But there are many roads to explore and many ways to seek out room temperature superconductivity.

As with many other discoveries, the stubborn and dedicated researcher will sooner or later find the answer.

We should never be cutting back on research. It is definitely a situation where more is always better than less.

But the clumsy method of shipping it to Virginia and then on to final destination seems to indicate this was only an occasional occurrence. If there were lots of them they would have been altered/enhanced on Cisco premises before final packaging.

Yeah but, it will be the mini Hell-fire missile for that dangerous speeding driver that will feature big time in major unintended co-lateral damage! Crispies on the free-way anyone?

If you lie down with dogs - you get fleas!

An easy solution would be to simply accept it as inevitable. As this impending Pharma disaster is going to equally affect people at every level of society we might as well look on it as the world-wide population control that we had to have. Karma on steroids if you like. It really is about time we had a clean sweep...

Me? I am buying into companies that specialize in mouth hygiene products of all types. It is a near certainty that all future diplomacy and major corporate policy will be discussed in close head to-head meetings in the centre of huge rooms in order to prevent espionage. Bad breath will be a career-ending certainty... Note that head-to-head is exactly the way that head-lice are transmitted to others so expect to be able identify major decision-makers either by their constant head scratching or by their permanently shaved heads.

That given the size of many apartment blocks these days there is the nagging thought that it might be kinder to everyone concerned to just not look for these massively destructive objects until we have an absolutely foolproof way of deflecting them sufficiently to provide a significant engineering challenge for future generations. I sweep dirt under the mat too!

Fight fire with fire. Set an industry cut-off date to blackball all specialists, technicians and contractors working in these agencies from future employment in the wider commercial IT world. This will quickly remove many thousands of specialists from the surveillance field and eventually bleed it dry. The same technique will work equally well in all countries that have abusive governments...

"I see this getting far worse, not better. Much much worse." There has not been much discussion about DNA databases lately. To think that these would not get into the hands of various government authorities is to believe in the tooth fairy. From government to Insurance companies is a short trip on the old boys network and then the fun starts for Joe Citizen...

Nobody said it better than Winston Churchill... "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Guilty or not, there is plenty of "threat" in all this for Congress to double the budget of the Department of Homeland Security...

First they 'investigate' you with all your colleagues. Then they reduce your security clearance. Next is work on lots of committees that actually do nothing. Finally they farm you out to a huge government contractor with a big title and nothing of any consequence to do. If you don't get the message then, they are quite prepared to dig up Senator Joseph McCarthy to look into your political allegiances. Resistance is futile!

I think it is the splayed feet and a tendency to walk/roll rather like an Orang-outang. His continuous threats to dismantle our nascent National Broadband optical fibre Network may also have something to do with it

I think we should upset the u.s.a. If the whole world stopped using capital letters when referring to the u.s.a. - the u.s. - uncle sam etcetera, then the fools who are allowing the united states to bob and curtsy and pass legislation to the entertainment industry and other powerful lobbies may just get the idea that the rest of the world is kicking back.

Yes indeed.

While the 'File Savers' of the world are praying for a huge capacity removable disks that have no chemical fade-out over time, the music and film industries are quaking in their boots at the very thought of such a disk.

It hasn't happened yet but you know, just as I know, that it will!