There appears to be a significant flaw in the specification. Technically whilst the inverter is limited in size, they have not limited what the inverter is contained in, so a liquid nitrogen bath comes to mind. Doing so makes the inverter quite easy to achieve and the temperature would remain very low even excluding the affect of the liquid nitrogen beyond it's super conductivity enhancing ability. So they should require the inverter function in a room temperature environment.

This is really all about materials design and molecular engineering. Creating micro channel structures to conduct the electricity, interleaved between layers of high heat conductivity material. Of course doesn't matter if it is small if you use very expensive material to manufacture it, you end up defeating your own purpose, like fooling around with platinum.

It appears you have never ever configured a notebook for secure use environment, I assure they can be configured to download only what you want them to from a source you specify. 16GB less operating system, less applications, less multi-media content, less all required texts and plus references works and less student created content, shrinks to nothing pretty fast. Plus you can protect the screen and you have a keyboard whilst retaining a full sized screen. The drive with computerising schools to to get students to create content not bloody mindlessly consume it, just to drive corporate profits.

When being an academic meant you specialized in one field, both in research and teaching. When people stopped going to college to become academics. The only reason it makes sense now to require diverse study is for the well-rounded argument, and it's the argument given whenever I've raised this subject (except with you).

I can't get how such an idiotic drivel would be considered "insightful" by anyone.

Did it ever occur to you that the East German government (which was always under considerable pressure from the USSR, and remembering Russian tanks rolling through East Germany), and the East German people didn't quite agree about politics and economy? How does your statement "private property was outlawed" match the fact that in any decent family, as soon as a child was born the parents would order a car for him and her (which, due to long waiting lists, would just be ready for the child's 18th birthday).

The article just claims "cheating". However, cheating happens in different situations. There is cheating on your friends or family or neighbours, and there is cheating on authorities.

In East Germany, the authorities were out to get you. Spying on you. Trying to catch you out. Your neighbours on the other hand were the people that you had to rely on and that had to rely on you. A person coming to you and asking questions was highly suspicious and probably up to no good. Everyone would lie to them. But not to your friends and neighbours.

That's probably still there, so if some scientists will come and ask questions, whatever the questions, nobody raised in East Germany will have any problem lying to them. Will they cheat to take advantage of their neighbours? I doubt it.

"Getting ads is annoying, getting ads for African American hair styling products when you're a redhead is infuriating"

No it isn't for most people, because we got used a LOT for this with TV. TV nearly never showed us advertising targeted for us specifically but more to a watcher class. But you know to whom it is infuriating to not target ads ? Marketing people. Because targeted ads means a better probability to transform an ad into a sale. In fact if marketing people could totally break our privacy and put camera everywhere to enhance their probability to higher level, they would do it, and pretend people like it. That's justification post hoc. They enable msot amrketing people to never discuss their own moral and ethical choice. Just pretend people like it and are infuriated when ads are not targeted to them. As opposed to be totally creeped out.

Of course a company can hire back fired employees. It could be seen as an admission that the firing shouldn't have happened and was wrong, but there is nothing wrong with the hiring. Especially since it would at least partially fix the wrong that happened with the firing.

A far better analogy is snail mail. The judge has granted the right to enter an unlimited number of recipients houses and recover mail sent to them. The real question is who owns that mail, the senders, the receivers, the handlers or the, the ISP. That is the tricky question with regards to email versus snail mail and that technically email should be legally treated exactly the same as snail mail because by and large that is the public expectation.

That is a technical lie. If you had provided them with notebooks with hard disk drives, by far the majority of the information they required for the the whole school year could have been pre-installed on the notebook, with only minor update traffic required. Of course tablets lacking significant storage capability require a continuous flow of data, now add in class timing schedules, and the data flow has significant peaks which of course result in inevitable bandwidth problems. So not only poor input interfaces limiting creativity and foolish lock in but huge bandwidth problems.

Why doesn't NASA ignore the celebrity bullshit and name buildings after the people they did the real work of getting man into space and onto the moon, the Scientists and Engineers. NASA you want more scientists and engineers, than stop bloody giving them a back seat to the monkey in the cockpit, grrr ;).

Murdoch is also very unlikely to get Time Warner as long as he continues to try to buy it with junk bond status non-voting News Corporation stocks. News corporation just can not cut it on the internet which will make it a boat anchor for the Time Warner group. As News Corporations drops and Time Warner rises so the buyout will eventually be on the other boot. The MySpace was the death knell for News Corporation on the internet.

Well of course that unemployed person ends up being employed when those around them with higher minimum wage buy stuff that needs to be made so that unemployed person now has a job. How much does an unemployed person make, likely the minimum wage once they become employed because the minimum wage jobs are the first to re-appear when the minimum wage is raised. As the flow on affect occurs so higher wage positions appear. The area of the market that loses is the slaver 'er' servant market, cheap maids, cheap gardeners etc. all paid for by cheap asses.

You'd think you learn your lesson. The best way to get a domain that is being squatted without paying a ransom is to not show any interest. It used to be domains could be held indefinitely, but ICANN closed that loophole a long time ago, so now it costs money to sit on it.

Back before PCI DSS we used to store everything we got during the booking process. And that include FOP (Form Of payment, CA cash, CC Credit Card, CH Checks, government card have another code etc...), FOID (Form of Identification - often Passport number nowadays but used to be FF card and CC card) confidential remarks (financial data) non confidential remarks (address, tel numbers, etc... And for a web based system , yes the IP you used). Everything you have directly or indirectly was saved i the PNR. And when CAPS 2 came up yes all that was sent indiscriminately to the US government , privacy be damned. Only recently when PCI DSS came up the airline started to blank our new PNR , but in some case for interline you may need to still send the CC (Can't recall which interline ticketing scenario - not refund as interline refund is not allowed by any airline i know of - maybe exchange to keep old FOP and new FOP in synch). Old PNR were never really corrected, especially all that was sent to the US government.

Bottom line : that's sadly a non story.