When someone comes up with a phosphor which can decently approximate a blackbody spectrum, let me know.
Ok
http://www.soraa.com/products/vivid

It would almost be easier for me to list the ones that have broken then put a lifespan to them.

Ever since I have moved to optical USB mice, of the dozens that I have used at home or work, only 3 no longer work. Ironically 2 of those were "high end" mice. The budget Microsoft and Logitech mice seem to last forever. I only just replaced the original Microsoft optical wheel mouse my grandmother had after ~10 years of use after a button broke. My other ones of that era are still going fine.

People die every day because another driver is going unsafe speeds on the road, but despite what all those deaths add up to it's only in the most extreme cases of reckless driving is anything more then a ticket given.

I agree with the sentiment that this is a behavior is one that should be curbed for countless good reasons. This though is clearly a case where an arrest is completely inappropriate. A citation would likely have stopped the offender with a net gain for law enforcement rather then the cost of an arrest and the fighting and bad publicity that this is going to lead to.

Stopping the unwanted activity at a net gain to the tax payer seems like a much better deal to me.

Yes, this exactly.

Keep the tray as small and unobtrusive as possible, you actually want to see as much of the cable as possible. Don't try to hide the but find a professional installer that will make the cables neat, tidy as possible. Belden and cables and others have a wide range of colors that you could offer and you could probably find a nice bold one to go with what the designer might like. It could actually be something of a feature if this is a design/tech kind of company.

It wasn't just that private people became interested after investment in the infrastructure. Government institutions like many public universities had a major part in making use of that infrastructure in a way that was interesting to private people.

Big companies aren't much interested in risky bets when they have a stable business, and little generally companies don't have the resources unless they have some other source of money. Big bets need to be made sometimes for big success, but the flip side is also sometimes they don't pay off. Losing bets once in a while isn't a failure, it's just the cost of progress.

Why? The universe doesn't need us, and won't miss us when we're gone. Whether we're on one planet, or a million, nothing lasts forever.

Frankly deferring massive amounts of resources to putting some people in cans on a frozen rock will probably worsen our chances for progress and survival. If we are concerned about our fate and want humankind to do something interesting with our future we should be putting our money in research and pure sciences. I think some sort of manned spaceflight program is probably an important part of those sciences, but massive engineering projects as a monument to our narcissism just seems like a waste of our resources.

At the time it was normal not to save TV shows. There was no home video market then, and for a long time not even really 'reruns'.

I'd bet that if you had some sort of time traveling box and went back to talk to people paying their TV tax then, they'd complain that the BBC would be wasting their money on all the storage of a TV show for no reason. Then you would have to fight some sort of robot men. At least I'm pretty sure how that would go.

Getting rid of other sorts of outputs such as analog, DVI or HD-SDI (which already had audio with video) certainly is all about DRM. We are forced to use HDMI, even where it is not the appropriate transport. It's a big, expensive problem for commercial and even some residential installations that now have to deal with short signal ranges and the extra points of failure that go with the two-way authentication protocols.

HDMI is being pushed, forced, in these areas that have nothing to do with having audio and video on the same cable for no other reason then DRM.

The reboot is indeed more accessible, but only by making it yet another summer action movie. I'm not really sure what it contributes to the plethora of other summer action movies other then some familiar characters and some references and homages thrown in. Frankly, in fact, I think the last movie went beyond homage or reboot well into rip-off Territory.

I don't find anything bad about movies and other forms of entertainment that are made to have wide appeal. I enjoy a great many of them, but the change in direction of ST is only a gain for ticket sales, not for what made it a unique work. At the end of the day of course, studios are there to make money, so I don't begrudge them exactly, or think they are going to change on my smaller opinion, but I do think a loss more then a gain by other metrics.

I think it's fair to point out here that the EFF are lawyers too.

If you are accused of committing a crime you didn't commit, but nobody believes you. I can't really imagine how grateful I would be for someone who's job it is to help me, whether he believes me or not.

Certainly I have no respect for a lawyer who uses lies and manipulation, and maybe there is something fundamentally broken in our justice system, but I think that the profession of a lawyer is at it's heart still an important one and a key to a just system.

I think I would prefer real books (something that I can just toss into a bag without worry if it's charged or going to get stolen), but, I'm dyslexic. Being able to change the text size so that I'm reading in small chunks makes me able to read much faster. The other benefits (saves space, able to buy a new book where ever I am) is just a bonus.

Yeah, my Core2 unibody macbook is I think my favorite of any laptop I have seen or used, despite the fact that I think I prefer Windows 7 (or Ubuntu) over OSX. I like the pointer, I like the screen (though there are better ones out to be sure), I like the shape and heft, battery life is good, sound is good. Sure any of these things could be better, particularly with newer and better tech out for some of them, but no one thing stands out to me as bad.

Yet, looking at the current trend in apple laptops, I probably won't be getting another. Sure, a few ounces lighter is nice, but I really see no reason to glue and solder everything in to save a few millimeters of thickness.

There is always going to be a need to pack as much power as possible into a workstation for CAD, 3d graphics and other specialty applications. This means a form-factor that can dissipate more heat then a tablet can.

On the flip side, on the very low end, administrators are going to want machines that are essentially tied down to the desk for places like call centers or data processing. For one the mouse/monitor/keyboard paradigm works very well here, but also workstations are much less 'personal'.

The point being, that while there be some interesting things that tablets and touch screens bring to the party that disrupt the mouse/monitor paradigm, the computer workstation and some variation on it's components will still be here for decades.