There is a black hole in Geneva. It is called the Paquis (drugs, street hookers, etc.).However it existed before CERN.

A big collider takes a lot of money and politicking to get started. It is a massive engineering project (the LHC was lucky, the detector chambers were new but the ring was inherited from the LEP). The CERN people already talk about what is next because they know they must start thinking now.

As for cosmic rays, yes they are incredibly powerful but undirected. You can't guarantee that the interesting particles will come into your detector any anyway, you normally end up with secondary collisions at best as the interesting particles interact at higher altitudes. Yes, you could fly a big detector, but they are extremely big and heavy,

I was involved in establishing one of the first major Electronic Markets in Germany. The country was quite decentralised with regional financial centres so we made sure that everyone communicated with the exchange (situated in Frankfurt) at the same speed. We even had line simulators to ensure that users in Frankfurt saw similar response times to users in Hamburg.

Now exchanges are more or less forced to join the race for the bottom by offering co-lo services (rackspace in the Exchange) where you are just a LAN switch away from theeExchange infrastructure. If you don't support that, the alleged "liquidity" moves to another exchange. Inside the machines, the algorithms are now run on the graphics cards (cheap multiprocessing) so they can run evven faster. Others use custom signal processing hardware.

Users actually issuing buy or sell orders to hold are never that close, the decision making happens within the institution not in the Exchange building. The "algo" machines just act as a man in the mmiddle driving prices to their advantage. Also, the algo traders are imposing a massive load on the order book and matching code within the exchange's systems. generally speaking the systems were chosen for reliability rather than pure speed.

The UK uses paper and pencil. Candidates may personally supervise counting or their agents can. Funnily enough, the Federal Republic of Germany (pop about 80m) does fine with paper and pencil and usually, there is a single, transferable vote type system so more complicated as you have take into account people's secondary choices.

Funnily enough, Nokia Maps on the better S60 feature phones was very good, performing much better than much of the competition, particularly if you had the content installed locally.

Yes, Nokia had plant in Germany and Eastern Europe as well as in Finland. Now all closed.

It wasn't the board, it was some US based institutional investors who also saw an ailing MSFT (WP had little interest from platform builders and as for the rest, they were hardly high-growth now) and thought they could put the two together. If major shareholders tell you that they are unhappy, your board tends to listen. The issue is that Nokia had never bothered that much with the US market. They had some stuff there, but mostly they were selling to the rest of the world. Nokia was having major issues with their MeeGo project, but their dumb and feature phones were still selling. Yes, smartphones were a weak point but were less of a problem than the R&D costs. They even had the high-end sorted with the Vertu brand (now sold off). Their US funders didn't really get it.

At the time, I would have said, persist with MeeGo at a lower staffing level but roll out an Android phone. People may complain that the market was crowded, but Nokia had a very good hardware rep, both on the RF modules and overall quality.

Now, it would be more difficult and it all comes back to the investors. Who now would want Nokia as anything other than a long-term gamble? There is that spin-off that is trying to launch a MeeGo phone. If they become successful, then of course, bring them back into the Nokia fold, but that would still need some serious strong-arming of their investors.

Unfortunately, the Russian Space industry is linked closelty to the military so where the money actually goes is secret.

However after such "ticket-sales" expect a few higher ups to suddenly enjoy an upgrade to their lifestyles.

DSLR Controller does a lot of this already for an Android phone or tablet plugged in via USB to a Canon EOS Camera. Canon do have a WiFi attachment which serves the pictures as files (I guess, like Nikon) but at $1K+, it is far from cheap.

This is the SVR not the FSB. The SVR is the main organisation doing extra-territorial activities while the FSB is domestic only. The two organisations retain connections but are under different management.

The gun collection and shotgun appear to be a myth as probably were the grounds given the NZ law enforcement.

Yes, loved the film too. But didn't the hero there get his hands on a lot of surplus parts? Many of which now would be mega-restricted in real life now.

your phone is a thin client. have it receive emails or some alert, but all heavy lifting should be on a server.

Why?

Even older smartphones have much more power than many desktop computers did 15 years ago. The I/O may not be up to much, especially over a network connection, but they definitely can do a lot of other work.

The difference being that once you have a physical keyboard device for the German market (D/A/CH), it is less easy to divert to another market so it means that you have to create keyboard specific batches.

Btw, RIM was putting out stock indices and FX since way back when to their earlier devices. Most of our traders had them in the mid nineties.

If we forget Blackberry, there were a lot of devices around that were connected by switched telephone lines that could only get their updates when connected. Not all that different from wireless.