Does patrolling our harbors for terrorists, spies, and underwater mines count?

The number you are quoting is the solar constant, as measured by satellite.

The number the grandparent is quoting is the average atmospheric insolation over all of Earth for a calendar year. I found a nice calculator provided by NASA that generates "a numerical table of monthly latitude insolation at top-of-atmosphere for a given calendar year" that backs up his provided average of ~342 W/m^2 -- see the bottom right.

I don't know about best, but I think Mandelbrot has already figured out the prettiest.

The word you are looking for is 'infamous'.

My guess would be that they used an atomic clock and very, very big Vernier calipers.

Well, at least then they could've used Rockapella for echolocation...

You see, exomorons have their stupidity on the outside, so we can determine at a glance that they're idiots. For our normal everyday endomorons, we have to talk to them for a while or observe their actions. If we can find some exomorons, we may be able (at a later date) to cross-breed them with endomorons and save everyone else a lot of time. Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion that there may be selective pressures against displaying one's stupidity for all to see, so any species we create that does so may be doomed to extinction. I can only hope we make all the endomorons extinct first...

Ars did an article on attempting to trace one such oft-quoted figure of losses, and slashdot discussed it. This $42 billion figure is probably from the same source.

tl;dr: big-dollar piracy numbers probably come from some unsubstantiated source from 1993 or earlier.

You're mostly correct, in that it is the longest and most well-known, but slightly wrong about it being the only one open to the public. Though I agree that riding on maglev trains is cool (did it at the Japan '05 Expo), riding on a minibus driven by a stuffed toy was more fun. :)

In retrospect, "The tiger is cast" would have been cooler for Caesar to say before crossing the Rubicon...

This brings up an interesting point. The Netflix algorithm is working from flawed/incomplete data generated from poor design decisions, so no matter how good the algorithm gets it still won't be able to accurately predict what movies will actually interest people based on a very subjective unidimensional rating. For example, the same person might rate a movie differently under differing conditions, and the rating itself may hinge entirely on one thing in the movie (s)he did(n't) like, whereas the movie might have been overall pretty good. It's like asking someone, 'on a scale of 1 to 5, what is your favorite color?'; it has next to no relation to its supposed objective.

On top of all this, people are capricious at best when it comes to movie tastes; they might not even like a movie based on its own merits, but something completely orthogonal to the question such as it being the movie they saw on their first date. As such, no set of ratings from any given user can really be accurately matched with those of another to provide suggestions, since they may have liked/hated those movies for entirely separate reasons. Granted, some of these things can't easily be transcribed into data for formulaic processing, but you'd think Netflix could at least add an optional 'detailed rating' section (e.g., rate by pace, plot, action, acting, dialogue, etc.) to better describe why a user did or didn't like a flick.

You'll probably be off by a day. The shipped product will invariably be older than a daily snapshot from the 23rd, so it is very likely that Win7 will have to download the most recent Windows Defender definitions if nothing else.

Well, some people just can't tolerate intolerance.

If I thought my feet were going to be stepped on, I would still pick the elephant before a woman in stilettos.