David Weber's Honor Harrington series postulates both wormholes and a kind of displacement into a state in which c is not the same. It feels less like an exploration of extreme physics than a literary device to set 18th century sea battles in the future, which it manages quite well.

Asaro postulates an inversion drive. I'm not sure it should be called unorthodox, since she is a professor of physics and described the drive in the American Journal of Physics. Basically, OK you can't go at light speed, but add a complex part to your speed, and you go around the singularity.

Sure, and I have one, but it's not usually in my pocket.

portable breathalyzer App upcoming

See http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Google won't want to pay, so Google won't post a link to their sites. Ever. Anywhere.

The box provided by French provider "Free" has a 250 GB HD that is CIFS exported:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox#Quatri.C3.A8me_g.C3.A9n.C3.A9ration_:_version_6_.C2.AB_R.C3.A9volution_.C2.BB

Not good enough. A nic driver that sees a specific code in a buffer, for the next hour sets that specific code in all subsequent packets passing through, and then shuts down after having fried the motherboard. Cue chaos.

Thank you for that. Indent and bracket placing standards are good for consistency, xCase and whatever are nice so that one immediately recognizes variables and functions and whatnot, but the really useful part of a coding standard is the one that says that every function has documentation block which specifies:

- expected behavior
- allowable inputs (NULLs, empty strings, corner cases . . .)
- allowable outputs

Hmmm. Webster DOES have it, defined as "a straight line from the muzzle of an artillery piece to a target". Definitely "citation needed". Dictionary.com says origin 1905-1910. I have taken an instant dislike to the expression, based on perceived lack of usefulness, homophony with almost-synonym, and IMHO probable origin in the misspelling of said synonym. Webster tells me to "like" it on Facebook; if there was a Facebook "dislike" I'd even consider signing up for a Facebook account.

Mutt existed long before Gmail. My first thought when I saw the GMail conversation view was "Mutt does it better". It still does.

The In-Reply-To header is extremely basic, there "in the first place", and the only thing really needed for conversation view. I would be surprised if none of the original designers of the e-mail format had envisioned the use. It "screws up" in GMail because GMail tries to compensate for MUAs who don't set In-Reply-To correctly.

If the ISP was running the Tor node, why not? But the ISP says you are running the Tor node, so that makes it your problem and your consequences to face. You're not saying you were running a Tor node unwittingly, right? Hmmm . . . a virus that installs a Tor node . . .

Probably because that's what people want to pay for. When you have a human on the line, you know that human is paying attention to you and only to you, and that's what you're paying for. IM/chat support *only* doesn't sound professional. However I do agree that WebEx or something similar should absolutely be standard alongside the telephone call, quite simply because it helps the client get satisfied quicker. That makes the customer happy, and also helps the bottom line when customers are paying a flat fee per month or per incident.

Gun? Bad idea. Fines are better, 20-dollar fine in Australia for example. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting