I believe their magnets are insulated in much the same way as the superconductors in the NMR I do maintenance on at work. The superconducting magnets are submerged in liquid helium. The liquid helium vessel is surrounded by a vacuum vessel to act as a layer of insulation/isolation. After that the whole thing is surrounded by another vessel containing liquid nitrogen which again is vacuum insulated, followed by more conventional insulation.

The liquid nitrogen, being quite cheap, is sacrificial. We need to top ours up every week or two. It absorbs the majority of the heat that radiates in through the first vacuum vessel.

The helium only needs to be topped up every 6 months or so.

There are none, once a game time card (GTC) is transferred into the in-game version (PLEX) no value can be removed from the game without violating the EULA. If you can't extract real life money from the game in a legitimate way, from CCP's and the average player's perspective, there's no tax implications.

I'm not sure if the practical aspect of engineering is something that gets dropped in favor of more theory at universities.

Many engineers I've worked with have been incapable of doing many simple hands-on tasks, like the electronic engineer that didn't know how to check switch continuity with a multimeter. Better yet, the electrical engineer that was making an extension cord by wiring up a male plug on a spool of wire, plugging it in to anchor it, unrolling to the desired length and cutting...

The Hunt for Gollum team went to massive excess to make sure their film was completely profitless without any accounting shenanigans. They also sought the go ahead from Tolkein Enterprises which controls many of the rights to LotR.

Excellent quality for a fan film.

There's only really been one content update, everything else has been patches.

The added versus campaigns weren't new, they were just the ones they didn't have time to balance properly for vs play before the original release. People have been expecting actual NEW campaigns. The quote from Gabe also mentioned new weapons, new infected, improved AI in the original game, all that seems to have been moved to the sequel.

Survival mode, well that was a decent addition, but it only added one small map, all the other survival maps were just expanded panic events from the existing content.

SDK beta... at least we can make our own content now, but how many horrible hack job maps are we going to need to sort through before finding anything good.

Typically 300-500 Watts, and they don't need to be plugged in all the time, usually an hour or two just before the morning commute. Most people use outdoor electrical timers.

At -40 starting most vehicles isn't an option unless they have been plugged in. The pre-heating also reduces warm up time and the terrible mileage while the vehicle is operating in 'cold' mode.

Except that they implemented a work around in the last patch by just increasing the regular cargo bay size...

"Black Ops ships have gained +100m3 to their cargo bay."

http://www.eveonline.com/updates/patchnotes.asp

There's a great book all bout the death star contractors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Star_(novel) Most were genuinely ignorant of how dangerous the deathstar was until the end.

Sure going to mars is going to be a high risk proposition anyway, but not having at least the redundancy of a return capable vehicle for the first trip isn't a bright idea. Having a one way trip would be exponentially more massive an undertaking than going and returning, unless it's a suicide mission. You'll need to rely on scheduled supply runs, with massive redundancy built into them. (What's the current success rate of probes successfully reaching Mars, 60%?) A permanent colonization would require way more people than a quick visit. What happens when you have some catastrophe that shuts down the program for a few years while they re-design? What happens if your colony ship is en-route and the equipment sent earlier gets destroyed? What happens if something unforeseen makes staying there impossible without re-designing something? What if someone goes crazy?