This is one of those times where you fail.

1 liter has a mass of 10^3 g
1ng = 10^-9 g
Therefore 44.7ng/L has a concentration of 44.7 * 10^-9 / 10^3
= 44.7 * 10^-6 / 10^6
= .0000447 ppm

Similarly, 152.2 ng/L is equivalent to .0001522 ppm.

I think the posters here have read the press release (or at least the summary) exactly as Microsoft hoped they would. But there's a lot less threat to Linux in this than it may seem. The news is that Microsoft and Amdocs have signed a blanket cross-licensing agreement and Amdocs has paid some money. That's it.

Should Amdocs' cafeteria be using Microsoft-patented techniques in making their breakfast burritos, that's cool now -- It's covered in the agreement (even if it's not likely). And if Amdocs is using Microsoft-patented technology in the Linux-based servers in its data centers, that's cool too -- even if it's not likely. The fact that Microsoft takes pains to mention it in their press release is pure spin.

I.e. nothing to see here.

Reading about this on Slashdot provides us with a clear source of inspiration in looking for ways to do this (marking) economically. Why not make marking of assignments, exams and papers a requirement for receiving your "degree"? The same could be done with tutoring, with senior students helping junior ones. This all scales very well, and reflects much of current practice at universities. The key difference is that the work is no longer paid, but goes towards earning your degree.

Meta-marking could also be built in to make the school mostly self-running (like Slashdot, or even better, Stackoverflow).

Gimp is an offensive term when used to refer to someone who is lame or handicapped. It may also evoke "the Gimp" from Pulp Fiction in some people's minds. However, it has other meanings, which are perfectly acceptable in polite conversation. Furthermore, it is a refreshingly straightforward, unforced, (indirectly) recursive acronym.

Personally, I am fine with the name and I picture the cute little whatever-it-is logo when I hear it, if I picture anything at all.

It's unlikely that a would-be assassin will learning the art of medical implant hacking in assassin school on the off chance that he'll one day have a target who just happens to have such an implant. As with today's black-hats, who focus on Windows over Linux (well, until the recent Mac headlines), their efforts will concentrate where they get the most leverage -- on cars. Even people who don't drive almost surely step into a car fairly regularly. The high-tech hacker-assassin may eschew the "old bomb under the chassis" bit, but why not a drive-by reprogramming of the ABS computer to disable the brakes when the car hits highway speed?

Great TED talk on this topic here

Can anybody make any sense of this passage from TFA?

Produce steam by heating air? I thought you got steam buy heating water. And what the hell is a cooling compressor. Doesn't air heat as it is compressed?

OK, I got the sarcasm out of the way. But really, I'd like to know how this really works and the articles explanation strikes me a pretty garbled. What is accomplished by heating the air, only to cool it? Or is the air really heated as it is compressed, then gets cooled under compression (in the heat exchanger) so that when it goes though an expansion valve the cooling effect results in condensation of the humidity?

I'm sure this device works fine but the poor explanation by a "science journalist" leaves a lot to the imagination.

There's that "up to" again. This is marketing speak. I make a point of mentally translating it to "never, under any circumstances, more than", or "between 0 and". Anybody who intends to give helpful information gives an average and possibly standard deviation, including whatever conditions needed to attain those figures. If your only intent is to promote your tech, you say "up to".

On another note, this is not likely to be used to provide drinking water where seawater or ground water high in salts is available. You'd get more bang for your wind power with desalination. On the other hand it could be very useful for drip irrigation, where salts remaining in desalinated water and even relatively good ground water present long term problems for agriculture as they accumulate over time to concentrations that no crops can tollerate.

IANAL, but I do play Devil's Advocate on Slashdot from time to time. So forgive me, mods, if I criticise this criticism of ID. It should not be taken as a defense of the indefensible. But I just can let such sloppy logic go unchallenged.

There are many versions of creationism besides the Christian ones. You'll have to do better than that to prove incompatibility

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The ID propenents are on very solid ground in their belief that something as complex as an eye, a flagellum or the blood clotting cascade could not evolve given that the partially formed proto-systems are useless. That is abolutely the case. The problem with ID is that this uselessness is not a given. It's not that a random process can result in an escape from a local optimum (which is true to a limited extent, but not really relevant here). It's that a partial eye is not useless. Nor a partial flagellum.

Not sure parent deserves a +5. Monsanto does not, in fact, sell pesticide resistant corn seeds. And if it did, the corn would be herbicide resistant, not insecticide resistant. Plants, including corn, are already insecticide resistant -- they're insecticides, after all.

Monstanto is working on pest resistant corn -- specifically, corn resistant to corn root worm. So, if the bees were actually eating the corn or the corn pollen, that might be something to look at.

The summary accurately says the "same base area", i.e. footprint. This is not the panel area. The GP is underwhelmed with this announcement for good reason. This is not a breakthrough in efficiency in anything except the area required to erect the structure. It doesn't make better use of available light. It just captures more by reaching higher, making adjacent areas less valuable or even useless for further solar installations.

They suggest these towers and other configurations as useful for locations where available footprint is limited, such as urban areas. I dread the day when I start seeing such structures, erected by neighbours, looming over my fence and blocking out the sunlight to my patio, garden or my own solar collectors.

Pardon me mods, but +4 informative? This is a terrible summary from someone who doesn't seem to have understood what he's read. The novel "cloudy-thing" aspect of the article's argument is the very part the parent misses when he dismisses this as "nothing new".

The cloud is an abstraction that intentionally hides detail. Cloud providers do that to make the service being offered simple to package, sell and use. They also do what they can to keep the tricks of their trade secret from competetors. But their infrastructure is actually very complex relative to what the average small to medium client would need for themselves. This is important in three ways:

1. 1) Your own engineers can't take all aspects of a deployment into account when making decisions.
2. 2) As a moderately sized company, using the cloud will expose you to the risks of emergent behaviour that would simply not be an issue on the smaller scale you would operate on if you ran your own infrastructure.
3. 3) Your system may be humming along smoothly one moment, then start thrashing disasterously the next in the absence of any action on your part and for no apparent reason, simply because your cloud provider has tweaked some seemingly innocuous parameter (even after extensive testing)

This is an important and novel issue and worthy of some real consideration.

I'd be modding this up if I had points right now.

Even if your servers are dedicated, they are part of an infrastructure that you not only don't control, but don't know much about. How the network is run is probably actually very closely guarded competetive business information for your cloud provider.