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I literally wrote hand-written letters to IBM asking questions about BASIC.

Later: Borland Pascal came with a glorious full bookshelf of printed documention, and instant-access context sensitive help within the (console mode) IDE.

Why?

Did that happen?

Not really.

Electrons do have mass, but a device powered by an electric current will generally have the electrons flowing out at the same rate that they flow in.

> poultry feathers or hog hair

Yum! I'm not sure the truth is all that much less disgusting than the myth.

If these points are true, then why has X been spun off into a separate entity (just "X", under the Alphabet holding company, with increasing separation from Google)?

If you're talking about making a map of the astrophysical or cosmological backgrounds of gravitational waves -- you're right. As you integrate (i.e. capture more data), the noise will tend to cancel out while the signal will reinforce itself. But the problem is that the signal-to-noise-ratio is so small -- essentially zero -- that, with current detector sensitivity, it would take literally forever to get an image with any features at all.

> Does that mean Apple is worth less than its market cap?

Yes.

Obligatory shuttle reading: http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

> quicksort O(log(n)).

Quicksort is O(n log n) average case and O(n^2) worst-case.

> It's the top of the bell curve that matters.

I think that this attitude has gotten us into a pretty big mess.

I take it you haven't read "Go Set a Watchman"...

> at least one having MD License Plates

Don't vehicles used by federal agencies typically bear U.S. Government license plates?

It's the Department of Computer Science, not the Department of Programming.

Lost 76% of its value... And still valued at nearly a billion dollars.

Regular expressions strike me as a far more fundamental CS concept than Unicode.

Doing laundry in Poland, I was grateful for the standard icons, whose meaning a quick Google search revealed.

The standardized laundry icons are way better than the alternative (no standard icons, or verbose text in a potentially foreign language).

SkyMall is back!

Jarringly different in style than the rest of the site.

>>I'm a junior college student doing some side projects[0] while taking 21 credits, jogging daily, going to mandatory club events, etc. Those except side projects take more than 40 hrs/week so I guess I have even less time for side projects than you.<<

You're assuming that the OP doesn't have a family or other responsibilities. I suspect that you'll look back on junior college, even with 21 credits and mandatory club events, as a time of carefree existence and plentiful free time.

In the United States, for example.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/who-owns-patent-right...

Another question: How do you develop a side project when your employer insists that it owns all intellectual property you produce?

Edit: As far as I know this is a very standard clause in tech company employment contracts, and is perhaps the legal default even in the absence of such a clause. For example, see "Employed to invent" under http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/pre-invention-assignm... .

California is an exception to the above: here employees may retain the rights to IP they create on their own time, not using resources of their employer (including company laptop), and, importantly, not in the same line of business as their employer. In the tech field, the "same line of business" caveat can be killer.

Since it's a character in Unicode's "private use area," its correct rendering is unspecified. (That code point's "use and interpretation may be determined by private agreement among cooperating users" according to the Unicode standard.)

Apparently Apple uses U+F8FF, part of the Unicode "Private Use Area", to represent its logo. It's not surprising that it fails to render on non-Apple platforms, given this warning in http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/CORPCHA... :

  # The following (1) is for the Mac OS Roman encoding
  # (also used in Symbol & Croatian).
  # NOTE: The graphic image associated with the Apple logo character is
  # not authorized for use without permission of Apple, and unauthorized
  # use might constitute trademark infringement.
  0xF8FF	# Apple logo # Roman-0xF0, Symbol-0xF0, Croatian-0xD8

Additional references: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/OSX/unicode_apple_logo.html http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/f8ff/index.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas

Confusingly, my browser renders that symbol () as a... square.

A classical particle can't literally "take every path at once." But fundamental particles - electronics, photons, etc - are governed by quantum mechanics, in which they really consist of a wave of probability amplitude. These really do "explore all possible paths".

"Economies of scale" when tunneling through solid rock?

Perhaps for compatibility with the rest of the Swiss rail network?

https://store.google.com/product/nexus_5x is a bit smaller.