What if his wife is also a gamer?* What if there is no other suitable room? What if they feel "the living room is the wife's domain" is twaddle? What if using the large screen TV for gaming is important to them?

* disliking a very loud gaming PC is not the same as disliking all gaming PCs.

silentpcreview.com is a web site dedicated to quiet and silent computing, with extensive reviews and forums. They have very recently posted a sample build of a quiet gaming PC.

You can take that as a base and adjust according to taste. (For example, I'm more obsessed by quiet and less by frames per second, so my gaming PC has a single GTX760Ti GPU.) If you have questions, take them to the forums.

Movie makers edited out lens flares at one point. There were a LOT of complaints. So many that even in pure CGI movies and animations, lens flare is now edited IN.

I think it was the second of the unofficial Han Solo novels during the time of the Original Trilogy that first had TIE Fighters in the atmosphere. So you're absolutely right that they're impossible, but it's "legitimate" extended canon. (Which is why I don't consider anything after the first movie "canon" at all.)

Plausible. Also, since it's an amateur rig, the force field may well extend well beyond the blade and not just envelop it. If that's the case, the cross guard's projectors cannot be sliced off as the force field would be protecting them as well.

Since they filmed some of the movie in Puzzle Wood and since I'm damn sure I recognize the trail, I'm going to say that's the likely location for this scene. If so, expect some seriously gnarled and twisted trees in the background. Those won't be CGI, that's really what the place looks like.

A projectile containing a Bose-Einstein Condensate.

The bullet vaporizes on the force field surrounding the plasma interior. However, this isn't instantaneous. During that time, there is a cavity in the force field. The BEC gets through this cavity and impacts the plasma. This causes the BEC to instantaneously heat up to temperatures that permit fusion. Since the nuclei are already overlapping, fusion into a mega atom takes place. The mega atom instantly disintegrates as it's violently unstable, drenching the Jedi in hard radiation.

Midichlorians don't exist in the Star Wars universe. We all heard Obi Wan, the Force is similar to an energy field except that the Jedi scientists could not understand its nature fully. Ergo, no deeper understanding exists, ergo midichlorians are mythical.

It was imagined as a 9-parter from the very beginning. The mistake Lucas made was to not write all nine parts in one go. Had they all been written together, you'd not have had the continuity errors or the deterioration in quality after the original.

Emissivity and absorptivity are the same thing. One way to look at this is the time-reversibility of physics on a microscopic scale, another is that something that was really absorptive but not emissive or vice-versa would give you a really easy way to beat the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Emissivity can, however, vary with wavelength, which is the trick here.

I agree the justice system has gone haywire.

I agree the justice system has no business going haywire.

I agree the justice system has no business treating one person differently from another.

I agree that what was done was completely wrong, not just in this case but in many others.

I've said as much, repeatedly, on The Guardian's website on relevant topics. This isn't a new opinion for me.

There is a difference between having no sympathy for the guy (IMHO he deserved it) and agreeing with the justice system. I agree, and always have, with Tolkien's phrasing of it: "Deserved death? I daresay he did. I daresay there are many who live who deserve to die. I daresay there are many who've died who deserve life. Can you give them that also?" Whilst I admit that I'm "quick to judge" on occasion, I heed Tolkien's words and do not believe that "deserving" is sufficient to warrant inflicting what is "deserved". I do not believe retribution is a functional way to go about things. Trashing a hard drive with a sledgehammer might stop bugs in software affecting you, but it doesn't actually fix anything. To do that, you have to not inflict retribution but therapy, fixing the defects.

The same is true of people. Fixing the defects of character is harder, but certainly achievable in most cases. That pays attention to Tolkien/Gandalf's advice, leaves the world a richer place, and is generally a Good Thing. It's also cheaper than inflicting punishment. A lot cheaper, if the world is a lot richer for it.

He has smarts, he has savvy, with a little examination of why he chose the path he was on and some tests, it would not be hard to figure out how he could either offer the same service in essentially the same way in a protected manner, or (if he preferred) to do something different but that makes use of his skills and knowledge.

