Well OK then, he maneuvered his way into the presidency without corruption or favours or an army of spin doctors, and has significantly changed the style with which the U.S. engages with the rest of the world.

I still feel this is a significant shift of the Nobel committee from observer and awarder to well established figures, to influencer of current affairs. This is either just pandering to populism or out-and-out lobbying, and we don't need another lobby group.

I think he may possibly deserver [sic] the prize, but its too early to say. Shouldn't they have waited to see if he manages to sort out Iraq, bring peace to the Middle East or something like that? After all if he does manage it now there will be nothing to reward him with.

That's what a lot of people are thinking. The Nobel Prize is famous for being conservative, waiting decades after the achievements of individuals before they give the prize, and then only if they're still living!

The concensus of the nay-sayers is that Obama doesn't have any achievements, he's only 8 months into his first term.

I think this is populist sh*t, same with the prize for the inventors of the CCD--the photodiode was physics, the CCD was a superb engineering effort based off the photodiode. The CCD in combination with fibre optics made it possible for us to see thousands of photos of teenage girls taken in their bathroom mirror. All hail the Internet.

Don't feed the trolls, but I'm the author of this worst submission ever.

First link is to text-only release from NASA, link at end goes to NASA Hubble page, http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

Last link is to HubbleSite, All 52 release images. Site still has server issues it seems, but nasa.gov link works smoothly.

What I don't get is why we don't just buy some Soyuz spacecraft off the Russians and be done with it. The Soyuz has a proven track record, the damned things are built like tanks, it is solid and dependable.

It's tiny, three astronauts have to be squeezed in there. It's basically a stepping stone to a proper spacecraft, but they didn't go to the next step because the U.S. had already won the race to the moon. It's good enough to transport astronauts to and from the ISS, and can be modified (Progress) as an unmanned resupply vehicle for the ISS. Not much use beyond that.

They really need a bigger vehicle for long duration missions beyond LEO.

be the first to sell pr0n to little kids without any age-rating?

I think there'll be other laws to cover that, like p@edophile laws.

(I know parent is a joke)

I wonder why they don't just change the names and dates on a copy of the old law, get a chorum at the house of commons, get trusted speed readers to check that the old and new laws are the same, and pass it as some sort of emergency act. Surely the don't need Europe to sign their own emergency legislation in Britain?

The loophole probably won't be exploited by any shopfront stores.

OK, I'll bite, how would NASA using Russia or China (however unlikely the latter is) benefit anyone in NASA or the U.S. congress, eg, Shelby*? Is it not the case that the only reliance on Russia under NASA's current plan is crew ferry to and from the ISS during 2011-2015? Surely this is nothing more than minor and temporary hurt to the pride of U.S. space expertise? No technical transfer, no hit to unmanned spaceflight, where 90%** of the science is done anyway?

*Apart from saving money in NASA and giving it to other US domestic programs, giving a different distribution of US Fed money. And do you mean Richard Shelby?

**Number is a guess, but all they do is crystal, plasma and minor biology research on the ISS/SpaceHab.

What overhead does this approach have? Are the benefits worth it? link

RTFA. The amount of work required is staggering (four years, 200,000 theorems to prove) but since it's a verification of code, not additional testing code, there is zero overhead when the system is running. link

Yeah, it's not like debug code or something similar. The code is written and now it's trusted on a high level by theorists etc. It could be fast and highly reliable, as reliable as the theorists are.

And what exactly do you mean by false? Do you mean, for example, if a word processing program were formally specified to print 2 character for every single keystroke that would be false? Or do you mean it would "lock up" and not work properly for a human? Or do you mean "generate non-existent instruction code and cause CPU to reset"?

I suspect the correct answer is the second example I give, but not exactly.

It does contain machine code however, so it could be #3 too.