For those of you who haven't figured out what the poll is asking yet, it's asking "How long until I consistently write 2010 in the date."

That's basically what the Wii's Virtual Console is. Only caveat is that you have to have a Wii to play them. And, well, you're not SUPPOSED to be able to copy them, but there are hacks that let you.

Disregard the "Copyright Shogmaster 2007" and you still get a hoax that doesn't look believable.

This is my point. Ridiculously minute is a relative thing here. Sure, 100 billion is a big number. Sure, Avogadro's number is a LOT bigger. However, I don't imagine they'd be needing quite that many particles for what they're doing. But really, I don't know. I'm not a physicist, I'm just speculating. 100 billion seems like a lot of particles to be smashing together in a linear accelerator, though.

If you call hundreds of billions ridiculously minute, then maybe.

With a username like "celibate for life", they don't really have to invent anything to tell you're a virgin.

We won't: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2008/7/15/2497614

The plasmodium behind malaria is not the same kind of plasmodium. IIRC, malaria is caused by a sporozoan, which is completely different from a slime mould. In fact, plasmodium is not even a kind of slime mould. In reference to slime moulds, plasmodium is just the macroscopic form of any slime mould.

Judging from the labeling, those parts are from the first replica, which is in London. This is the second replica. I saw them operate this one, so I'd hope it's functional.

Er, sorry, scratch that. There are a few photos of it. There was a repeat photo in the gallery and thought I had gone through all of the photos.

Although these photos don't include the functional replica of Babbage's Difference Engine #2 that's currently at the museum, and leaves in a few months. I was just at the museum two weeks ago. It was pretty interesting. There's also an exhibit about the history of chess computation. Apart from those two things though, most of the museum is a big room full of old computers. I wish there were more to see there, but what is there is pretty interesting. I recommend going before the Babbage Engine leaves in a few months if one gets a chance.

Golden Sun DS (not mentioned in TFS) is really what I'm most excited about. Golden Sun and its sequel for GBA were possibly my favorite RPG series for a long time. What a brilliant mixture of RPG gameplay with puzzle solving it was, with great graphics (for GBA) to boot! I've been waiting for a third for ages, as the second had a somewhat open ending.

I know I've given up on Sony laptops at least. I purchased a Sony Vaio SZ right as it was released, hoping it would be a good lightweight laptop that also delivered some power so that I could play at least some Windows games (when I was booted into Windows and not Linux, of course, which doesn't happen very often).

As soon as we ordered it, the warranty started ticking. If they had shipped the laptop as soon as we ordered it, that would not have been that bad. But they didn't. For about a month we waited for it to ship, because one part was consistently out of stock. Please, make sure you have the parts for your laptop in stock when you release it, okay Sony?

Well. Finally, it shipped. Okay, so now I have one month less on my warranty than I should. No. This is not the end of my story. Yes, it continues. When it arrived, with its brand new Core Duo processor, I popped open the task manager in Windows because it was acting funny and laggy. Wouldn't you know it, one of the cores was constantly being consumed by some unknown process. It hadn't been shipped with a virus--rather, the motherboard was defective on arrival. Yet more time I have to go without this laptop! So we shipped it back, and they eventually got back to us with a working motherboard. All was good, right?

Yeah, my story still isn't over. Come February of the next year, my battery just stops working. It's no longer recognized by the OS. At all. Well, okay, we have an extended warranty. But it's still under warranty. Right? Wrong. The battery was under a different warranty, which had just expired. Fine, okay, this is getting absurd, but I'll buy another outrageously priced battery. I have a laptop, after all? Come 362 days later, the battery dies AGAIN. Fortunately, this time around, I had a warranty on the battery (for three more days). Well, okay. This is getting suspicious.

Wouldn't you know it. The next year (this year), the battery died again. Very little research told me that this happens to EVERYONE. Right after the warranty expires (hopefully for Sony)...

Well yeah, in the mean time, I'd bought a new laptop from Apple and had no problems with it, so I didn't bother to replace the $200 battery again. I'm never buying a Sony laptop again. I think I had more problems that I've forgotten in the 3 years since I got the laptop, so this rant may be incomplete.