Pretty!!! That's one expensive fireworks display that they put on for Christmas!

Seriously though, the GSLV seems to have a pretty poor success rate; this is the third of five operational launches to fail.

It is worth noting that while this judge says that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, two other Federal judges (one in Michigan, and one from a different case in Virginia) have said that it is just fine. This will doubtless go all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Watching the video I'm wondering if this is really a new browser concept or is this is just a set of well-designed widgets neatly placed around the borders of the same of browser technology we've had for years? I don't see anything that could not be done using Firefox plug-ins or Safari extensions. I'm not saying that what they have isn't useful to people who live their lives on the Social Network, I just don't see how this idea warrants backing as a venture-capital funded start-up. How long will it be before there are half a dozen implementations of all their good ideas as plug-ins for the browsers we already use?

Legend has it that before trying the whole "standing on a hill, waving a staff and praying a lot" thing, St. Patrick tried bombing Ireland with frozen rodents laced with Tylenol. Sadly, it was quickly discovered that eating these dead mice cured hangovers and the indigenous population got to them before the snakes did, at which point St. Patrick had to resort to miracles. It is not widely known that until quite recently eating various sorts of dead muridae was a folk cure for headaches in Ireland but for some reason it's not been that effective since St. Paddy died, a little over 1,500 years ago.

One of the flaws in this study is that the models that they chose to compare against the hybrids have different specs and performance levels. For the ones that I've looked at in the past (Toyota Highlander, Lexus RX400h, Lexus GS450h), while they have compared the models that are 'closest', all of these are compared with models that have both lower standard specification and lower performance. Given that after 'brand image' the biggest factors in car pricing are spec and performance it seems a little unfair not to adjust for these.

And never, ever attempt to Reverse Polish unless you have a whole stack in your defense fund!

The TSA knew this was going to happen, which is why they already have procedures for screening monkeys at airports!

I wonder how many of these minutes are spent at work. Consider that 16 billion minutes a day, at US$10 per hour, is just shy of $1 Trillion a year. Has anyone else noticed the correlation between the rise Facebook and the global economic meltdown?

The problem with building a memory stick out of quantum memory would be that you'd never be able to know both what's on the thumb drive and where you left it!

"Rather they are rectangular and while the short axis is 78m, the long axis on the iPhone 4 pixel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 102m"

Wow, 78 meters but 102 meters? I guess Apple released this for gaming, so that the World Cup matches could be played on each pixel. That, or the quoted text is out by six orders of magnitude in each direction...

As far as I can tell there are three major flaws in the calculation of this figure:

Firstly, it appears to assume a 100% conversion rate between "pirated copies" and "lost sales". As has mentioned repeatedly in other comments, this is impossible to justify.

Secondly, it seems to presuppose that the Average Selling Price that would be achieved in emerging markets like China and Brazil are the same as the current ASP that they get in the Western world where more of the software is purchased legitimately; this too is unsupportable.

Thirdly, they ascribed zero value to the marketing benefit of people "stealing" software in order to determine if they like it and then going on to buy a copy. Repeated studies in the music market have shown that people who download music buy more music and while the situations are not identical it is clear that many people get hold of pirated software to try it and then buy the software for the support that comes with a legitimate copy once they decide that it does the job. Killing illegal copies of software would therefore likely damage sales that they currently make while possibly bringing in some new sales.

Having run software businesses in the past I appreciate that seeing your hard work ripped off can be a serious problem but the BSA spreading mis-information and unsupportable assertions as if they are fact does nothing to make people believe that they are anything other than a bunch of self-serving scaremongerers.

While I'm no particular fan of the MPAA, the RIAA or the ACTA, it deserves to be pointed out that the article is substantially misleading and inaccurate. Firstly, the speech to which they refer, in the section about IP protection, talks exclusively about protecting the licensing of technology and make no mention what so ever of the MPAA, the RIAA or music of video piracy. While these organisations happen to also support the ACTA, it is grossly misleading to say that the speech comes out in support of either of them. Secondly, the article says that "the European Parliament has already shot the ACTA agreement down". This is completely incorrect. The European Parliament have demanded that the European Commission make public the nature of its discussions in the ACTA negotiations, and the EU Privacy Commissioner has expressed concern that the treaty might be incompatible with existing EU law, but the parliament have not passed any resolutions regarding the content of the treaty itself (not least because it's secret, so they don't know what it says).

The process through which the ACTA has be created is highly suspect but it does its opponents no service if those who campaign against it can't present an accurate case.

Much is being made of the US Govt is funding these cars that are to be built outside the US, but the fact is that the technology is going to be owned by a US company. Fisker is essentially outsourcing every aspect of their development but the resulting technology, and the profits, will accrue to the US business and be taxed in the US. It seems perfectly reasonable for the US govt to underwrite creation of valuable technology that will benefit the US in the long term. People need to get over the fact that the US is now a post-industrial nation who's future lies in innovation rather than manufacturing.

The difference between 2^30 and 10^9 is about 7.4%. Disc drive capacity has been growing at least as fast as CPU power, doubling every 18 month, for as long as I can remember. This means that it takes about 8 weeks for drive capacity to grow by 7.4%. This should mean that by the time the marketing literature has made it through the bureaucratic process of being reviewed for release it will probably be correct!

Darn, the tin foil in my hat won't work against this! I'm going to have to add some sound-absorbing cotton wool too in order to keep the CIA out of my head!