Yeah, that's a lot of punctuation. Why do they have a pre-teen for a CEO?

Well,for a long time chat applications seemed to be about the only examples of node.js in use, so maybe they have a point.

And where are you, Larry and Sergei? Waiting for the unpleasantness to just go away? Shivering under the covers with the rest of your lot? Shame on you. It is nearly too late to call your side, and we are all waiting.

"Seconds to midnight" is a great unit of probability.
5% probability every minute. Conveniently, a 95% probability (2 sigma) is "One Minute To Midnight".

Or if the higgs is at 2.4 sigma now, its 24 seconds to midnight.
And, its energy is about a quarter microfirkin-microfurlong!

I vote we adopt these new doomsday units into the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight (FFF) system, so that we can say "That's 3 minutes to midnight!" to mean "That's an 85% probability!"

Proud Italian Americans tend to say, that once Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered.

But that's not a good analogy for IBM's contribution to the PC. The fact is that the PC was already there, and had a decent market, and was starting to make dramatic inroads into small and medium businesses thanks to the PC's first killer-app VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program). This program first ran on the AppleII and propelled Apple from a small (actually fairly dominant) enthusiast company to Silicon Valley's latest wunderkind. This was well before IBM got into the marketplace. But everyone knew they would, considering the surge, and the rapidly expanding business market. The thing was that at the time, IBM's entry was met with quite a bit of disappointment. We were all expecting great things, but that was decidedly not what the 1st IBM PC was. A run of the mill CPU married to an also-ran OS. Not a step forward so much as a step sideways. Also a significant departure was that none of this stuff was actually developed by IBM, but by Intel, and an unknown snot-nosed kid with a bad haircut, who's mom was on IBM's board at the time. And yet, it was destined to become a huge thing. The technology decision makers in business were certainly no more savvy then than they are now. Why did it take off? "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was what was often said.

So, as it turns out, the singular thing that IBM contributed to the PC was its logo.

I'm assuming you're talking about the US.
Contrary to the incessant, shrill whining, its more like 30%, which is quite a bit lower than the 7-major-OECD average. For 40% you have to go to the UK. Germany's 45%. And boy, does their economy suck!
Here:

Oh yeah "best practices". This results, taken as a whole, in the biggest pile of crap ever devised by man. The exceptions are few enough to be thought of as fortunate accidents.

What people refer to as "engineering" in the software world would have long ago brought our industrial revolution to its knees.

What people refer to as "CS math" would have brought science to its knees if scientists payed any serious attention.

Luckily, with our "sharing culture" and "gift economy", the crap tends to find its place, and so do the gems.

Do something worthwhile wether your degree is in CS, math or English lit. Seriously.

There are plenty of libraries for doing this kind of thing (object tracking). Doing it with video processing is definitely the way to go though, because other than a camera and a substantial computer (or FPGA or GPU), its all software which is freely replicated, and easier to come by if you have more people with time and talent than money. Its also a lot harder to fool. Radar is basically obsolete, limited to speed only, and easy to dispute. If you track objects (cars), you can also factor in rapid acceleration/deceleration, extreme lane-changes, other things that you can update with software, like accident detection even. The OCR on the license plate is only to figure out who to send the ticket to. The speed, acceleration, etc is all done by tracking the whole car(s). Its a nice project for state-of-the-art geekery, and will have lots of non-traffic-related applications. If the only video that makes it out of the system are the snippets containing violations as determined by software, it could be made hard to use this system for general people tracking. Hard being a relative term, of course.

Oh, and its Cairo, right? No traffic lights, no enforcement, reckless speeding, sea of pedestrians. Its gotta be Cairo.
Libertarians need to spend a week or two in Cairo to see how their ideas work in practice. Its not all bad, actually. Just extreme. I love Cairo.

I've never met a Libertarian who neglected to tell me what to do.

I'm not sure you're very familiar with Ayn Rand or her cult. Or maybe its hard to see it as such unless you're looking at it from the outside.

I'm wondering how much 'ol T. Boone had to do with the aforementioned study.

Natural gas is fossil fuel. There are sustainable, renewable, carbon-neutral ways of getting it, but this is not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is dumping sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere, and long (or medium) term, that's pretty primitive thinking in my book.

It would mean more giant piles of money for T. Boone if he manages to get his way. He's good at it too.

Sorry, but Rand's philosophy is all about not having people tell her what to do. Other than that, it was pretty much her telling people what to do. Its a subtle distinction, but it does illustrate a common characteristic of people who identify themselves as Libertarians.

Yeah, the VW bug was excellent in the snow if you learned how to drift it around corners. You had to initiate a controlled slide, because if it was ever initiated for you unexpectedly, the rear would sligshot past the front so fast, there was little left to do but pray.

That and driving with the windows cracked open and no heat to slow down the frost build-up on the inside of the windshield, and always carrying a lighter so you can melt a little peep-hole in the windshield to see through while driving 65 down the highway.

Good times.

Only in as far as state and federal laws allow gumball machines to do such things.
The gumball machine does not have constitutional rights, dammit!