Really, I'd like to explore another planet ... but that's not going to happen.

Safeties can be bypassed. No doubt there will eventually (if these things get off the ground) be some sort of hacker toolkit developed to allow either the owner or the equivalent of "script kiddies" to make the car do whatever they feel like. Just like rooting you phone and installing Cyanogenmod. It'll happen no matter what the FBI says - but hopefully require physical access. If the FBI/NSA try to get their own ... well, let's call it a rootkit, where they could override the software remotely even if it was hacked ... then anyone else will be able to as well. Someone will sell the secret to the Russian mafia or whoever, and all the criminals will have it.

The FBI's concerns may be valid, but are moot - just use a human driver.

I gather that "remote areas" somehow excludes deserts? Amazing ...

I do wear a watch, and can see uses for a smart watch - but almost all the stuff listed in the summary would be excluded! Music? Requires headphones or speakers, better to leave it on the phone. Pictures? Um ... how? Are you planning to use the screen as the viewer and thus have the lens wear the clasp would be? Sensor has to go with the lens ... seems it would be too prone to damage. GPS could work - already seen watches with a built-in compass, but navigation is probably a bad idea (small screen, and sound/voice would be better with headphones again). What watches are mostly for is telling time, so how about a watch that can sync with your schedule to remind you of appointments? A watch could reasonably display small amounts of text (like addresses or tweets) but input is rather limited - currently. Hmm ... install enough motion sensors that the watch could track your hand on a virtual keyboard or virtual mouse? But that's only one hand - and not even individual fingers - so would require some training to get it to work right. Looks like we'd better just stick to time and leave most of the "smart" stuff for the phones.

Back in what has to qualify as the computer stone age, a high school Biology teacher I worked with got a bunch of A/D converters and wired them to his networked C-64s, I wrote the software myself. We were measuring the acceleration of gravity (okay, not a Biology experiment, but he saw it in a magazine and wanted to try it himself) and graphing student's heartbeats and so on - in 1986. So really, the oscilloscope part is trivial. Might even be able to use the existing A/D and DSP from the sound card, if you can figure out how to feed your signal to the Mic. input. (Yes, 1986 - the school board wanted him to upgrade to PC XTs, he preferred to use what he had. When they saw what we did with those old C-64s, all they could do was scratch their heads.)

Favorite? KDE (though the old version was slightly better) Second? Enlightenment.

When I look for a desktop, I expect a basic set of tools to come with it, and design consistency between said tools. KDE seems best in terms of tools (aka desktop accessories if you prefer). Gnome's tools seem like they are chosen by committee, rather than actually designed for that environment.

And yes, desktop environments should include Windows and Macintosh OSX as options.

Sorry, didn't realize I wasn't logged in.

And ... can Google Glass be used as a HUD? That is, when driving it shows you pertinent information to your driving. If your "digital devices" law bans GPSs then it may be counterproductive.

As long as a company - in this case Google, but any company - can show how their product assists the driver rather than distracting the driver, there really shouldn't be an issue. There will of course be states that want to ban HUDs, but the public will straighten them out over time. So go ahead, Google, convince us that Google Glass will actually help the driver ...

My first computer was an RCA VIP (1802 processor - like an ELF) with 2KB, later expanded to 8KB. Mind you, 1 "page" (0.25K) was devoted to the video display. This netbook has 2GB, so I'm ... well really 1.048,576 times as much. I doubt anyone has exactly 1,000,000 times as much ...

Use HTML entities? Hmm ... maybe not, 4π didn't render properly.

I always wondered why Ad-Aware never checked for that name (it was owned by ADAware, an ADA software site, when I looked at it several years ago). Apparently those two didn't arrive at amicable terms ... last I saw, ADAware had a link to a different ad blocker on their site.

The question is ... if the user changes their mind, how easy is it to recover.

I help out with an online forum, we get requests every day from people who requested to delete their accounts and then changed their mind. (Okay, not every day ... but too often.) This isn't something the user can do themselves, one of the administrators has to go into the backups to find the data.

Conversely, we do have a legal requirement to delete user data upon proper request, we can't just make this option unavailable.

So the option is there and is fairly hard to find (I've never used it myself and can't say how hard it is to actually use), that's the best we can do.

I gather the comment system doesn't like all those symbols. It removed half of my reply. Let me try words ...

n! is divisible by k for all k less than or equal to n, so n! - k is divisible by k and (if k is not 1) is not prime. So n! - 1 to n! - (n + 1) are two numbers with a difference of n with no primes between them.

The result must show that for any x there are primes p and q with q > p > x and q - p less than 70 million, ...

May. There is a trivial proof that there exist gaps larger than any given number ...

Pick any number n. Consider n! (that's "factorial", for the non-mathematicians). Now, n! - 1 might be prime (or not), but as n! is divisible by k for all k x and a prime q > p with q - p = 70 million, not that there will always be a prime within 70 million of x.