There was an article on The Register some months ago on ARM development history (can't seem to find it now), and if it's to be believed they were investigating a series of mysterious crashes in the prototype ARM CPU, and in debugging they found the power on their dev kit wasn't actually connected to the chip - it was running entirely on leakage current and if there weren't enough 1's going into the chip to provide current, it wouldn't have enough power to run.

I think you mean this article, "ARM creators Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber Part Two: the accidental chip":
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes_of_tech_arm_creators_sophie_wilson_and_steve_furber/

I saw the video of that debate recently. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku3GcPrW9xg&t=0m52s

That link goes to the point where they aired a short fragment of the movie after interviewing John Cleese and Michael Palin, and then the debate starts.

What do you think of that initiative in the US to have all textbooks be digital in five years?

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/03/30/apple_others_challenged_to_make_digital_textbooks_a_reality_in_five_years.html

I guess books could be loaded on the devices, not needing internet access for most functions, but still I'd like to know if you have some take on this.

First select the "classic discussion system (D1)" under "Discussions" in your options (gear icon). Then, in the settings just below the summary pick the "flat" view instead of "nested".

Don't the Japanse bullet trains also touch the rails?

My curiosity is peaked.

Then I guess you could say that it has jumped the shark.

I had no idea that Japan used two different power grid frequencies.

I searched for the reason behind it, and while I could not get any good results from Google, following the leads from the Wikipedia image you linked brought me to the page on "utility frequency" where it says how it happened:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency#Standardization

This originates in the first purchases of generators from AEG in 1895, installed for Tokyo, and General Electric in 1896, installed in Osaka.

AEG being a German company had its generators produce at 50 Hz, while the USA General Electric delivered 60 Hz.

What some professors do now at the University of Saarland (Germany) is to define three zones.
If you want to use the laptop for taking notes in class, you sit in the first rows, and if you want to do whatever else you sit in the last rows way back.
In the middle there is a DMZ without laptops at all.

The idea is to avoid getting distracted by flashy graphic stuff happening before you when you want to pay attention.

Same here. I disabled the "dynamic" stuff and set the view to "classic" shortly after it was introduced, and today suddenly I have it in my screen.

Looks like a bug.

More or less: in Spanish, "libertad" means "freedom". The word for the adjective "free" is indeed "libre", like in French. In Italian "freedom" is "libertà", and "free" varies with grammatical gender and number: masculine singular is "libero", while femenine is "libera", and plural is "liberi". (Well, while I'm at it, in Spanish the plural form is "libres", and I guess in French it might be the same)

Your grocery store CCTV analogy to network packet inspection would be more accurate if the store demanded to put cameras in your home, not just in their premises.

The in-store measures you mention are analogous to inspecting the packets my computer interchanges with their servers and limiting the amount of concurrent users, which they can do without bugging my communications with other people.

(I realize that you say that "society in general" might not care about it anyway, not necessarily that you would agree with it.)

Before the Hanzi Chinese CCTLDs were approved by ICANN, when the only way to use them was to install CNNIC's "Official Client-end CDN Software" in your computer, the registration of a .cn domain name with Chinese characters automatically gave you the version with the Hanzi Chinese CCTLD.

You can read it here in English: http://cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2005/10/11/3218.htm
It's in the answer to the third question.

I don't have any confirmation, but I don't see why they would change their policy.

I was curious too, and looked for it. I think it might be this one:
http://theoath.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/inflation-1923.jpg

The blog entry where I found it has more context and a couple of other contemporary photos:
http://theoath.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/lehman-bros-employee-its-over-man/

The first thing I did when reading these news was to visit their website and look for a license, until I found the copyright notice you mention. Epic fail indeed. I wanted to do some processing of this content. As it is, it's no more useful for me than functions.wolfram.com, which might or might not have less content but is nicer looking anyway.

As I saw OpenMath in your post I got curious about you and clicked on your homepage link, but it says "This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.".

I can't speak on this specific case, but in general there are specific areas in china and IP ranges where attacks have come from for a while, many of which have no resale value on the market, or political value only to China.
One incident doesn't tell the story, but combined they do.

See http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2009/10/report-on-chinese-government-sponsored.html for more details.