Jesus, I'd certainly win the Darwin Award hands down if I died in a vacuum chamber killed by a falling tree that was chopped down by some friend because I couldn't hear him scream "Timber!"...

Hasn't this kind of saber rattling (and more) already been covered in fiction ?

Tom Clancy - Threat Vector....

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." Replace "mail" by "PDFs"...

They don't care about my message and I will quite likely get a coupon for cheap batteries for the taser.

Is this some sort of 'Hey we can do this even better !' or what exactly could be the point of - besides fighting, err, terrorism of course - spying on everyone at the olympics ? Don't get me wrong, I still wish that there wouldn't this sort of spying on harmless people, but what exactly could be gained from it ?

...especially if it's supposed to be mainly supposed to harm a few people in the uncivilized world (whatever that means...).

Probabaly, since they patrol lake Geneva. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Switzerland#Lakes_flotilla

Finally ! We are going to get lean and efficient code again instead of the current trend towards more and more bloated stuff ! (There weren't any bloody Blahblahtoolbars or N different themes in those ZX-81-1kB-and-that's-all-days, huh ?! Not even with the 16kB RAM pack either.)

"something pretty hard to spoof, Earth's magnetic field" - Obviously you have never been near a compass with an ordinary screwdriver...

Ain't this what we call acceleration ?

Check. "Unscrew these screws !" to any sufficiently technically literate subordinate will do.

Where the hell is the *west* antarctic ??? Well, west of east antarctic obviously. Stil...

Don't get me wrong: there surely is a need to promote clean energy, fuel efficiency and all but why for fucks sake would anybody assume that this is a configuration that will ever be of use outside of high and very long flying unmanned planes for surveillance or similar ?

You cannot defy the laws of physics and they tell me that even with weightless 100% efficiency solar cells that cover a huge blimp you might barely able to drive the thing. Why not store the energy that can be collected with ground based solar cells (where weight doesn't count and efficiency in terms of power vs. surface not that much) in synthesized fuel (say, methanol) and use it in a rather traditional plane ???

From the Timetech article: >And the animation is rudimentary — it’s monochromatic, blocky and... Yeah, right, next time it'll be better, they will use colored atoms and do antialiasing with fragments of atoms ! (I'd expect that someone who writes an article about physics at least understands some of the basic properties of atoms. Oh well, this is 2013...)

Years ago I got a 512mb IDE HDD either from the trashcan or a friend who worked in a computer shop gave it to me. It might have been a Maxtor, but I wouldn't bet anything on that. It would show ok on the bus but didn't spin up albeit emitting some mechanical sound. Just to give it a try as a last resort I opened the enclosure as little as possible and used a small screwdriver to spin the disks a turn or two by pushing them along the edge. After that, the enclosuse sealed again, it DID spin up and I could use it, e.g. get data from it, write to it. Not sure how it would have done in the longer run, but touching the enclosure wa suseful in this case.