And the Web is 90% porn (ok, maybe exaggerated) and Email traffic is 30-90% Spam (http://www.mailarmory.com/resources/stats/). But still we use both. Maybe 90% of torrents are currently illegal, but it does not mean that the service should be blocked or banned. Otherwise I would say: Bye bye to Email and Web as well. (At least Porn and illegal torrents serve a certain purpose, Spam on the other hand...)

The hydrogen is a fuel that can be stored (with problems, as mentioned above). There are solar reactors that do what you propose, but this special reactor would be able to generate energy for later usage. Even if our hydrogen storage mechanisms are not perfect yet, this helps to solve one part of the problem.

An 8088 is still a 16 bit machine. It has 16 bit registers and supports arithmetic operations on 16 bit values. Just the data bus is 8 bit and hence pushing those 16 bit values around the system takes more time...

Sounds like a rather good plan. I am currently reading the Heechee trilogy by Frederik Pohl. The spaceships there never enter an atmosphere, except for the landing pods. Those are rather small. This sounds like a good idea for me. Even in Star Trek we have the idea of big space ships and small shuttle crafts -- ok, those are reusable, but I think the idea here could be: Use a small Soyuz type spacecraft and rocket to get into LEO. Then dock to your re-usable non-reentry spaceship that takes you to Mars / asteroids / whatever. With Mars the problem would of course be, to get a small-ish Soyuz-like rocket to the ground. I guess here you would want some Apollo style lander, but with a heat shield.

Democratic does not always equal morally or ethically correct. The society is made up of egoistic individuals. Most of us would buy products from Iran. Heck, I am buying stuff from Apple, produced at "the evil Foxconn". Because it's affordable and cool! But I am glad that there are institutions (many of them democratically elected) that serve as a moral / ethical watchdog. I am glad that they are applying sanctions. Our individual egotism is useful in day to day life, but hinders the greater society's values. So I think the system as we have it is already on a good track. It just needs some tweaking.

The keys of your first and second post were so close together... Could have happened to anyone...

Then just rename it 'The Hobbit (book) - For other uses, see Hobbit (disambiguation)'. :^)

But now I checked streaming. I used to love the cinema. And I still go to our local Arthouse cinema for non-mainstream movies. And also every now and then with my spouse to the mainstream cinema. But the latter ist getting less and less attractive. Prices are insane, especially with 3D, and also for snacks and drinks. An evening there for a single person with soft drink and popcorn can cost as much as 20 to 25 EUR, depending on length of movie and if it's in 3D. I couldn't care less for the 3D, but alas many movies are released 3D-only nowadays.

In contrast, renting a nice movie on the AppleTV / iTunes for between 1 and 4 EUR plus homegrown food and drinks makes for a nice evening and still a good experience.

What I can't stand at all anymore are movies on TV with a ton of commercial breaks and bad editing! E.g. Die Hard was on a couple of weeks ago, and they cut out *every* scene that was deemed too violent. Which in itself is sort of understandable, but it ruined the plot. There was suspense being build up, you knew there would be a brawl or shooting and: BAM! Cut to the next scene, Bruce Willis is somewhere else, bleeding slightly more. What a downer.

Must not forget, then, "Stand On Zanzibar" which posits what life would be like on a crowded, '60s-inflected world in 2010. Brunner did get one thing right: a worldwide, 24/7 news network called Engrelay Satelserv, English-language Relay Satellite Service. Say it with me in your best imitation of James Earl Jones: THIS IS CNN. From the perspective of two years after 2010 it reads more like a dip into an alternate Earth which zagged where ours zigged sometime in the '70s. Brunner was a genius.

"You're holding it wrong!" ;)

The problem with these demos is, they use ray tracing like we did in 1980 (i.e. Whitted style). All computations are highly coherent and efficient. As soon as you want to have more natural rendering, with diffuse illumination etc. Parellization doesn't scale proportionally anymore. Rays become heavily incoherent, memory access scatters and you get cache misses etc. So the real feat would have been if tey show 7.7x speed with diffuse global illumination.

Uh oh, treading on very shallow ground here. We already had this kind of stuff in a slightly different setting, some 70 years back. It was not so much turning people away from fertility treatment, but rather making sure they are infertile. The question always is: where do you draw the line? If there's a risk of injury / disability in your family or with your pregnancy, the doctor should inform the parents, so that they can make a decision, if they want to get pregnant or if they really want to carry out the baby. But simply saying "people with ... defects ... would be turned away" is borderline unethical.

I am not sure, but I guess that costs per launch are a reason. With Soyuz, a bunch of russian companies manufacture the rocket parts and final assembly and erection happen in Kourou. I guess that this frees ESAs resources considerably, compared to having to make an Ariane 4 in Europe. Furthermore, I don't see any Ariane 4 integration buildings anymore on ESAs map of the Centre Spatial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_Centre_Spatial_Guyanais-en.svg
It is likely that the buildings that were used for Ariane 4 have been assimilated by the Ariane 5 pipeline. So either way you would have had to build a new integration and erection facility, so it seems that Soyuz-ST was the most efficient and reliable way to do that.

Well, the N900 was a great platform, but you can't buy it anymore (at least here in Germany), since Nokia stopped producing it, I think. And the whole open Linux-based smartphone idea at Nokia died as well.

I am not quite sure if it would work in all cases. One certain example comes to mind, where it might not have worked. This example I won't mention, for Godwin's sake. But some opponents are just too suicidal to be coerced into non-aggressive behaviour in a MAD setting.