Pick up a stick or a rock. If the article had read, we evolved tool use from weapons then yes. By that benchmark we are the most violent species.

No, that's the current stage of evolution.

A scientific hypothesis quite a different thing to the usual definition of speculation. Conjecture is a better fit to what you mean.

This skewing of the stats is because "hot jupiters" are particularly easy to detect since they have such a strong influence on parent stars. It's just the limitations of our current ability to spot planets around other stars. There isn't enough data to suggest Hot Jupiters are unusually common. I'd guess they are more likely the result of a rogue body messing up a star system than any big mistake we've made in modelling planetary system formation.

Pretty much every programmer I know's first taste of programming was BASIC.

My emphasis. Oh shit: I hadn't thought of that. As an Android nerd that's reason enough for me to get one of these as my next tablet. Ironically this is a tablet you could develop for other tablets on. Surface Pro will also support SATA and will likely have a full-blown SSD. Storage I/O on tablets and right there you have 20-30x the throughput of the shitty cheap NAND controllers that tablets universally have. That halved battery life is because the Surface Pro's real-computer spec will wipe the floor with anything ARM based.

If your a PC guy over those years you must have had motherboards fail or become flaky, but the CPU to be perfectly fine when you swapped it in to one of your spares? Or even the other way around. You'd probably have a spare board of any socket kicking around right? Soldering down the CPU means loss of this troubleshooting you'd be RMAing the whole board, not just dropping in a spare with the same CPU. If it's out of warranty you'll be stuck with a bigger cost. It's not just about upgrading and overclockers nervous about bricking a whole board when they roast a CPU, you'd lose that convenience of this kind of troubleshooting.

Try 2011 pins in Intel's latest and greatest overpriced high end socket. You're right. Mainboard manufactuers might solder Broadwell CPUs to their own package or some sort of daughterboards even. They could agree on a standard or they could even have their own proprietary socket and sell upgrade kits to enthusiasts (ASUS, Gigabyte might do this).

Intentionally preparing us for the day of soldered down CPUs? I think their attitude has been clear for a while. They've already changed socket on a whim, and now have a confusing range of several different sockets... compared to AMD which has been much more friendly to both enthusiasts and motherboard manufacturers. AMD has backwards and even limited forwards (!) compatibility with their AM2/2+ and AM3 CPUs.

It's people. Soylent-ion is made out of people! Tell everybody! Soylent-ion is people!

Exactly, that shit should not be patent-able.

Sony stores opened long before Apple Stores. First Sony Style store opened in the early 1980s even. There were many Sony retail stores worldwide before the first Apple store in 2001.

Apple directly took the idea of opening it's own one-brand direct retail store from Sony.

Now get off lawn etc etc

Erm no, it's contemporary interior design language, common shop fittings, and there are only so many ways to lay out shop floor for maximum wallet-lightening effect. It's just conventional looking. The interior has to be minimal to draw eyes to the small gadgets on display and emphasis any other product messages in store. Etc. You converge on stores of certain kinds looking similar and having similar floor layouts. It's not just the way it's done, it's what you need to do to have your store appeal to customers - has to look like other stores of the same kind. The Sony Style store in my local area looks like this too, along with some of the mobile phone retailers.

Apple's designs and layout is so minimal, bare and generic it's difficult not to copy it to some extent. It also means they have no claim over something too simple.

If you try to justify the space you rented with the few products you sell in your one-brand store you also converge on similar looks different only in what, some colour choices, floor tile pattern.

You know your technological civilization has reached a certain level when you send a robot to another planet to shoot shit with fricken lasers.

Early days yet, can only sizzle a bit of rock. Today, some scientific samples, tomorrow the galaxy!

Stop and think about the opposite awful idea: Lets have private companies sell whatever they want, however they want, and answer to no law.

Frankly I'd rather have Governments in control that Corporations, ultimately governments [are meant to] answer to the people since democracy [is supposed ro] puts them in power, corporations answer to money and can never put anything else other than profit as priority number one: else they will fail.