I currently work for a Canadian shipping company that handles UPS, Purolator, DHL and a bit of FedEx air freight across the country and I can tell you at 4 AM outside in the cold and rain after the 4000th 50lb supposedly fragile package it's REALLY hard to give a flying(get it? 'cause it's air freight) fuck about your shipment. And of course as they say in the article, express shipping (read: air freight) is expensive, to keep a reasonable profit margin sacrifices have to be made and so that although 1 in 1000 might get damaged the other 999 make it to their destination on time and in one piece.

The hell an icebox didn't carry it's design task perfectly, an icebox was designed to keep items cool and fresh so long as it's provided with a regular supply of ice, which was available year round via delivery, a fridge is designed to keep items cool and fresh so long as it's provided with a regular supply of electricity. This new fancy fridge is designed to keep items cool and fresh AND provide an in kitchen computer interface to various applications so long as it's prerequisites are met and I'm sure that it will carry out said task perfectly (or as close to perfect as can be reasonably achieved).

Do not assume that just because you cannot imagine a future world or do not like the future world you imagine, that everyone else is equally handicapped.

Yeah, who buys vegetables? Now steak & beer, that's a whole different story.

Whats a Fridge? By the sounds of the previous comments it sounds like my icebox, you know the thing that I put the big block of ice in to keep my food cold for a few weeks? Dunno about this whole fridge thing, sounds kinda flaky and unnecessary I mean you can't go wrong with an icebox can you? It's a box with a bit of ice. Nice, easy simple. And well we're on the subject you can keep your electricity and indoor plumbing, who wants to live in a house that can spontaneously catch fire or flood? Not me that's for sure.

It all depends on your frame of reference doesn't it, and in the absence of an absolute universal reference I shall accept earths as a reasonable and practical substitute. And seeing as from earth that black hole is 30 years old thats the age I'll accept, anything else is pointless pedantry.

My experience with the Gran Turismo series has been that it's a racing simulator, that is if you're going around hitting other cars or walls, you've already lost. Spending time and effort creating a damage simulation for a game where the point is NOT to hit anything else seems a bit pointless. Look at any car race (outside of demolition derbies) what happens when a car hit anything with more force then the slightest of bumps? The Race comes to a stop and very often paramedics are called.

Just because quantum physics is most obvious at sub-atomic levels does not mean it has no effect on the macroscopic world. Some cancers are potentially caused by nothing more then a gamma ray impacting a molecular structure in a cell in just the right not to cause it to start misbehaving. These gamma rays, being a result of a fusion reaction in the sun, are spawned with a random trajectory at a random time (quantum physics at work in the fusion reaction) and if it just happens to hit said molecule in you then you have lost the lottery, no defense, no way to predict it, it just happened so sorry. The same goes for a die throw or a pool table, the results can be predicted with excellent accuracy using only Newtonian physics up to a point after that the minuscule random effects start to add up and with all the sensory equipment and all the computing power in the world wont predict the outcome.

Unless of course you subscribe to Einsteins view of the universe where "God does not play dice with the universe" in which case you could do just that, assuming you knew the exact state of the whole universe down to an atomic level.

Easy there now, that`s some pinko commie socialism bullshit you`re spouting off.

Well that's actually true, but instead we'll be getting panics on the market.

If you don't want to be subject to Chinese laws then don't do business with Chinese customers. Now on a related note if you happen to do business with China but have no physical presence there then China would be forced to extradite you OR attempt to sue you in your jurisdiction. (I believe this is true anyone with more knowledge feel free to correct me) UNLESS you happen to be stupid enough to travel to country that has a warrant for your arrest, theres been a few poor bastards that got nabbed by the FBI because they had a connecting flight in the States even though USA was not there intended destination.

Because when the space junk is a bolt traveling at 10km/s relative to you, sticky doesn't quite cut it.

My mom used to hope that I wouldn't ever come back.

So you're prepared to criticize Opera for their (allegedly) poor quality Mac port but aren't prepared to actually file a bug report or make any attempt to bring your dissatisfaction to their attention? Hell, you could have filed a bug report with Opera in less time then it took you to complain about it on Slashdot.

Since you clearly want that thing in an enclosed box (I prefer my TVs to be of the less then lethal variety) It would seem to make sense to make that box a vacuum or at least low pressure, they were making some pretty massive CRTs right at the end of that tech so I imagine that this wouldn't be a problem. Ultimately thought I think that this just isn't practical and probably never will be, it doesn't scale very well, 60 fps would likely shatter the mirror, in most applications nobody would actually care to sit at the back and frankly it's a big spinning mirror in the middle of your office or living room.

Microsoft would gladly make a walled garden OS for EVERYONE to use if they thought they could get away with it.