Out of curiosity, what would a proper electronics geek do to find one/disable of those things if he knew it was in the room- short of tearing everything apart? Is it possible to rig up some sort of detector that could find it- or some sort of electromagnetic interference that could kill it without, say, setting off a small nuclear bomb?

Yeah, I know how (cosmologically speaking) distance = time, I just meant that they're saying alpha varies in space as well. From the article:
"Along one direction the fine-structure constant, which governs the strength of the electromagnetic force, grows slightly weaker with time, while in the other direction it grows slightly stronger. " ... which seems to suggest that the entire universe has some sort of axis along which alpha changes.

I thought the anomaly described varied in space, rather than time? That is, things further away in one direction had a greater alpha, but ones in the other direction had a lesser alpha.

You'll need a big IR spotlight, though. This wouldn't even need that.

The point being, Moore's Law has had 15 years to work and if someone was selling you a PC from 15 years ago for the same price as it cost 15 years ago, you'd be a bit confused.

"It's 150 Mhz with a WHOLE GIGABYTE of RAM! $1300, with included copy of Windows 98!"

Per wikipedia, it sounds like Anglo-Norman didn't supplant English.

"Although the English language survived and eventually eclipsed Anglo-Norman, the latter had been sufficiently widespread as to permanently affect English lexically. This is why English has lost or, more often, kept as parallel terms many of its original Germanic words which can still be found in German and Dutch. Grammatically, Anglo-Norman had little lasting impact on English, although it is still evident in official and legal terms where the noun and adjective are reversed: attorney general, heir apparent, court martial, body politic, and so on.[2]"

In other words, modern English isn't a descendant of Anglo-Norman.

I walked into an MRI room. $20 metro card, wiped.

I'm not saying that oligopolies set prices based on supply and demand, or that oligopolies don't set prices higher than in a market with perfect competition. But that's not the definition of a free market.

A free market is a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to enforce ownership ("property rights") and contracts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

As I understood Microeconomics 101, an oligopoly usually sets prices lower than a monopoly, but higher than a market with monopolistic competition or perfect competition. An oligopoly is not effectively a monopoly, and behaves quite differently. I think you're confusing a "free market" with a monopolistically competitive or perfectly competitive one.
FYI, trains are a "natural monopoly", I think, not an oligopoly, and for that matter the government owns AmTrak. So yes, not a free market at all.
Again- I'm not saying oligopolies are good for the consumer, but they can quite easily exist in a free market- so can monopolies. That's why most of the world's more sane governments have laws preventing certain types of anticompetitive behavior and restricting the free market.

Oligopolies can form in free markets. A free market doesn't mean a competitive one, it just means the government doesn't interfere. Governments can interfere to promote oligopoly, or to dissuade it.

Apple uses the same trick as Microsoft did in the past, they modulate how easy/convenient it is to pirate/jailbreak their shit to maximize earnings.

Wait, so the Jailbreakme pdf exploit was left there intentionally? Allowing anyone on the intarwebs to execute arbitrary code on my device?

I don't see any modulation going on- every update breaks the last jailbreak, within a couple of months a new jailbreak is out, rinse, repeat.

I have a soft spot for Logo, it was my first programming language. It's a great learning language, it caught my imagination pretty much immediately.

I remember the media saying that other pandemic flus had peaked twice, once in the fall and once later. So if that had happened, it could have helped.

Anyway, I don't think we physically have the ability to manufacture flu vaccines much faster than we did. It's grown in eggs, sloowwly. If anything it was a good wake-up call that we can't expect to be protected by a vaccine in the event of a really deadly epidemic.

[citation needed] on the first one, there...

They ramped up vaccine production as fast as they possibly could, IN CASE by the time it was available, the virus would be still going gangbusters.

Luckily it wasn't, but we just don't know enough about flu to have known ahead of time, let alone guessed.

Too late.

http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=r1c4qr7k5y8t&scene=38572790&lvl=2&sty=b

Bing maps has had aerial imagery for forever. The area around my house is higher res than this link, actually (down to a swingset).