Just a thought - but if SOPA can be used to silence debate, this must apply just as much to the political as to the scientific process.

I think that if you were to target politician's private websites and any websites associated with congress using SOPA then you might quickly find the act repealed!

Good point but enhancing an existing line to improve capacity and speed is far more problematic than building a new line on a greenfield site. I think they realised that after comparing the success of HS1 (Channel tunnel to London) when compared with the West Coast main line upgrade that was taking place at the same time.

- There is a finite limit to the number of trains you can run down any stretch of track. Once you reach that limit (which is quite close on existing track) You have limited options to increase capacity:-

    > Make the trains/platforms longer. Good in theory, but requires major changes to existing infrastructure. (Demolition of existing buildings in town centres) Changes in track layout, particularly at terminus stations. Changes in signalling (for longer trains).

  > Double decker trains. This requires a change in the loading gauge of the lines. A particular problem in the UK that has a smaller existing track gauge than Europe. This is why double decker trains are widespread in Europe and non-existent in the UK: there simply isn't the room for them. Changing the gauge basically means rebuilding the entire railway, with all the disruption that brings. (i.e. rebuild bridges, overhead lines, all track-side structures, track alignment, platforms....)

Building an entirely new line brings you all of the benefits of longer platforms, double decker trains, and a much higher speed. All without causing any significant disruption to existing lines. It's cheaper in the long run. And it provides a much bigger increase in total capacity and resilience for the money.

In the same league as Alan Turing, or Ada Lovelace, or Charles Babbage...?

Which one of those has had the biggenst influence on technology as we use it in out daily lives today?

Ada Lovelace and Chares Babbage - built, or tried to buiild a mechanical difference engine in the 19th Century. Interesting. Yes. Important from a purely theoretical point of view. Yes. Impact on current technology and society, probably a lot less than Steve Jobs.

Alan Turing - seminal work on computability. the halting problem, turing machine, not to mention his work at Bletchley park on the Engima Machine. Arguably more important than Jobs when you look at the theoretical underpinnings of modern computer science. Someone else might have come along 5 or 10 years after and provided the same insights, but he was first. If he had not been at Bletchley Park, the Germans could have won the second world war - or it could have dragged on for a lot longer. That would have made a huge difference to modern society.

But really Jobs wasn't in the same class as these people. It's like comparing apples to oranges (pun intended). He was never a theroetical, head in the clouds, computer scientist. he was a businesman first and foremost with a very good intution as to what the market would want if he gave it to them. (as opposed to what the market/a focus group would have said it wanted) He was a leader in that sense.

If you want to compare Jobs to anyone, look at Henry Ford, Thomas Watson (IBM), (even, arguably Bill Gates, Lee Gerstener,Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.) You can't ignore the fact that he took Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable (more or less) corporation in the world in 14 years, and along the way produced some of the most iconic pieces of technology of our time.

Will Jobs be as well remembered in 50 or 100 years time as Babbage/Turing/Lovelace? Only time will tell

I though you guys in the US were meant to have a constitutionally-enforced separation of church and state.

How long before this issue ends up in the SCOTUS?

Seriously, the support for creationism in the US is making it a laughing stock of the scientific community.
No serious scientist believes in quasi-mystical bullshit about creationism.
Stop abusing your children by teaching it to them as if it were accepted fact.

The theory of evolution is one of the cornerstones of modern biology (and as important in its own field as Newton's theory of Gravity, Einstein's theory of relativity or Maxwell's laws of Electromagentism). There is so much of what can be observed in the world around us that is fully explained by the theory of evolution. Creationism is not a useful explanation of the world around us. As far as I know it makes no predictions or hypotheses that can be proved by experiment.

Does creationism tell us why antibiotic-resistant bacteria have developed? Or do they think that God is punishing us all for some misdeed?

...we could invest an minuscule fraction of the resources involved in going to the moon to mine 3He in investigating Adrian Rossi's claimed breakthrough cold fusion device (sorry in case the Cold Fusion though police are around, let's call it Low Energy Nuclear Reactions).

I was very sceptical about this when it came on the radar at the start of the year. But all the accounts so far suggest that he does seem to have a real device that produces significant amounts of energy (heat) using a non-chemical process, and in a very consistent and reproducible fashion and which he intends to commercialize in the fairly near term. All the reports I have seen would suggest that it has stood up to examination and investigation by respected sceptics - if it is a scam, then it's an incredibly good one.

