The first sentence is wrong. Last June isn't when American TV stations began broadcasting in digital; it's when they (mostly) stopped broadcasting in analogue. The vast majority of stations had been broadcasting in both modes for years, until the overlap period ended last year. The remaining analogue exceptions are low-power community/educational/religious stations, who face a later deadline to cut over to digital.

Seeing "PricewaterhouseCoopers" always sets my teeth on edge. One of the predecessor firms was called "Price Waterhouse", so it makes no sense that the capital "W" got demoted to lower case while the capital "C" in "Coopers" did not. If they insist on going with a name formed by WordsJammedTogether, at least they could have made it PriceWaterhouseCoopers, with a capital "W".

Of course, we must also pay tribute to creators of the fictional band "Spinal Tap" (sorry, can't put an umlaut over the "n"), who mocked fatuous punctuation before it was cool to do so.

Quite a telling analogy used by the former headmaster: pupils portrayed as mere inert goods in the shop, not as its customers.

Is there some British confusion evident in this interview? The SAT (that's snigular "SAT", not "SATs" as in England) has three components, *each* of which has a top score of 800), so a guaranteed improvement of 150 points (out of 2400, not 800) is not as relatively impressive as the bracketed editorial comments imply.

The private vs. gov't-run nature of the prison in this story is a red herring. The real problem is that very dangerous violent criminals were serving time in a medium-security prison (which happened to be administered by a private company via an outsourcing arrangement) instead of in a maximum-security facility. Two of the three escapees were convicted murderers (one serving a life sentence), and the other one was an attempted murderer. Clearly, a medium-security facility was inappropriate for these three men, and their escape plan could just as easily succeeded if they had been incarcerated in a government-run medium-security prison. The real failing of the system was how they ended up getting assigned to a lower-than-warranted tier of incarceration. I don't believe the private contractors who run such prisons have any say in who gets sentenced to what level of prison; that error was made by the Arizona Department of Corrections or the Arizona judicial system.

Any idea what it does to the weight? Liquids tend to be heavy, and I suspect that the average soldier cares more about reducing weight than about reducing bulk, all other things being equal. If the new suit gives more protection but also weighs substantially more than its predecessor, it might not get used as much as it could be. But a technology that reduced weight AND bulk AND kinetic damage would be welcome indeed.

Vinny,

Why exactly would the CIA (or the US gov't in general) be motivated to kill Bob Marley?

How is it that .edu and .mil are described as the "biggest generic top-level domains"? In what way are .net and .com not generic TLDs?

You also had the misfortune of driving in the only (contiguous) state west of the Mississippi that still has unreasonably low freeway speed limits. Every other western state has limits of 75 or 70 mph (plus a few interstates in Texas and Utah where the limit is 80).