open many type of financial transactions in your name?

But you have context for all of these examples. What field are you studying, the name of the constant, even the fact that it is a constant are all context.

Your examples would all be better searches just by putting in "math" or "source code constant" as a way of narrowing the results. You wouldn't take the answer to an equation and go "aha, I'm got a 14 significant digit result, but I'll round it off to a number with lots of possible uses, no context, and see what I get." You wouldn't take "75.013895789014" as your result, put in 75.01, and expect a result. You'd either put in a number with few significant digits, multiple uses, and add context, or have a truly unique (to you) number.

I'll bite.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mole+of+sodium+chloride+in+grams - seems to work just fine searching for "mole of sodium chloride in grams" and also works without the "in grams".

http://www.bing.com/search?q=mole+of+sodium+chloride+in+grams - works for Bing too.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=sodium+chloride+molecular+weight - also works.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=58.44+science - "58.44 science" 6th one down. Better results from google.

Why would anyone just type in a number and expect it to know that you want the molecular weight of NaCl? If you add a little bit of context to your search, it magically works.

2009 (Year ending June 30, 2009) - 14.57B net income
2008 - 17.68B net income
2007 - 14.07B net income

GP was comparing 2008 (last year) numbers to 2007 numbers. Microsoft released their 2009 numbers on July 30. He's really not that out of line.

Your article is interesting, but conveniently ignores every other company, not just every other large tech company in this environment. Like all companies right now, they're trimming expenses to go slim.

In short, revenues are down for most companies, leading to lower income. Whether this is a short or long term trend remains to be seen, but companies usually try to keep the expenses they can contain at a certain % of revenue, and adjust accordingly.

That's interesting - and you're right, based on the price points, it seems a user should just get the XP version and then install Ubuntu (as long as the user capable of installing Ubuntu).

Now, it should be less, but how much less? Full cost of license ($65 per this discussion) seems to be what you get back.

Is the labor involved in installing Ubuntu more than or less than XP at the enterprise level? I really don't know what's involved from a timing standpoint at the mass-install level for either, so this may be a wash.

Did your Ubuntu laptop come with all of the crapware from vendors that are paying Dell? If not, that's money they're not making on the Ubuntu laptop, so it wouldn't be the full $65 less.

Does it come with the standard support contract where you have X years to call them/send to them/etc? I would assume that they have fewer Linux support staff than Windows support staff, so are you paying a subsidy for that, or did they already attempt to put it in the price?

Or are they just seeing an opportunity to cater to a different group of consumers, while making a higher profit margin on those machines?

Center on the word DDF

"Practice was challenged by the DDF, a group representing newspaper interests"

From that, we can determine that - this is going to be about fair use/copyright, newspapers will shoot themselves in the foot to try to stay relevant^W afloat, and that we should all go to using 10 word snippets, to be safe.

There are two main reasons why my family eats primarily organic fruits and vegetables.

1 (the small reason) - My wife, son, and I like the taste better. Significantly. Additionally, since it does go bad faster (for us), we're forced to buy an approrpriate amount of fruit/vegetables, and we don't go through the "toss out those 6 tomatoes we bought and then decided not to have a salad that week" syndrome. I go to the store more frequently and buy less, which works for our situation, maybe not yours.

2 (the HUGE reason) - Pesticides. Not so much for my wife and I, but for my son. He has a condition which does not allow him to process toxins normally, and they seep through his stomach lining and pass through the blood-brain barrier. All kinds of scary stuff shows up on his tests, and something (I don't know if it's this or something else, the doctors don't either unfortunately) is severely impacting his speech development.

Now, I don't know whether toxins or pesticides are directly causing any of that, but I do know that the levels of pesticides, heavy metals, and other fun chemicals are off the chart in his lab tests. They are at normal levels for both my wife and I. Since we have switched to organic, they have been slowly coming down. This may be causal, this may be correlational, but you know what - I don't care. If it helps my son, I'll do it.

If you want to eat organic, by all means do so. The main change I found in friends who wanted to eat organic (more anecdotes) is that they eat more fruit and vegetables than they used to. So maybe that's their health benefit - not that these fruits/vegetables are healthier, but that they've made a healthier choice in general.

Almost - until you realize that the vampires in Twilight ARE diamonds. They're tough to break They sparkle They're cold And the emotionally unstable lead female in the "story" will do anything for them.

Visible Light = Light which falls in the part of the spectrum that our eyes can see. They're talking about the wavelengths of the light.

It's slashdot, the parties are overwhelmingly attaended by a bunch of sticks.