Well, i live in Estonia. My apartment has a steel door with a steel frame bolted into the concrete. And it opens to the outside. I don't think it could be breached with a battering ram. You would need a heavy duty saw to cut the hinges and the deadbolt, or the frame bolts. Explosives, maybe, but no human powered device would be effective. This configuration is fairly common here, to discourage the break-ins.

Signs covered with snow (or other stuff) are fairly common in winter where i live. But our Traffic law says, that if the sign is unreadable, you can ignore it. If it's a speed limit sign, you just go with the universal speed limit (50 km/h in towns and 90 elsewere). So it should not be a problem for the automatic sign reading system.

I'm not blocking ads, because i'm an a***ole, but mainly because of the security concerns. Until the ad networks start to seriously screen stuff that goes out there, i'm going to block any ads i can. Also, a lot of the ads are intrusive, use flash, javascript and whatnot. So the browsing experience is also a concern for me. I really hate it when i have to close a million browser windows, that have popped up trying to sell me stuff i really don't need, or the ads that cover most (or all in some cases) of the text i'm interested in, and i have to go and search the close button instead of starting to consume the content. I don't really mind the small text-based ads that appear here and there, so i don't block those. All the others are going to be blocked, even if i have to write a custom filter for them. So the message to the content providers and also the ad networks: if you want us not to block your ads, make them look and play nice. And relevant.

Search without a warrant, the evidence would not be admissible in the court.

What about the "standing the ground" laws?

As far as i understand it, the appeals are for figuring out whether your trial was fair or not. If you plead guilty, there is no trial, hence you have nothing to appeal against. So pleading guilty indeed limits your options. In USA You can appeal up to the supreme court, in Europe even up to the European court of Human Rights. If you plead guilty, you accept your sentence and that's it.

Worst case that i saw personally: a vendor asked 7000 € (a bit over 8000 $USD) for a Windows 7 compatible version of their software. The software is used to program a laser cutter. What do you think the CEO of the company told me, when i asked if we could upgrade? Of course we are keeping the XP alive...

Nope, i have some clients (i do small/medium business IT support for a number of clients) who still do keep alive xp machines. The top of the corporate food chain is getting new machines, old ones trickle down the corporate ladder, lowest positions are getting 5-7 years old desktops and notebooks (with Xp of course). Even had to upgrade a few of them - new batteries, 1GB RAM replaced with 2 etc. Those machines will be used until the hardware fails. And 1 client even has a few NT4 boxes still running, used as a Remote Desktop terminal. Another one uses XP and NT4 PC-s to run industrial machinery (CNC, Laser cutters). So XP isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Nor is NT4. And a few ghosts of the 98 have been reported too.... Legacy hardware is a bitch.

They should first get the ones they have right. My native language is available in google translator, but it can't get even the simpler phrases right. Always a good chuckle, when someone had tried to translate a longer text. There was a wave of phishing messages recently, where you could tell the text was translated using google, and that was the one of the reasons why the attempt failed miserably.

Luckily most linux distributions nowadays come with a simple GUI for the package management system (Software Center in the Ubuntu for example), that have the simple "search, click install, enter password, done" process. Password is the same password users log in with (sudo rights). And how is it easier with the Windows installing packages not in the official repos? Both in windows or in linux you have to find the app (nowadays the serious software vendors have linux versions on their download pages), download the installer/package, double click the file and install. And also, if you don't want to cleanup the Windows box every other week, you set it up similar to the linux: user will log in in with the rights of a standard user, and has a separate administrative account to install software/hardware. Thanks to the UAC, user does not have to switch accounts, just enters the administrator credentials when asked.

And the best part - apt-get upgrade updates ALL your software you installed via apt, in windows you have to run every single application to use their own separate update feature, or in the worst case, you have to go through this process: go to the website, download the updated version, install, next, you have to remove the old version, start the install again, now the system is waiting for the pending reboot, reboot, install, next, some old registry records are in the way, install a third party registry cleaning app, clean the registry, install, now the WinSxS store is corrupted, repair your windows, bang your head against the wall a few times, install, installer gives a cryptic error message, google the message, find out that other people have a similar problem, but nobody has a solution, give up and continue working with the old, version potentially vulnerable to attacks.

It's because of the shared resources/libs. And in case of Windows also because of the abomination known as .NET and the registry. In ye olde days, all the libs, config files and executables needed for the application were contained in the applications directory (hell, in some cases everything was contained in the executable itself), nowadays Microsoft has restricted access to the programs directory, configurations are stored in registry, there are shared features that have to go to a specific system-wide accessible place, some nonsense with the dcom, com+ and .net, some applications want to run as a system service etc.

Problem is, that this self-correcting mechanism does not always reach out from the "inner circle" of the scientists. So in the end the average Joe will believe a guy/gal who wrote a better book/made a better movie. And sometimes it's not the true science that reaches the people (Ancient aliens, Homeopathy, anti-vaccines movement, creationism etc.). Scientists know it's a load of male bovine excrement, but because the Joe Average does not read the science magazines, he will believe this. And in the end, he's really the one who's votes will count (there are just a lot more of them than scientists).

So her body parts have more talent than she has? Parts of the sum are greater than the whole?

The article you linked left out the point Neill deGrasse Tyson was trying to make: the quote goes like this: