The EU has many issues, but prosecution of anti-competitive behavior is one of the areas where they shine. I bought a big Philips 'flatscreen' (i.e. the front is flat, it sticks out half a meter on the backside) for around 1200 euro circa 2001, so can I now claim some of my money back? (Related bonus question, since this is Slashdot: A somewhat obsolute piece of electronics weighing 50 kg is collecting dust in my living room. It is still working perfectly, but has only scart and analog coax inputs. Resolution is also on the low side, it is not HD. Any useful project it can be used for, other than throwing it out of the window to kill my neighbour's cat?)

Exactly, came here to say the same. I have a Dell Latitude 5420 running mainly ubuntu, which cost me around 1000 euro total. During ordering, you can customize it a bit: I went for one of the cheaper I3 processors, but upgraded the screen from standard 1200x800 or so to 1600x900 without even thinking. The 50 euro for the upgrade of the screen is very good value for money. Having some pixels to spare is essential when you want to open 2 editors side-by side. It looks pretty good compared to my colleague's non-retina last generation's macbook.

They should add more fine-grained permission, so that for example an application would only require 'access to add-server' instead of full network access. And please make some clear policy that gets enforced, i.e. applications that do ask more permissions than they need get banned until the problem is fixed.

That is BS. IANARS, but the orbit that supply- or crew-vehicles sent to the ISS are launched on is probably the equivalent of a Geostationary Transfer Orbit, except that you want to end up in the low-earth-orbit of the ISS instead of the geostationary one. This means that they are launched more or less on an elliptic orbit, with the high point of the ellipse intersecting with ISS's circular orbit. At this high point, you do a 'circularization burn', after which you are at the same height and same speed as the ISS. I am for sure skipping over some details, such as orbital inclination, but there is no fundamental reason why you can not launch at exactly the right time so that you are really close to the ISS just after this burn.

One reason why it takes several days might be due to launch inaccuracy: there are always small errors in the orbital parameters just after launch, so you probably want to allow for some time to adjust the orbit with small burns. Another reason might be procedural, you might want to do some potentially dangerous checks of your vehicle before you come close to the ISS. As an example of how short a rendezvous can be, the Russians recently launched and docked a Progress freighter in six hours (instead of the usual 2 days), they plan on doing this in future with the manned Soyuz.

Optics guy here too. I don't know a lot about spectroscopy, but I had to assemble a spectrometer for my thesis project. It was a pretty fancy imaging spectrometer (main element was a concave mirror and grating combined in one) and used a LN-cooled CCD as the sensor. This was not cheap stuff (~5000eu for the spectrometer and probably > 20000eu for the camera), but the operating principle is exactly the same as the DVD + webcam. The resolution was limited to around 1 nm due to the input slit, not sure if they could improve things by using a slit in this home-built device. I had to calibrate it from scratch, which was actually pretty easy: I borrowed some spectral lamps from the 1st year lab course and also used a HeNe-laser we had laying around. Choose a few of the big lines (which should all be known to better than 1 nm) and for each write down the pixel position of the line on the CCD. Perform low order (e.g. quadratic) polynomial fit and you are done calibrating. I don't know if there are some cheap spectral lamps that you could use at home, there is at least the yellow lines from the Sodium (?) street lightning. I agree with others that the resolution of these home built devices is probably too low to identify materials, but it is for sure a fun project.

Maybe just point it at Mars? The diffraction limit is your friend: with a wavelength around one cm, a 100 meter dish has the a diffraction limit (~wavelength/telescope diameter) about one order of magnitude worse than your 50 euro plastic telescope for kids (which might just resolve some white spot at its poles). From back of the envelope calculation, I would guess that the width of the radio-beam is pretty similar to the diameter of mars itself.

Maybe they found one of the first versions of a bra with a modern design, but already some Roman mosaics showed women wearing two-piece clothing, which isn't so different from a modern day bikini.

Because your laziness of saving 2 seconds would easily cost you more than 10% in efficiency. That would be like filling your car with gasoline and not giving a shit that you spill large amounts of fuel just because you are to lazy to properly connect the hose. WIth both fuel and electricity prices remaining high for the forseable future, efficiency will count till the last percent.

No-one says that this is not science as usual, this is the typical type of error which you make every now, which on occasion wastes a few weeks of your time. As for the real reason of his resignations I can only speculate. My guess it has to do with the decision to publish the unexpected result so early, only to retract it two months later. It makes them look a bit like amateurs. Couldn't they have kept it internally for another 2 months while double-checking everything? But it must have been hard to have foreseen the public hype that resulted. Do note, finally, that the guy just gave up his position as spokesman of the Opera experiment, it is not like he was forced to resign his professorship or so.

Memory usage is not a problem for python. If you are using big data-structures, you would typically store them in multi-dimensional arrays defined in Numpy/Scipy. Internally, they use the same type of arrays as in C or Fortran, in all the usual data formats (ints, doubles, ...). There obviously will be a little bit of overhead space needed to store its data-type, array dimensions etc, but this is a fixed amount that is negligible for large arrays. Also the computation speed is for many problems not an issue. If you can formulate your problem as vector-algebra, all the computational intensive algorithms (matrix inversion, FFT, ...) use Fortran or LAPACK under the hood.

I am not sure about Rapidshare and others, but I think that Dropbox has not a lot to fear. I guess most people (including myself) only use it primarily as a backup service or to synchronize stuff between computers, occasionally to share things with friends and even rarer to share things with the general population (using the Public folder). Of course this could be used to share movies with friends, but this is not much different than sharing them via USB stick. Using it to share illegal stuff with the general public could be done (it has been tried in the past), but this is easily detected and people caught are likely expelled from the service. This can not be done for anonymous services like Megaupload or Rapidshare. Dropbox is thus largely used for innocent activity (as seen by the RIAA/MPAA), while in case of Megaupload it was the contrary (mostly illegal stuff and the occasional innocent use).

Ryanair's boss Michael O'Leary is known for this kind of brainfarts. He knows the press will talk about it for days, so it is all free publicity. He gives a rats ass about the image of the company, since its image is that they are cheap. More of his brilliant ideas: paying for toilets, flying without co-pilot and having a flight attended land it in case of trouble and airplanes with standing room only. They run some provoking advertisements too, like giving the finger to their competitors, or giving holiday suggestions for Berlusconi (he finally resigned a few hours ago!).

Another example: Ryanair (Europe's lowest cost and most profitable airline) boss O'Leary started his own taxi company, which provides services exclusively to himself, so that he can use the taxi lanes to zoom past traffic towards work.

Anyone else having problems viewing the EPOXi webpage? It brings my Firefox to a halt and almost crashes my laptop. Nice way to design your website, embedding more than 70 big images that are just scaled. It shouldn't exactly be rocket-science to make some thumbnails! :)