It's a very simple, even lower-tech approach. Unstable molecules are unstable, stable ones aren't. Life isn't capable of producing stable molecules from stable molecules. Something, somewhere down the line, therefore must produce unstable molecules.

If you use spectrometry and find a planet that has two or more highly reactive molecules (especially if they cannot coexist naturally), that planet has complex life. If you have one reactive molecule that breaks down in sunlight but is being refreshed, that planet must have at least simple life. If the planet has highly reactive molecules that don't readily form naturally, you have life that is nominally intelligent.

No requirement for any technology capable of generating a specific signature. No requirement for the absence of metamaterials. No requirement for a telescope big enough to detect the signature against natural variation.

SKA would be capable of detecting an alien civilization using Lovelock's method anywhere inside of 1,000 light years, given the size and sensitivity currently being proposed. How big would the James Webb telescope need to be to get an IR signature on the industrialized part of the US at that range?

Found a bug in physics.c, those cars we mass produced last year will spontaneously explode after 367 days of exposure to an atmosphere containing oxygen, or when white lines are painted rather than vinyl, or when attempting a corner of a prime number of degrees when speeding on a cambered road.

Why wasn't this spotted sooner?

Because we hadn't expected to need chemistry or non-Euclidian geometry in a physics engine.

Then make the episodes longer. Or have one set of presenters on the first show (they're usually paired) and the others on the second show. Or eliminate redundant footage so that you can have two or three times the content. Or eliminate the advertisers, sorry adverts, and get three times the running length.

The assumption seems to be that as 90% of kids 15 years ago were diagnosed ADHD, 90% of the target audience now must also have ADHD. Except for Game of Thrones viewers, who apparently have other issues.

Discovery got caught using fake footage in documentaries. No scientist should be working with a channel that is peddling fraudulent material. History lost a lot of reputation with their academically bogus Ancient Aliens stuff, but at least they didn't try to offer photographs and videos they themselves doctored as "evidence".

If the three have projects worth taking seriously, they won't be projects on Discovery. HBO has less of a credibility issue.

Not that I am a Labour voter but I would point out that while the debt at the beginning of 2008 was higher in real terms, importantly as a percentage of the GDP it was lower than it was in May 1997 when Labour came to power.

It is like getting a new job with a higher salary and using the extra income to take out a larger mortgage and buy a bigger house. Could easily be that while the total debt goes up, as a percentage of your income it has gone down. Is that a bad thing? You might argue that it is, but it is not as clear cut as you would like to make out.

That's easy to fix. If a cell has not just the existing error correction codes but also digital ones as well, then mutagenic substances (of which there are a lot) and telemere shortening can be fixed. Well, once we've figured out how to modify the DNA in-situ. Nanotech should have that sorted soonish.

The existing error correction is neither very good nor very reliable. This is a good thing, because it allows evolution. You don't want good error correction between generations. You just want it in a single person over their lifespan, and you want it restricted so that it doesn't clash with retrotranspons and other similar mechanisms. So, basically, one whole inter-gene gap/one whole gene protected by one code. Doable. You still need cell death - intercept the signal and use a guaranteed method.

Here, in the year Lemon Meringue, we decided to solve the problem once and for all.

Instead of trying to kill cancer, we hijack its techniques. We start by having nanocomputers in the vaccuelles of each brain cell. These keep a continuous backup copy of the state of the brain up to death. Cancers disable the hard limit on cell duplication that cannot otherwise be avoided. By using the techniques of cell-devouring microphages, the cancer "consumes" the old cells and replaces them with new ones. They can't spread anywhere else, because that's how the cancer is designed to spread. Once the body has been fully replaced, the cancer is disabled. The brain is then programmed by the nanocomputers and the remaining cells are specialized by means of chemical signal.

This does result in oddly-shaped livers and three-handed software developers, but so far this has boosted productivity.

The free market didn't provide alternatives. The free market created Microsoft and the other monopolies. Adam Smith warned against a free market.

The majority do not create alternatives, either. The majority like things to not change. The familiar will always better the superior in the marketplace.