Of course, the final proof is when I can replace the boiler in my house with one of Rossi's devices. But that it starting to look increasingly likely with each passing week.

So do you still want to go mining 3He on the moon?

I think this depends on your device - providers have very limited scope to mess with the software on the iPad (yes they could force you to install an App, but if that were the case I would tell my provider where to go).

As for ROM upgrade - not an issue for the provider on iPad/iPhone/iPod as it comes from Apple and is nothing to do with the provider.

I could put this in terms of an iPod Touch vs iPhone debate: I owned an iPod Touch for three years. A great MP3 player, and it was handy having access to the web via WiFi, but I was still carrying around a Blackberry for e-mail (although BB useless for web).

Having upgraded to a iPhone last year I wouldn't go back: it's one less device to carry around, and that's a huge plus. Add to that the location-awareness of the iPhone (GPS, compass) . Web access pretty much anywhere (at least anywhere that you have 3G/EDGE and a data contract). A semi-decent camera than means I rarely carry my compact camera any more (yet another device to not carry around).

For the iPad I would go with 3G if the cost wasn't too much of an issue for you. Not everywhere has Wi-Fi, or if they do they want more than the monthy cost of a SIM card for an hour's use. If you are on the move then 3G is the only way to go.

Tethering is always a compromise - yes there is one less SIM/data contract to worry about. But tethering is never quite as seamless as it promises, and then you are running down the battery on both devices at the same time. Or your provider doesn't allow you to tether.

Battery Trashed?

Remember this isn't a Windows notebook. In my experience Mac batteries last a lot longer than the crap you get with most PC's.

For example - the 22 month old Macbook I am writing this on is currently showing that the battery is still at 95% of its design capacity after being used every day (271 charge cycles). It certainly good for 4-5 hours on battery use still.

Unless you have been really abusing the Mac it should still be good for 90% design charge, and 4-5 hours.

Of course if you install Windows you will probably only get half of that. But that's your choice (or your wife's)

I would agree with the "Do .net because that's where the money with".

I've had 30 years expericens in the computer industry, and probably programmed in more languages than most people have hot dinners.

Yes, you can try and stick with a particular OS or language (usually, in my experience, because it's what you already know, rather than because it is best)
I've done that with OSes and languages inthe past, but if there is no market for them, and the paychecks don't come in, well, go and learn something new.

I've done that serveral times in my career. However, previous experience is rarely wasted. It's always useful to be able to compare why a certain OS feature works a certain way in Windows or MacOS compared to Linux/Solaris/VMS/OS/360 and a few other OS's I've probably forgotten about.

I feel sorry for anyone who has only known a Windows/C# development environment, but there are a lot of things in .Net, especially the newer incarnations such as 4.0 that are actually quite exciting/useful: implementations of generics, lambda functions, LINQ, MVVM design pattern to name a few. Stuff I learnt about in CS classes nearly 30 years ago, but only now am I starting to see in mainstream development (Well you can argue about closures and Perl or LISP and how mainstream there were, and you would be right to do so, however...)

I like being able to just declare List or ObservableCollection. I'm sure I could implement these from scratch, given time. I'm well aware of the implementation differences between Hashtable and List (I've implemented a few in my time). I've been there, and I don't need to spend several more weeks of my life implementing and testing them when I can use what comes out of the box.
 

There was an article a few weeks ago on how people have died through following their GPS into Death Valley, then getting into trouble - no water, no cellphone coverage, very high temperatures. Go figure.

Really?
I've had a 1st Gen IPod Touch in daily use for three years now. There is not noticable degradation of battery life.
Not saying there isn't any (I'm sure there must be), but nothing that you would notice.
And if the battery does die, it's easy enough to get it replaced.

The beauty of a swiss army knife is that it can be always to hand (or in pocket). I could carry around a set of screwdrivers, knives, scissors, tweezers, toothpick, biro, bottle opener, allen keys and torx wrench. I could wear a pair of trousers with pockets large enough to accomodate all of these tools.

Then normal people would no doubt cross the road to avoid me!

Why bother with a Gearbox? It should not be needed with an electric motor.

I recall that Tesla started off with a 2-speed gearbox. They abandoned it when they found that it was unnecessary and just added complexity and weight.