That's something I still don't understand. Why does he claim the Americans could arrange an extradition from Sweden more readily than from the UK?

She was in Lordi too? Hard to know who they really are through the masks, but they are Finnish, and electrical engineering types do get up to some strange hobbies. How did you know?

And the landsharks?

And you think Word does that? If you are going to write a doctoral thesis in Word, then you have my pity starting out. With LaTeX, you have a formatting area at the front, your references in a nice separate bibliography file, and most of your document is just the text you have written. Setting up a master document that includes separate documents for each chapter, allowing cross-referencing, a single bibliography, and a table of contents is possible in Word, but it's dead simple in LaTeX.

Setting it up in the first place may take a little looking into, but building a master document in Word isn't intuitive either. If it takes more than a day to get your basic file structure sorted, then you aren't trying. It's three or four years of your life that you will be writing this thing. If the format guidelines change during that time, you can fix it in one place (in fact, some procrastinating student will probably build a fresh style file to share so you don't even need to fix it yourself). How long would it take you in Word to change the margins or line-spacing for a multi-chapter document? What about copying formatted text from a research paper you just finished, keeping all the figure references and citations, but in your university format instead of the journal publisher's?

I'm in business now, and use Word and Excel regularly because that's the de facto standard. Every time I need to re-format anything in Word I wish I just had to edit LaTeX instead. It's just simpler. In the long run, it will save you time and agony.

You left out the cloning to eliminate most variables when you give an experimental medical treatment to one animal but not to another. I'm surprised you thought about cloning sex slaves before getting to that one.

Could this be because it's easier to get diagnosed with diabetes, COPD, or other non-healthy conditions than it was in 2002? I've heard enough anecdotal evidence to make me ask the question, but it would be nice to see a study. How many people who were considered healthy in 2002 could visit a doctor in 2013 and be declared unhealthy, and how does that fraction vary by country? Unless an article can control for that variable, the other numbers don't really mean much.

But if all the scientists and engineers are going to work on THC, will they get anything done?

The equation is irrelevant. The Chelonian Uncertainty Principle demonstrates that the more accurately you know the momentum of a turtle, the less accurately you know its position. Since any usefully accurate value for its quantum wavelength would need very high accuracy for its momentum, you would never be able to find the turtle for which you had made your calculations, especially since they can look just like little rocks under the water and are naturally given to hiding.

The Turtle Moves!

Wish I could remember what movie it's from: "There should be a test before people can become parents. Beyond the practical, I mean."

Certainly wouldn't want anyone to think you were doing something as dangerous as making a finger-gun sign when you were just engaging in the traditionally constructive stigmatization of school colleagues as losers who deserve an identifying tattoo on their forehead to protect society from accidentally interacting with their feeble selves. Catching a glimpse of a mimed gun might lead to emotional problems later in life, so it's best to clamp down on such foolishness.

Damn! I've been out of the country for a long time, and haven't followed baseball, but the Expos moved to Washington D.C.?

Why do I need to learn about things this way? Now it really is the "National" league that it always claimed to be, leaving the "American" league the old "North America" excuse.

My first thought too. If the thing the machine sells is worth so much (maybe train tickets), then the money in there is probably still worth more than free tickets until the hack is patched.

I can't imagine enjoying The Sandman more on e-book than in those nice "Absolute" anthologies.

Just because a response is possible doesn't mean defense is pointless. The idea is just to make it difficult and risky enough that the payoff isn't worth it.

If a virus is discovered 99% of the time, then 1% can still cause a lot of damage, and erasing a virus doesn't worry the other virus installations. Detecting and investigating 99% of attempted attacks by people might worry other human attackers.

It's also easy to test whether a commercial virus scanner will detect a new prototype virus. I expect this system would be stored and used in a way to make it difficult for attackers to acquire a copy for the development and testing of social attacks.

I'm not a big apple fan, but their solution in the Apple II was an Escape key with an extra-strong spring under it. Don't know when they stopped using those.