People keep touting the idea of mining metals from asteroids and using it to build spacecraft outside of the earth's gravity well, but do we actually know how to do that?

The mining side of things seems relatively straight-forward (not easy, but you wouldn't need anything radically new), but smelting and refining significant amounts of ore in low gravity could be rather difficult. As far as I understand, a traditional iron smelting plant uses gravity to help with the purification, allowing the slag to float to the surface, before tapping the good quality iron from the bottom of the blast furnace.

It seems like purifying and working ore in space would require entirely new ways of working with the raw materials. Perhaps using some kind of high temperature centrifuge to spin and separate the material.

I'm not saying it's not possible, but it doesn't seem quite as easy as some of the more excitable science-fictiony plans for space exploration treat it. Many of these plans feature major problems to solve that get glossed over as minor technicalities.

This is why techies tend to be crap at marketing (that's a complement to techies by the way, I'm a techie).

The purpose of the Surface isn't just to make a profit on each unit (which at this price it probably is), it's to help position Windows 8/RT/Metro or whatever it's called.

The market for cheap tablets is thoroughly occupied by Android. Most people I know, even techies, think of Android tablets as "like an iPad, but cheaper, and therefore not as good". The perception (right or wrong) is that if you want the best you buy an iPad, if you want cheap and cheerful you by an Android tablet. There is no competition at the premium end, it's iPad or nothing. The perception is that the only reason you'd buy Android is because you don't have the money for an iPad.

Pricing the Surface at the same point as the iPad sends out a message to consumers that says "we think the Surface is as good as the iPad". Microsoft clearly want to position Windows 8/RT on tablets as a premium product, it doesn't want to compete with Android, it wants to compete with Apple and iOS.

That won't stop other manufacturers from making cheaper tablets, but Microsoft are setting the bar high. If someone else (e.g. Acer) make a cheap WinRT tablet it will be seen as an affordable version of a premium product, not a "cheap" product.

Couldn't agree more. That was my question, and the answer was better than I could have hoped for.

It's interesting, and probably not that surprising, that those people who actually accomplish stuff rarely seem to be zealots about how they get them done.

I currently do Rails development (after doing everything from embedded systems to Pel hackery), and that community seems to be particularly full of people with a religious fanaticism to certain principles, either methodological or design-pattern wise. The current obsession with the so-called "Single Responsibility Principle" seems to be behind an awful lot of horribly over-complicated code.

The software world needs more outspoken pragmatists before the entire industry disappears up its collective arse.

Has there ever been a time in the development of the Linux Kernel where you've wished you'd gone the Hurd-style micro-kernel route espoused by the like of Tannenbaum, or do you feel that from an architectural standpoint Linux has benefitted from having a monolithic design?

Linux has been massively more successful than Hurd, but I wonder how much of that is down to intrinsic technical superiority of its approach, and how much to the lack of a central driving force supported by a community of committed developers? It always seemed like the Hurd model should have allowed more people to be involved, but that has never seemed to be the case.

"If we're ever going to build space craft and other things in orbit, this seems like a great first step."

What, you mean like the ISS (over 100m long and 70m wide)?

I think we took the first steps in building things in orbit quite a long time ago.

I still think this is a very cool idea though, and the more practice we get at building stuff in space the better.

Another great example is electricity.

You won't find many today who would argue that electricity has no use. But go back to the very early days of electricity research (I'm talking about Volta and before) and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thought it had any practical use at all.

That we have electricity as a practical form of energy is down to a bunch of people who researched it because it was interesting, and a mystery to be investigated, not because they thought there was some obvious practical application for it. Yes, engineers like Tesla, Marconi, et al, did lots of work to make it a widespread and developed useful applications for it, but they wouldn't have been able to had the fundamental research not been carried out.

My wife is a secondary school German and French teacher here in the UK.

Her school has a very tech heavy setup, with smart-boards in all the classrooms and all the kids have netbooks.

She really loves the smart-boards, they are incredibly useful because they allow her to use much richer teaching material much more easily than in the past, mixing video, audio, and even letting her create interactive games for the whole class.

