If one looks at similar statistics by state in the US, murder-by-firearm also does not correlate with gun ownership. Rather, it slightly tracks population density. I recently updated my murder and firearm statistics spreadsheet with the FBI's 2010 murder data.

Thanks, that data is somewhat more recent than what I previously had. I've used it to update my by-state US gun ownership and murder data. Conclusions:

• Gun ownership and gun murder are uncorrelated or slightly inversely correlated.
• Gun ownership is strongly inversely correlated with population density.
• Murder rates are slightly correlated with population density, gun murder slightly moreso. (I'd guess the relation would be stronger if I did a by-county comparison instead of by state)
• Gun ownership is weakly inversely correlated with overall murder rates.

Note, the gun ownership data is from 2001 - if someone can find something more recent, I'll update it.

Strangely there's no citation of the paper in that article. Here's the arXiv preprint.

That's an excellent point - there seems to be a certain timeframe beyond which futurists fail to consider the implications of progressive implementation. On only slightly shorter timeframes, they can actually do quite well - for example, AT&T had a series of "You Will" ads in 1993 that were strangely accurate in predicting modern technology. Presumably it has something to do with extending an existing technology in a logical way rather than trying to determine the intermediate uses of new concepts.

This looks quite similar to a European effort reported last year that successfully tested glucose fuel cells in rats in 2010. This MIT one can be fabricated in silicon, though, so hopefully has the potential to be cheaper.

Fun fact: Surgeons are 130 times more likely than gunowners to leave a foreign object in someone (assumptions: all gunshot wounds count, and surgeons never leave foreign objects in patients which do not undergo general anesthesia).

Higher education degrees in the US for science and engineering degrees (not usually mathematics, I don't know about non-science technology degrees) are generally paid for by working as a TA or research assistant half-time. This usually waives or pays tuition and provides a moderate stipend, often funded via grant money or similar from the research group the student is working for. This is less common for Masters than it is for Doctorates, though.

Perhaps you should do the math. Assuming a 3.6e8 km^2 surface area for the ocean, the largest reservoir alone, going by Wikipedia's 180km^3 figure, could account for 0.5mm of sea level. A trivial calculation. Others have posted similar further up the page.

Unfortunately, constant high acceleration is energetically impossible. By the time you get to ~0.7c, you've used up half the mass of your ship if you have a perfectly efficient matter to kinetic energy converter (eg. a 100% efficient photon drive). I.E. your kinetic energy is now equal to your rest mass. Good luck getting anywhere near that with conventional propulsion methods!

They seem to have merely omitted the games which favor AMD more strongly. Compare, for example, the Metro 2033 benchmarks (or BF3, or Skyrim) and you can see that they are relatively similar. THG did not test Crysis or Total War: Shogun 2, which the AMD cards perform better on.

I'll be voting for Ron Paul not because I agree with him on everything (although I agree with him on several things), but because I think it would be better to have a significant change, even if it includes crazy changes, rather than more of the same. It would be beneficial to shake up the current Federal government policies.

My generic CFLs purchased at Costco 6 years ago (and installed then) have not yet had a single burnout. They're in enclosed ceiling fixtures, and my apartment building has wiring from the 1960s.

No, superconductors are not thermally superconductive, just electrically. Niven made a mistake there.

Isn't it better to attempt to radically change something, even if it upsets the system, instead of hoping that more of the same will be an improvement?

Don't forget Alien: Resurrection, where Serenity's crew boards a space station to help mutant-Ripley kill the Aliens!