It would have to be a 30-60 hour TV series to be close to the original, at least 12 hours even after massive cuts. It would have to have a lot of work done to make it filmable at all. The connections and deeper points of the book make Lost seem almost straightforward. It has a gazillion characters and dozens of locations. The jumping around between different storylines would be a bitch to make work on screen, too. The parts that appeal to one audience run a risk of losing the others rather than broadening the appeal. It practically requires Johnny Depp to play Jack Shaftoe, or at least someone who doesn't mind being accused of imitating him. The best choices for Eliza wouldn't be cheap either (Keira Knightly, Natalie Portman). There would be many difficult-to-cast roles, several of which would have to be cast multiple times at different ages.

I'd like to see it, but it would be a huge, expensive risky project.

Well, maybe if you're dealing with frictionless, spherical cows.
It will double the momentum of the recoil, not the velocity. The mass of the gun + boat + water moved by the boat is much, much higher than the mass of the projectiles. The drag from the water will go up steeply with velocity, at least the square. Also the damage done is related more to the impulse rather than the momentum per se. The projectile acts over perhaps a two tenths of a microsecond on the hull of the target, the recoil can be spread over perhaps 200 microseconds, and the area ratio is going to be about a factor of 10,000 between the gun mount and the projectile impact point, for a factor of around 1e7 difference in pressure, and more than that difference in damage done to to the nonlinearity in the strength of materials.

"Hi, Central Casting? This is Joe Cornish. Yeah. I need a seven-foot tall radioactive mutant Eskimo drug lord. With muscles. Yeah, it's a speaking role. How many can you send over for audition tomorrow? Sure, twelve would be great."

To be fair, it's next to impossible to find half-Black, half-Asian actors that can carry a lead role in a big-budget film. I'd go with a medium skin tone black actor and add a hint of epicanthal fold in makeup. The other option is to use an Asian lead and do skin darkening in post-production (makeup never seems to look right), but that will get you pilloried in the media.

And that person was refuted. You can buy higher-density RAM of the same type for 1/3 what Apple is charging.

No, it's 8GB extra for $200, triple the going rate, and no option to buy it from anybody else. And if it ever goes bad you need a new motherboard. And if the camera or the Wi-Fi goes out, that's a whole new, very expensive screen assembly.

Only if you get Apple to do it for you with their special part (and extra-special prices).

The article says that the battery is permanently glued in place on top of the delicate touchpad cable. The hard drive is non-standard, no other drive will fit. Also, the memory is soldered onto the motherboard and special tools are needed to open up the machine in the first place. The computer is intentionally designed to be unfixable, non-upgradable and to become unusable shortly after the warranty runs out. It's sheer greedy dickery on Apple's part - they are setting out to screw their customers with this drastically overpriced and totally unserviceable laptop.

The US government can cook the books all it likes, but the employment (not unemployment) numbers have barely improved at all. We're short 10 million jobs. Income is declining in real terms for every income bracket except the top 0.1%. Even if that were not so, we actually took a less conservative approach than Europe. We gave tens of trillions of dollars in welfare to the bankers and speculators who caused the problem, Europe did far less of that and far more austerity, and where there was the most austerity there have been the worst results.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic would have been better to get equity in the big banks when they were on the ropes, in exchange for the bailout and recapitalization, effectively nationalizing all the too-big-to-exist banks. Then some real housecleaning, write-offs and mass prosecutions could take place, followed by breaking up the big banks and selling off the pieces. We also need to require them to make loans to productive enterprises as an enforced condition of their charters, rather than paying them to sit on their hands and buy treasuries as we are doing now.

You might think so, and 50 generations seems awfully high (that's 10^15 50-g-grandparents, vs. 3.2billion base pairs or 23,000 genes), but due to the cohesiveness of tribes and nations you will get most of your ancestry even 50 generations back from a few hundred thousand to a few million people, with most of those related to you in billions of different ways. With Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA there is relatively little mixing, so a few ancestors 50 generations back will have very similar Y-chromosome or mitochondrial sequences to yours.

You're thinking of Singapore.

Bigger wafers means less waste around the edges where the rectangular chips meet the circular wafer edge. This becomes very important for larger chips such as image sensors. (Not sure if the new process will be used for that, though.) Also, many manufacturing steps are applied to the wafer as a whole, and having wafers with over 2.25 times as many chips makes those steps cheaper on a per-chip basis. Making the boules will be hard, but I think they will find some way of providing extra support for the boule as it grows. Thinner wafers may also get more out of each boule. There will be many other problems such as maintaining alignment over the greater distance which may be harder.

http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/compub.htm
Bureau of Labor Statistics - National Compensation Survey - Wages
The job category is likely "computer and information systems managers" or "information systems managers" (Over $53/hr in wages in Atlanta, for instance = $138,000/yr. @50hrs./wk.). You also may want to look at the different levels of regular managers to see what the pay trajectory typically is and use that to scale the number for your specialty and region.

Also see the NCS databases section here.

"Doesn't every chemical have to go through thorough tests before deemed safe for human consumption?"

No, because we used to be a free country where everything was considered legal until proven otherwise. Back in the early 20th century, it took a constitutional amendment to ban a substance. It was understood that that was not within Congress' powers to do so otherwise, which gave rise to all sorts of dodges such as calling the ban an "excise tax", with outrageously high duties.

We have slid down the slippery slope to the point that agencies such as the BATF, DEA and FDA can ban substances by totally discretionary administrative action - and anyone with molecules vaguely similar can have all property seized, be prevented from making any effective legal defense and sentenced under draconian mandatory minimums to decades in prison. But they still like to pretend that they are still exercising their authority with some authentic legal basis, so they'll do a bit of hand-wringing while actually prosecuting anyone with any potentially mind-altering material, or "precursors" or even just for possessing glassware without license from our masters.

I say they never had the authority to ban anything, nor to even tax anything to a level that would remove it from regular commerce.
When they try to use their power to do so, they are acting outside their delegated auhtority ultra vires, they have lost their immunity, and so are entitled to even less deference than any other band of armed thugs that invades homes, steals property and kidnaps, terrorizes and kills citizens.

No, that is an alarmist view not supported by the evidence, which shows no acceleration. The current rate of rise is about 3.3mm/yr on satellite data, about 2mm/yr on tide gauge data, with a best projection of about 3mm/yr for the next century. See Wikipedia's article"Current sea level rise". There are a range of estimates, but the high ones all seem to be informed more by political advocacy than actual research. It would be a waste to not develop all that land on the basis of mere speculation.