This strikes me as an almost perfectly cliched Japanese technical solution to a social problem: you cannot accept the loss of face that would be involved in telling your minion Mr Akusake to shut up indicating that you do not have the degree of control over Mr Akusake that your relative positions would indicate, or the unspeakable loss of status that would be implied if you told your minion Mr Akusake to shut up and he didn't, but you can point the shutting-up machine at him and cause him to shut up.

Loud people dominating conversations is undeniably an actual social problem, and this is an actual technical solution to it.

The Sandy-Bridge-E (X79) motherboards have eight RAM slots each of which can hold an 8G module, which gets your 64GB. Of course, Sandy-Bridge-E is a Xeon in the same way that Socket-1366 Nehalem was a Xeon.

There are real electronic-engineering problems with getting lots of RAM slots attached to a single memory controller - you have to run the memory more slowly than you would if there were less of it. Cisco have a chip which pretends to be a very large slow DDR3 module by connecting together four large fast DDR3 modules, but it's sold only in expensive Cisco servers.

There is already a prodigious amount of money going to cancer research, because marginally effective chemotherapy drugs can be sold for quite large sums of money and truly-effective chemotherapy drugs could be sold for ludicrous sums of money; it's not clear that there's that much marginal gain to be had from another five billion.

The US stopped funding the SSC, and the result was that the scientists went to Europe to work on the LHC there. If they stop funding space observatories, I will rejoice happily as a whole load of the best astronomers in the world come and move to European universities, and the best students make a habit of coming to European universities to work for them - and, since there aren't that many astrophysics jobs around even in Europe, they'll probably stay and set up startups in Europe. But it's not clear this will do anything terribly good for the United States.

There has been billions of dollars of research into drill bits over the twenty years since the Kola project stopped, drilling deep holes in rock under awkward conditions being more than somewhat useful for the oil industry - the mud-motors that Kola is described as pioneering are now reasonably routine. But whilst 400F is something that people deal with now, 600F is still quite a problem.

The drilling fluids probably will be fairly horrible, and simply getting electronics to work at those temperatures is hard (NASA have done some work in silicon-carbide-substrate semiconductors, since it would be fantastic to be able to run a robot on the surface of Venus, but I don't think they've met with much success).

6km is a deep hole, but not an enormously deep hole by the standards of the off-shore drilling industry; there are deeper holes drilled for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and for gas production in Sakhalin and the Persian Gulf. The post-salt oil prospects in Brazil require 5km depth to get past the salt layer.

(annoyingly, oil-drillers appear to use 'depth' to describe the length of holes even when they are not pointing vertically downwards, and some of the things described as 'deepest' appear to be drilled mostly horizontally. Some articles also measure depths of oil deposits from the top rather than the bottom of the water)

However, 4km of water is rather deeper than it seems anyone's done oil-drilling to date; there are wells in 2800m water in the Gulf of Mexico (the one that exploded last year was in 1500m) but there doesn't seem to be anything much deeper.

Computer components are designed to be installed by untrained labourers who left their parents' farm in Hunan province last week to seek their fortune in the factories of Shenzhen. Connectors are keyed, connectors with different purposes are keyed differently, and almost everything has locking tabs so you don't knock things out unintentionally.

No; it's rape (since the consent was dependent on the payment); I believe someone in the UK has been convicted of rape for paying a prostitute with counterfeit money.

I've deliberately bought several Intel integrated-graphics motherboards; they display an 80x25 text mode fine as you install Debian, and my compute servers only have a monitor attached when they're failing to boot.

I wish Intel didn't oblige you to buy a super-SLI-gamer motherboard just to run a Core i7 CPU; I bought the chip for the main-memory bandwidth.