My personal storage which is how I read it has to be HDD - somewhere around 8-12 TB spread over everything at home. I'd have to look to be sure. Next would be DVD - although there is a lot it's comforetably less than the HDD - 400 DVD's even 9GB ones comes in well below that. At work though, whcih isn't *mine* per se although I look after it I have online right now.. 25Pb of old fashion tape which easily creams the SAN for storage size at work.

You see this is where I come from... Windows does do what I want 100% of the time. It has a nice desktop, it is after XP SP3 stable, secure (enough if you use common sense) and has all the software I need. Linux does it about 98% of the time. But I run things in Wine and use Linux - the reason being that I've gotten burnt by vendors ceasing to trade. Ceasing to offer support. In particular, one vendor who is now defunct stopped providing updates for their software. That's when we found that there was a timebomb in the application and it became unusable, meaning all out historical data and build methods was just that. History. With Liunx at the very least if it is easter egged or timebombed, I'll have the source, and if I don't have the ability or time, I can pay someone to have it to fix my stuff. I'll have open format data structures so I can slap a bit of glue code together to port it to the new pacakge I use. That sort of freedom is worth real money and is something that a lot of Windows only people simply don't seem to appreciate. Most do "get" it but many don't - until it burns them. This is why open source solutions are always going to be around as an alternative. It's not about price, but the other sort of freedom.

Imagine if when developing the jet engine, Whittle had to make it backwards compatible with the piston engine. You know - it still needed to use the same fuel, it still only had the same bearings specifications, same exhaust temperatures, couldn't use different lube oil, and so forth... Yes it's a pain but if you want to advance sometimes you have to toss something that has reached the end of it's life and take a large jump forwards. Python 2 will probably go for a lot longer, just like prop-engines do now, but most people have switched to jet for a good reason.

I just enter SW1A 1AA (Buckingham Palace) It's amazing how often a gentleman named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni living at that address has made purchases in the UK.

Well it will according to John Titor anyway.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

Could we not try vapour phase deposition? I dunno, I've not looked at the numbers but I think that may help if we cannot zone refine. Alternatively for a thin layer you could lay it down by sputtering a coat on with a mass spectrograph to precisely select the ions you wanted - slow and doesnt make a very thick layer but that seems to be a bonus from what I read..

Many other elements are critical trace elements, but I dont see people complaining about using nickel for things like steelmaking.... Simple stating this is dumb without telling people why doesnt help. It's been shown that Mo is used in lubricatanrs for a century or so without problems. Simply saying that a few extra kT is suddently going to cause a problem without saying why doesnt cut ice. After all, we use a lot of moly - no issues so far. We use a lot of copper as well - another trace but that's not a problem, and we even recycle most of it stopping it from entering the biosphere. But the Amazon is still there... ditto zinc, boron, manganese.... So unless you have reason why - other than shouting DUMB - I fail to see why using a small amount compared to current use is such a problem.

You are aware that we've been using moly disulphide in lubricants for a hundred years or so - I hardly think that this will cause a problem since we are already in fact mining and using the stuff. Simply taking it out of a mine, cycling it through some components that then get discarded and recycled will if anything increase the soil availability of molybdenum.

Since they are still north of the Equator they will be - they only become the aurora austrialis if you are viewing them looking southwards.

Partly. The Criminal Justice Act 1994 http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1994/ukpga_19940033_en_7#pt4-pb2-l1g60 provides for example in s60 the right to temporarily search anyone or any vehicle without suspicion if violent disorder is anticipated. The main search laws etc are in PACE, and these generally do require reasonable grounds. http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?parentActiveTextDocId=1871554&ActiveTextDocId=1871558

I could sign in any of my capacities of company director, Chartered Chemist or as a member of the BCS - most people belonging to organisations that grant postnominals by letters patent will be able to countersign.

The British people have never tolerated a register of where they live open to all officialdom - only in WW2 was it tolerated and it got kicked out shortly afterwards. Identity (of which there is a national birth register) is a totally different thing to address which is why passports have never had your address on them.

It is checked - I'm one of the people on the list of those who can countersign and I guess that about 20% of them are verified, might only be a phone call but they do check. For one guy who was coming from shall we say a country of interest they turned up with the application and wanted me to examine and confirm I had filled it all out.

You most certainly can. French national ID cards are perfectly valid and I know someone who travels on those documents regularly.