Glad I came back to look for later replies, thanks for that.

This kind of subject always leads to a cascade of stupid questions in my head that I can't answer, leaving me feeling even dumber than usual. Does negative mass necessarily imply negative weight? What about momentum and kinetic energy? If a lump of matter with negative mass hit something, would it actually absorb energy from it rather than imparting energy to it? Would a negative-mass planet have an anti-gravity field? Is it even meaningful to talk about matter with negative mass, or is some physicist going to pop up and explain to me that negative mass is a property of some sort of field, and not something that could actually be expressed by anything that I would recognise as matter?

Umm, they couldn't find any trace of the HIV virus, or specific antibodies to it. It seems reasonable to hope that someone is cured of a disease if you can't find any trace of said disease in their body. And it's not like they jumped the gun on it, she was supposed to be on anti-viral drugs because they weren't sure the virus was gone.

I wonder if this ought to invalidate crap like the infamous Amazon one-click patent. After all it was also just a generic software implementation of a long-established system, namely storing someone's payment and address details for use with future purchases.

The trouble with those car-sized hovercraft is the turning and braking profile, which is nowhere near good enough for public roads designed for cars. Now a design something like the Aero-X hoverbike might be able to improve on that - by hovering a bit higher and tilting the entire craft, you could effectively vector a large proportion of the lift airflow for turning force, as opposed to redirecting a bit of the horizontal thrust only with a fin as with conventional hovercraft. Aerofex don't seem to make any such claims about their design though, they seem to be targeting off-road use only, and I guess turning that way might present problems for other road users/pedestrians getting hit by the airflow.

I used to disable adblock on slashdot, and not use that disable ads option either; I've even clicked the odd ad on rare occasions. I have no problem with reasonably sized static ads. But they started having those stupid ads expanding at the bottom of the screen when your mouse went near them; those were the final straw, adblock enabled again. As far as I'm concerned, ads that pop up or expand or move or anything like that are too annoying.

"Hmm, I just thought of something that I heard about a good while back but haven't seen any movement on - "peripheral vision" TVs. I seem to recall reading years ago about a type of TV that used lights around the edges to dimly shine the peripheral colors on the TV image around the room parallel to the TV, giving the illusion to your peripheral vision of an expansive screen."

Philips Ambilight.

I think you're just trolling. Seriously? You're annoyed that common usage of a term has diverged from its original correct usage? Better rip out about 90% of your dictionary and burn it then. So operating systems using the Linux kernel have become known as Linux in common parlance; how infuriating. I tell you, I am completely fascinated to know what other earth-threatening evils are giving you ulcers right now.

It's a shame TFA didn't provide a breakdown of device types, I would have been interested in the percentage of Surface versus Surface Pro devices, but also I would like to know if they included convertible ultrabooks as tablets. I find it a bit unlikely that Windows tablets could hit 6% without convertibles, but they really aren't part of the "tablet market" IMHO.

Yeah, considering how many species humans have (directly or indirectly) wiped out, developing the skills to bring some of them back might be prudent.

" We already extinguished them once, without even the help of gunpowder."

However I believe the current thinking is that mammoths are not amongst our victims, and were wiped out by natural climate change instead.

"Editing your own article on Wikipedia is not prohibited as long as you disclose your conflict of interest and follow the rules[...]"

That's just the point though, they are not following the rules. FTA; "While the research behind the 144 named donors who gave more than $5,000 to the WMF is not yet complete, it is already clear that several dozen of them are not widely notable enough to have a Wikipedia article associated with them", "While a few have adequately disclosed their conflict of interest, most have not."

"[...]so I have trouble seeing how this submission is anything other than yet more manufactured controversy and/or anti-Wikipedia astroturfing."

If they are getting away with not following the rules because they are donors, then that is different from people who don't obey the rules for other reasons.

It's not as bad as it used to be, I don't think. I recently went through the exercise of unsubscribing every spam mail that came in to the accounts of two former employees at the company I work for, and the spam level dropped almost to zero, around one spam mail per day rather than 30-50. Granted, the kind of spam you get on the work account of a reasonably sensible employee is probably going to be from more reputable sources on average than most personal accounts, but they weren't all reputable-looking. For sure I always do a little checking up on the source before I click that "unsubscribe" link on my own mail.

Apple didn't make a success of the iPhone by being first to market with a smartphone, they did it by getting it right. I'm no Apple fanboy, and I own no Apple products, but current smartwatches are a joke, and if anyone is going to take the concept beyond niche/gimmick level, it wouldn't entirely surprise me if it was Apple.

I use logmein for the same purpose, and I must say I might have considered signing up for pro, but the zero-notice cancellation of the free account has left a major bad taste in my mouth. It's a pretty blatant attempt to rush people into signing up for the paid program, because hey, give people a month's notice to evaluate alternatives and the might find something else they like. For that reason, there is zero chance I'll sign up for logmein pro.

Don't be a cheapskate, pay for FastMail or other decent pay-for email provider. Sign up for a personal domain, most services throw in email accounts for free with a domain, or forward to your FastMail account. Then you are completely independent of the vagaries of the free providers, and you can keep your email addresses regardless of whatever provider or ISP you use, and it will cost very little (~$30/year depending on your choice of domain).

If you insist on free, well, you get what you pay for.