A monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio has a 12.33% larger area than a 16:9 monitor with the same diagonal. We are not only losing vertical pixels, we are losing screen area! Therefore, the wider monitors are probably cheaper to manufacture, as they can make more monitors out of the same LCD substrate. Because they can still advertise the same diagonal, consumers don't notice...

I find it interesting that the woman has the same last name as a famous British spy, Eddie Chapman.

VASIMR certainly has a lot of potential, but we are lacking the power source to drive it at reasonable power. Combined with photovoltaics, it will only open up the inner solar system, as the intensity of the sunlight decreases at the square of the distance to the sun. At mars, the intensity is already between a third and half of that near earth.

Unfortunately, everything that contains the word "nuclear" cannot be used for political reasons. There are even protests every time a probe uses an RTG. We would probably need something like this to make the best use of VASIMR.

With regard to the "age of sail", I would really like someone to develop solar sails and test them in space. Yes, I'm looking at you, NASA...

As opposed to TFA, this article includes a nice die shot, for those that care.

You could have read the link... Theoretically, you could use an ATI card for graphics and a second Nvidia card just for the physx. Well, not anymore. Nvidia disabled that possibility in the driver. So people with older Nvidia cards who choose to upgrade to the newest radeon 5800 series will lose physx. That kind of business practices remind me of a certain company from Redmond...

There is an interesting post regarding stealth elements of sukhoi planes in a blog on the aviation week website: link. Supposedly, they apply radar absorbent material directly to the compressor blades and use spray-on RAM on the external stores. This alone does not make it a stealth plane, but the reduced signature is very useful when combined with jammers. The link about the "Have Glass" program contains further info about this kind of stealth features in russian and western planes.