The translation is only available if you use Windows 8.

There's no technical reason for this. It's a simple business issue. Microsoft wants people to upgrade to Windows 8. Microsoft owns Skype. So it's obvious what happened: Someone called the Skype management and told them that any new features are to be Windows 8 exclusive in future.

I'm really surprised Microsoft haven't ordered the linux client discontinued yet.

You have a larger chance of being struck by lightning in the us than being killed by a terrorist. Lightning killed about fifty people a year (US only), which is considerably more than terrorists ten-year average.

It grants them unprunability. That doesn't imply cancer-resistance. It's quite possible that aspect of sun damage would be worsened, as you're shutting down one of the evolved damage-mitigation mechanisms.

So they could come up with a cream that lets you remain wrinkle-free until you are past your nineties, but at the expense of being unable to tolerate prolonged exposure to sunlight?

Even if they were entirely open about this drawback, it'd still sell. A lot of people really are desperate to look young, and wouldn't mind giving up their time on the beach and having to douse themselves in sunscreen when attending outdoors events.

Oh, everything I said above was in relation to the film, not the book. The book has it much simpler: No-one in the future speaks english at all.

Only if your CD was recorded using that more recent technology, rather than an 80s ADC.

It doesn't matter anyway - you'd need superhuman hearing to tell the difference.

There were bigger birds once, eating bigger mammals. Haast's eagle, for one. Bloody huge, still capable of flight. The local tribes still tell legends of the terrifying creatures which could once descend from above and carry off human children.

Modern biologists tend to shy away from the idea of reptiles entirely. It's a bit of an ugly classification.

Why do they have to kill them in the egg? I want to see what it looks like! Probably with horrible facial deformities, but come on... we kill billions of chickens painfully for food anyway, what's wrong with a couple more for science?

There is at least some brief attempt to explain this: English is no longer a widely spoken language, but there is a religion-like effort to preserve it as a ceremonial language, aided by conserving any text in a sufficiently durable form.

It's not a very good explanation considering the time scales involved, but it's better than no explanation at all. It does have some historical basis. Hebrew, for example, all but died out for a time before being revived by religious schoolers. Eight hundred thousand years, though, may be pressing things a little.

The morlocks don't need to preserve english - their leader is telepathic.

Yes, but CD wasn't designed for modern hardware. It was designed for the hardware of the era - and to be low-cost enough for the mass market on hardware of the era too.

I've found a way to listen to vinyl and cassettes!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Ridiculous, but cool.

I used to have one of those. From it I learned how to recognise the german label for 'Do not remove this retaining screw, the mechanism is spring loaded and will launch delicate parts at your face.'

I used it for a while, even though the sound was poor, just because I did like to have it running in the background and it looked cool. But it had no collector/ebay value, and I couldn't justify the price to replace another failed drive belt when my mobile phone and some cheap external speakers actually sounded better.

20KHz. The 'extra' 2KHz is to allow for the limitations of analog processing. No filter can be perfect, so you need a little padding to allow for that.

Nuclear also has a PR problem. It scares people - and if it scares people, politicians end up following the will of the people for once.

Look at Fukushima, for example. It was a media-fest for weeks. Minimal release of radiation, no nuclear-related fatalities, no land left unusable for a thousand years - but even so there was more coverage of that plant than all the rest of the tsunami damage put together. It was a bit hairy for a time when they needed to bring in emergency pumps for the cooldown, but even that was only due to a problem with the outdated plant putting all their cooling pumps in one place - not an issue with newer designs. You can blame the media for a lot of the panic, but they just can't resist a story about nuclear catastrophy. Even when there isn't actually a catastrophy, they still try to hype it up.