The netbooks on the other hand are much less useful. In a class of 30 the odds of all the kids remembering to bring them, and all of them working properly is pretty small. They get broken and lost or infected with viruses. The school's IT team have done a really good job, but with 1200 students it's a sisyphean task to keep them all running.

Don't get me wrong, I think the kids having the netbooks has been a good thing overall, but it's not a magic bullet.

But most importantly the use of the new tech has been driven by the teaching staff, not imposed on them from above, so what they have actually serves an educational purpose.

Politicians should stay out of the minutia of teaching and let teachers and school mangement get on with it. Government should stick to just making sure that the results are good, and intervening where necessary, not ruling by dictat.

...is that Americans are dumber than people from Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Cyprus,Israel, Malaysia, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Qatar, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom* - all of whom seem to cope quite happily with the concept.

I totally understand that there is a problem with driver education about any kind of new road layout, but the idea that americans are somehow intrinsically incapable of using a roundabout is just weird. Can americans really be intrinsically incapable of cooperating with other road users and generally being aware of those around them?

How do people cope with things like changing lanes or merging onto freeways? Both require awareness of other road users and a certain amount of spontaneous cooperation.

Or are you suggesting that America, the land of personal freedom, only works properly when someone or something (like a set of lights) else tells everyone what to do?

* - according to Wikipedia

I agree with him in so far as the Kindle store is concerned. Being able to effectively "un-sell" a book as happened with 1984 is basically wrong.

However that's a product of the Kindle store, not the device. About two-thirds of the books on my kindle have no DRM. Some of these are Project Gutenberg books, others are Pragmatic Programmers ebooks which are sold in DRM free formats.

There is nothing to stop you from buying a Kindle and then never buying a single ebook from Amazon if you really want.

As with all these sorts of things, the problems lie in the services and publishers, not with the technology.

Does anyone know if similar powers exist to take over things like power-stations, water supplies etc in the event of some attack/emergency?

The Wired article keeps talking about "covered critical infrastructure" without actually defining exactly what that means.

The described intent (for arguments sake lets assume they are being honest for a change) is to secure critical infrastructure. This could include things like the phone network (essential for the emergency services and governemt to function), the power grid, water supply, gas and electric distribution systems. This is not about taking over Random Corp's internal network.

Of course, as with all "emergency powers" legislation there is massive scope for abuse and for creep in what is defined as "critical", which is why they are almost always a bad idea and should always have very strict checks and balances from all branches of the government and judiciary.

Reminds me of an old saying I heard a lot when I worked in the aerospace industry...

"Takeoff is optional, landing is mandatory"

The whole operating remotely thing has interesting potential for allowing specialist surgeons to operate on patients from a distance and therefore make possible operations that might not have been possible for that patient.

However in this case the reason was because the patient was being x-rayed during the operation to allow the surgeon to see where the catheter was in the heart.

Repeated and prolonged exposure to x-rays, even low levels, is not a good thing so surgeons normally have to wear lead aprons to protect themselves during an operation like this. That get's pretty knackering after a few hours. By operating from another room the surgeon could be shielded better, while not getting tired out by the weight of protective clothing.

All in all a really interesting operation.

And not a death panel in sight :)

in the theatre:

Lighting control desks normally use them for letting you save lighting plots (most also have hard-drives for normal use). Lighting plots are a tiny amount of data that easily fit on a floppy.

Most are just DOS PCs with a digital desk and DMX connections to the dimmer packs and other gear.

I would like to be able to use a USB key, but that's more because I don't have a floppy drive for my laptop so can't get the data onto it to edit.

To add to all the specialist gear that people are mentioning we can add theatre lighting desks.

The smart lighting desks are basically just DOS based PCs with a funky set of peripherals.

If I need to save a lighting plot or configuration I use a 3.5" disc.

I'm sure they will have USB disc support eventually, but lighting plots don't take much space so there is no real pressure. It'll probably happen when people can't get new disks.