Alternatives are created by small groups of people being disreputable, commercially unproductive and at total odds with the consumer. These alternatives will typically take 7-14 years to develop. Adoption will typically reach peak after another 7-14 years. By the 30th year after first concept, the idea will be "obvious" and its destiny an "inevitable consequence" of how things are done.

In reality, it takes exceptional courage and a total disregard for "how things are done". 7-14 years with guaranteed losses is not how the marketplace works. Even thinking along those lines is often met with derision and calls of "Socialism!" by the market. No, real inventors are the enemy of the free market.

If you want a Linux desktop, you must forgo all dreams of wealth. You must subject yourself to the abject poverty that is the lot of an inventor in a market economy, or move to somewhere that supports the real achievers.

The problem is corruption. OSDL were working on a Linux desktop environment, but a key (financial) figure in the organization worked hard to kill off success and left around the time the unit went bankrupt. Several organizations they've been linked to have either gone belly up or have suffered catastrophic failure.

I won't name names, no point. What is the point is that such people exist in the Linux community at all, parasites that destroy good engineering and good work for some personal benefit of their own.

X is not great, but it's just a specification. People have developed Postscript-based GUIs using it. It's merely an API that you can implement as you like (someone ported it to Java) and extend as you like (Sun did that all the time). The reference implementation is just that. Interoperability of just that set of functions used by Glib/Gtk and Qt would give you almost all the key software.

Alternatively, write a GUI that has a port of those three libraries. You could use Berlin as a starting point, or build off Linux framebuffers, or perhaps use SDL, or write something unique. If it supports software needing those libraries, then almost everything in actual use will be usable and almost everything written around X in the future will also be usable. If what you write is better than X, people will switch.

Binary drivers exist and are loadable so long as they are properly versioned.

Block drivers can always use FUSE.

Automatic builders can recompile a shim layer with new kernels (or even the git tree version), automatic test harnesses or a repurposed Linux Test Project can validate the shim. You don't need to validate the driver for everykernel, if it's totally isolated from the OS and worked before then it'll remain working.

Automated distributors can then place the binaries in a corporate yum/apt repository.

What has an ABI got to do with it? Only gets in the way of writing clean code.

The commands to the bus don't change.
The commands sent to the hardware don't change.
The internal logic won't change.

That leaves the specific hooks to the OS and the externally visible structures.

Nobody is insane enough to use globals directly and structures are subject to change without notice. So external stuff will already be isolated.

If the hardware is available for any two of HyperTransport, PCI Express 2.x, VME/VXI or one of the low-power busses used on mobile hand-warmers, err, smart devices, then the actual calls to the bus hardware will be compartmentalized or go through an OS-based abstraction layer.

So 95% of a well-written driver is OS-agnostic and the remaining 5% is already is isolated.

So either drivers are very badly written (which is a crime against sanity) or the hardware vendor could place the OS-dependent code in its own DLL at bugger-all cost to them. Since the OS-dependent code has nothing trade secret in it, they can publish the source for the shim at no risk. Since the shim isn't the driver, there's no implication of support for OS' they don't know or understand. It's not their problem what the shim is used for.

Everyone's happy. Well, happier. The companies don't get harassed, the Linux users get their drivers, Microsoft gets fewer complaints about badly-written drivers killing their software. It's not open, it's not supported, but it's good enough.

No problem come live in my house. Some ferrous/magnetic material in the bricks that make the walls means no phone signal in the house unless you are right by a window and we can "fix" that by replacing the sealed units with ones that have "energy saving" glass. I have to use a femtocell for a reliable mobile signal :-)

Lithium is a metal.

Oops. Right. Sorry.

"lithium is in the upper left-hand corner of the periodic table. Only hydrogen and helium are lighter on an atomic basis."

  I'm wondering if this is a non sequitur for electric batteries.

Not a non sequitur at all.

An important factor for batteries is energy density: How much energy is stored per unit mass. This is particularly important for electric cars: The higher the energy density, the less mass you havce to haul around for a given amount of "fuel", which means the less "fuel" is spent hauling your "fuel" around, so it's a more-than-linear improvement.

Lithium is both extremely light and a very reactive nonmetal. So you're talking about a lot of energy per unit mass for the lithium-based electrode's contribution to the reaction.