Bankrupting him has left the world poorer, because there's no way on Earth anyone will convince him to be more charitable and considerate now, and that's the only way the world would ever benefit from his skills and know-how.

To me, this is simple economics. At vast expense, the US has turned a person who was merely dysfunctional but a potential asset nonetheless to society if he could be persuaded into a dysfunctional wreck with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Empire State Building who is never going to let the world see the positive in his abilities. In short, by clocking up a huge liability, the US has achieved the dubious distinction of turning an asset into an additional liability.

I hold that there is always a solution that is both economically sound and ethically sound over the long term, over society as a whole, and that on closer examination, such solutions will always be superior to those that appear ethically sound but are economically unsound. Most of what is truly ethical is also a boost to some key aspect - to a person, society or planet - in the long term that is in excess of the cost, and thus will automatically be also economically sensible. Everything that is truly unethical may produce some short term benefit of some kind to some person, but is invariably expensive to everyone and everything in the long run. In consequence, even the ethical things with no obvious benefits will be cheaper than the great burdens created by the unethical.

I would not do well in a Star Trek universe.

A parasite (he didn't get a fleet of flashy cars by donating disk space to anyone) gets sucked dry by a bigger, nastier parasite.

Sorry, but if you live by a dog-eat-dog creed, don't expect tears when your pet poodle is a predator's desert.

I'm sympathetic with ISOhunt, who got crippled by the UK government, as I'm willing to bet that people after illegal ISOs searched elsewhere. They're a major source of information on ISOs for F/L/OS software, though, which is entirely legal. They got a raw deal on that, because of the bad name the *AA have given torrents. Blocking the others won't do the UK any good, but that's not the point. Nor is it the point that these services index, not host. The point is that it doesn't matter whether the links point to legitimate or illegitimate content, they're tarnished not by what they index but by the mode of transport used.

Kim DotCom is another matter. He raked in an awful lot of money by doing very very little. He'd make a great bank CEO or politician, such is his level of verminicity. Had he done essentially the same, with far less profit (it's ok for him to live, just not ok for him to own half the cars in New Zealand), far less arrogance (like I said, a bank CEO or politician), and far less swagger (maybe, just maybe a touch of humility), I might pity him more. The humble earn at least some respect for being humble. It's rare enough.

If he'd presented his service as "common carrier", then that too would be worth respect. That's legal, that's all about NOT looking at what's there and NOT being shot in the process. DotCom's approach was to be a braggart. Sorry, but that kills any respect.

As judges are renown for disliking the arrogant, swaggering braggart type, that might well have cost him every court case contested. Even on the rare occasion that justice is blind, it still has a sense of smell and arrogant, swaggering braggarts stink.

Enough about Microsoft! What about those suffering physical pain?

I think the second photograph in the article is the researchers reflected in their piece of film, so the answer is it is reflective like a mirror. I imagine you could put some translucent layer over it at the cost of some efficiency.

Not really - the 40Wm^2 of cooling is only useful if it is in contact with something that can move that cold to where it is needed. (Hand-wavy explanation, really we are shifting heat to the film.) It also needs to see mostly sky, which windows usually don't.
You'd put it on your roof and run water behind it to shift the heat around.

Would you care to be more specific? My explanation is pop-science simplified, but I don't see an error in it.

More detailed explanation:
In the 8-13 micron (wavelength) window, atmospheric transmittance averages about 80% (estimated from a plot in the paper.) So the energy received is about 20% of what you'd get from a black body at atmospheric temperature (plus 80% of what you'd get from space, which is negligible in comparison.) So the brightness temperature at 8-13 microns is lower than ground level atmospheric temperature. How much lower depends on the average temperature of the atmosphere along the line of sight, and where 8-13 microns falls on the black body curve at that temperature (even this is oversimplifying) and I can't be bothered figuring that out. However, if we can reflect/insulate all energy except 8-13 micron radiation, then our thermal equilibrium temperature will be the brightness temperature at 8-13 microns to which we are exposed. This is, as noted, less than atmospheric temperature at ground level.