Actually I believe all the 777 models currently in production (777-200ER, 777-200LR, 777-300ER) have longer range than the 747-400 (although the older models, the 777-200 and the 777-300, did not). Also, the last passenger 747-400s produced have a similar interior to the 777.

I believe Newark-Singapore nonstop is only flown by the A340-500.

777-200: 5235 nm
777-300: 6015 nm
747-400: 7259 nm
747-400ER: 7670 nm
777-200ER: 7700 nm
777-300ER: 7930 nm
777-200LR: 9450 nm (!!)

Well, Last.fm has to know the correct artist and song name for their algorithms to work best (so they can group all songs played by that artist together, for example). Sometimes people misspell a name ("Stained" instead of "Staind", or something), and it would be detrimental to Last.fm's data mining if it treated some Staind songs as being by "Stained" instead.

That being said, the prime function of Last.fm is not to correct mistagged songs, but doing so aids its algorithms and makes the website more useful, since it more accurately reflects its users' listening habits.

True, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO) was retired in 1995 to free up funding for SOFIA. Work on SOFIA started in the 90s and it made its first flight with the telescope installed last year. SOFIA is a similar idea to KAO, but on a much larger scale (the telescope is 2.5 m in diameter, compared to 91.5 cm for the KAO) and representing a significantly larger engineering challenge.

But yeah, I don't know why this is news now. Science flights aren't supposed to start taking place until next year.

Interestingly, it won't really be ready for science flights next year, but every ten years the US National Research Council does its decadal surveys of all the science programs it's supporting and decides which ones to continue funding on. SOFIA's been so delayed that if it doesn't have any science results by mid-2009 (when the 2010 decadal survey will be taking its data), it runs a real risk of having its US government funding cut. If this happens, DLR (German Aerospace Center), another one of the big funders, will be likely to cut funding as well, resulting in a bleak future for the SOFIA program.

(I worked on SOFIA as an intern at NASA last year.)