I should p'bly mod you down, since you're a bit off-topic -- I'm not aware of a Niven-in-film series/work that needs re-booting. But instead I'll join you in off-topic-land...Ringworld would be a perfect series of texts to adapt to film: Sets would be easy, and Weta would love the character work (just not sure if there'd be an uncanny valley prob with Chmee and Nessus ;-). There's so much published backstory that a screenwriter could go deep into "Known Space" -- showing us the rise and resolution of the Puppeteer's excess heat problem, showing us the Kzin homeworld (with maybe a few vignettes of the Man-Kzin Wars), devoting a few minutes to Phssthpok's heroic voyage to Sol System, etc. Bog, but I'd love to see a Trinoc or Bandersnatch....

The original stories have everything modern films want: hetero-sex (Teela Brown and tons of rishathra), cool boats (Long Shot, Needle, flycycles), battles (esp. in the 3rd Ringworld book), McGuyverisms, and huge "message" potential (nudge-nudge, Mr. Cameron) from the role of ARM in Earth culture, to Flatlanders vs. Belters, to Puppeteers-as-power-elite, to Chmee's journey of learning patience and diplomacy, and the ultimate fun of Niven's alternate Genesis tale of the Pak.

So if any "reboot" is broad enough to attempt restoring science fiction films to former glory, I'm with ya on Ringworld. Or, another great way to go would be either of two sets of work by Herbert -- Destination: Void is tragically undervalued (along with its follow-on works); it's the earliest fiction I know of that tackles construction principles of an AI. Or Herbert's two Jorg McKie books (Whipping Star and mostly The Dosadi Experiment...maybe the Tea Partiers could get excited enough about the Bureau of Sabotage to let the subtle consciousness-raising that Dosadi's solution induces soak in undetected.....

You misread. The relevant paragraph is, "We used a one-dimensional model for this project," says co-author Wladimir Lyra, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysics at the Museum. "Three dimensional models are so computationally expensive that we could only follow the evolution of disks for about 100 orbits -- about 1,000 years. We want to see what happens over the entire multimillion year lifetime of a disk."

Another vote for Sonos. It's the wife-friendliest, kid-friendliest, overnight-visitor-friendliest, drunk-out-of-your-mind-friendliest system out there. Install and setup is a breeze -- truly as easy as the diagram portrays. The mesh network is excellent, or you can run it wired. You can source music from your computer/CD player/iPod, or let Sonos grab internet radio streams or services like last.fm, Sirius, Rhapsody, etc. Use Sonos to feed your own amplifier(s), or buy amplified Sonos nodes.

Slashdot covered 'em when they were new; many favorable comments. They were kick-ass at launch; these days they're miles better. Totally modular, so the system can grow as budget/desire dictates. The secure mesh network is excellent, or you can run 'em wired with CAT5. The new handheld controllers are great, or use an iPhone, iPod touch, or computer. (I've never hooked one up for a linux user, but Wine should do the job just fine.)

Simply to demonstrate that it's rarely as easy as "if they'd just do XYZ their world would be rosy"...

By specifying a hard path for the .xml file, your code assumes that users have left their iTunes Library file in the default location. If the library file has been moved -- say, to an external drive along with content files to make the entire library portable -- your code will produce, at best, access to an old .xml file (and at worst, a completely empty .xml file).

On a Mac, the most-recently used iTunes Music Library.xml file is best located by reading the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iApps.plist file for the "iTunesRecentDatabasePaths" item, and extracting the .xml file's path. (For example, run defaults read com.apple.iApps iTunesRecentDatabasePaths in a shell script.) The equivalent item in a Windows "plist" file would be iTunes Library XML Location in the "iTunes Prefs.xml" file in the user's Application Data folder.

You're asking papers to turn back the clock.... Newspapers have used "3rd party ad servers" for quite some time now; regional or nat'l campaigns where rates, art, copy, etc. are provided by an agency and sold under "co-op" programs that split costs between local outlets and national manufacturers/distributors. All the paper has to do is insert local affiliate info, drop the block into their page layout, and keep paperwork on billing; it's a pretty good system. Why force each paper to deal with each advertiser "from scratch"?

The paper itself can also serve the role of 3rd party ad server -- the outstate edition of a large metro daily is going to print different ads (and news) than the city edition (if I live in BFE, what do I care about the prices/products in Big City? Let the ads be responsive to the market where they're being displayed).

Getting rid of 3rd party ad servers would benefit...who? If I'm in New York reading an e-newspaper that's hosted in California, why should the 'net be forced to make all the hops to serve me CA ads? A sharp 3rd party ad serving outfit is going to have a server close to my location, saving hops; it's also going to serve up ads that relate to my "geographic" -- featuring local/regional outlets, promotions, products, etc. The paper gets to concentrate on what it does best -- serve content -- while the ad server folks take care of what they do best -- speed up load times, geo-coordinate the ads, compile stats, assess usage, etc.

Did I miss the elitist newsletter that told us all we had to say science fiction was crap now?

No, you just didn't see Transformers.

You're reifying "history," as though it was a thing with independent existence. History is human-created, following the events it explains. If you attempt to preserve only the "historical" sites in the world, then you have indeed ceded history to the victors -- those who control the means of designating what history is.

All information (evidence) is questionable, either in fact or context; this is something historians learn early-on. What we know about, for instance, early Mercantilism comes not only from contemporary essays, explicit descriptions and official policies, but mainly from poring over all the "abandoned sites" of the time -- receipts, chits, ledgers, shipping manifests, birth/death/property records, private letters, junk lots, etc. In this sense, historical research is much like scientific research: myriad observations are made, contextualized, and ordered. From there, hypotheses can be formed and tested against the evidence -- which hypothesis best accounts for the most evidence; which makes the evidence most plausible; which best survives counterclaims (think: falsifiability); etc.

Accepting as sufficient only that evidence which is deemed "authoritative" won't make for good history, only good PR, agit-prop, or religion.

She [Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS] adds, "We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet."

Good thing Boeing's not using fere software for aircraft simulation tools, space station labs, sub hunters, or moon rockets ;-)

But remember -- the intial outcry on Digg wasn't so much about the suppression of the number as about the stealthy suppression (read: account terminations) of the people posting the number. IOW, it started by being all about the children ;-)