Sometimes, i just dont understand people's motivation for this sort of thing. Copernicus was a great man, why on earth do we need to dig up his corpse and rebury him to honor his achievements?

I think in essence this is a church advert. (They couldn't care less of the science he has discovered. Religion needs promotion. Same happened at the death of Newton.)

Google has just put the best holiday logo ever on the homepage. A working PacMan! I wonder what's the worldwide economic impact of this joke, in terms of lost productivity. It probably beats most terrorist acts and natural disasters :).

There are two things about this publication that make it remarkable.

1. This is a new useful information processing primitive that is only possible to do quantum, not in any classical information processing (the paper cites impossibility proof in classical domain). There's just a handful such quantum primitives known today (e.g., QKD, Shor's algorithm), so discovering one more is a great deal.

2. It is practically implementable with today's quantum crypto hardware. In fact, I expect any lab that has a working free-space QKD system can be working on an experimental demonstration of location-restricted QKD right now. It may just take some software rewriting and a couple extra wi-fi links to assemble a full 2D-location QKD scheme.

To be fair I must mention that the location primitive has been published two months ago by R. Malaney from Australia. However, his version was more difficult to implement (although also doable with today's experimental techniques), and notably it lacked QKD functionality. Now with this publication the scheme is complete and is even supplied with a security proof. My applauds to the authors.

due to scientific instruments, for which it's not uncommon to have 20-30 years lifetime, and as others have pointed out due to industrial equipment with similarly long lifetime. In CNC mills for example, replacing a part of the controller is not as easy as it sounds: it's a triple redundant machine, very conservatively tested for safety.

All things being equal, the latter solution is inferior to the former. Metric is logical and much easier (powers of ten, same decimal prefixes in all units). The only thing holding the imperial system is legacy; it has no inherent advantages.

I encountered this over a year ago. In the summer 2008, to be exact. A large academic publisher's website was hacked to redirect to malware when seeing "google" in the REFERER string, yet function normally otherwise. It has taken me a day to realize it wasn't Google's or my computer problem. It has taken me two or three emails to a journal editor over a couple weeks to have the site webmaster finally notice and believe it was his server responsible and not something else. Half the traffric was hijacked, yet webmasters usually checked their own websites not through Google and assumed everything looked normal. This was an efficient trick the first time it was used.

Viewing the rover video has convinced me the US will go throuh with this space program. Real work, real schedules, real tests, capable technology. I wish NASA and the US all the best with the upcoming establishment of the lunar base.

By decent I mostly mean size, and resolution. Yes it suffers from what you've named. Possible Kindle screen technology is better (haven't seen it), but it's small. This is one issue; another killer one is that laptop is a universal thing on which I have access to all my stuff, can store texts with other data in the filesystem, backup together, instantly switch between tasks while reading, etc., etc.

"I read texts on my computer"? I don't think I will ever use any separate device for reading books. What's the point of lugging one around when I already have a laptop with a very decent screen? Besides, #bookz rulez at getting the texts: no DRM, no weird formats, no hassles.

they are still factorizing the number 15 :)

Bill Gates, thank you!

I will watch them all.

Somewhere in the hub (where the "tentacles") converge, there is a small fancy 'designer' seating area. Lots of outlets there. When changing planes, I always walk through it.

is the second most important thing. I'd even say it's the first one: I can live without internet, but to work offline I need to charge the laptop.

At most airoports a few outlets in the waiting areas are at best inconveniently located (being designed for plugging cleaning machines rather than for traveller's use), and at worst unavailable. I've spent more than a few strolls down the halls trying to find a free outlet and a seat withing the reach of it.

Depends on how the laptop was packed. Look someday how they have to load the bags into the cargo compartment. Several bags sit atop each other. Some bags have hard edges sticking into other bags. In addition, when the bags are loaded and unloaded, they have to be handled roughly to speed up the process.

To ship safely, all fragile things have to be packed with ample padding on all sides. If you don't pack like this, please accept a high risk of damage.