This is going to be awesome fight.

Or vicious gangs of Keep Left signs

I know anecdotes are not statistics but I slapped Win7 on my custom built PC and it just worked. It was extremely easy. I did not have much oddball hardware attached, but neither were any of the components Win7 certified.

Sure, there's the pain of reinstalling apps and waiting for Steam to download my game collection. But that's not really the point.

Slashdot is just a Selection Effect with nerd rage

As someone else said, there are no blind spots as such, over a long enough period of time.

Gaia will build an astrometric/photometric catalogue of all objects from mag 7ish down to mag 20 + a little bit. This is about 10^9 objects, some of which will be solar system objects. So yes it will see many objects which are could be a problem. It will almost certainly be in contact with the Minor Planet Center.

However there are better telescopes for doing this sort of object detection (LSST etc), although the final astrometry will be better from Gaia if enough observations can be made - this is certainly going to help ephemeris calculation.

Unlikely! Gaia will not be launched until 2012.

What? Pagers were around long long before SMS even existed. They just were never in the mass-market communication space that SMSs dominate now since they were not 'peer to peer', at least not in the most common form

Thank Weis and Hickman for that.