Because the 54 year-old embargo against Cuba was so effective at turning the Cuban people against Castro^H^H^H^H the US.

The black marketeers love it and it keeps up the price of fake Cuban cigars.

As proof that computer companies have always blindly followed in the footsteps of other computer companies and repeated their UI mistakes, the following computers preceded PCjr's bad keyboard design:

• Commodore Pet's "chicklet" keyboard.
• Atari 400's you want fries with that? keyboard
• The Timex/Sinclair 1000 seven dwarfs keyboard.

When the PC/jr came out, the Commodore 64, Commodore Vic 20, Apple II series, Texas Instruments and Mac computers all had decent keyboards but IBM decided to reinvent keyboards again.

I live abroad and have been through several passport applications and renewals. But for many of my American friends and family, the cost is prohibitive. They will never be able to visit me and they can no longer visit other parts of North America.

The cost of an adult US passport book and is currently $140 plus a $25 "execution fee." Add the photo, paperwork and postage and you're getting near $200 add another $150 for a file search if the person can't produce evidence of citizenship. Minors (under 16) are $95+$25. So for a family of four living in, say Niagara Falls, NY or Detroit, Michigan it can range from $570 to $1170 for the right to cross over to a better neighborhood on the Canadian side. You might say, "What's $570, that's only the cost of an iPad or iPhone?" But for many, this is two paychecks, a month's rent, the family car or a medical bill for a minor visit to a medical center. The US has an iron-curtain but it applies to the 9.9% of white Americans, 12.1% of Asian-Americans, 26.6% of Hispanic-Americans and 27.4% of Black-Americans who live below the poverty line.

A bit of dry ice forms in a crack in a stone and stays below freezing for a day or a million years before a rover tyre moves some soil and exposes it to the heat of the sun. The dry ice sublimates but instead of earth water's slow process of expanding and cracking a rock, sublimated dry ice occasionally pops a rock shard quite a long distance. Like pop-rocks.

Pop rock manufacture (from Wikipedia): The candy is made by mixing its ingredients and heating them until they melt into a syrup, then exposing the mixture to pressurized carbon dioxide gas (about 600 pounds per square inch or 40 bar) and allowing it to cool. The process causes tiny high-pressure bubbles to be trapped inside the candy.

This may be another example of where our geocentric understaning of landscape geology misleads us. Perchlorate-rich soil under carbon-dioxide rich low atmospheric pressure, thermal tides, carbon dioxide ice... What would happen if a bit of CO2 froze inside a rock or in a pocket beneath a stone and eventually got up to its sublimation temperature? Sometimes it would vaporize with enough force to pop the rock somewhere else. What if the perchlorate-water reaction that caused so much excitement with the Viking landers happened naturally due to condensed water vapor? Might that sometimes cause internal pressures within rocks and cause them to fragment?

This is similar to what Northern Irish banks did after the Northern bank robbery got away with 26 million pounds sterling a few years ago. They recalled all of the northern Irish cash. Rumor is that a member of the political wing of the old IRA was spotted burning cash in his back garden. This becomes much easier with credit cards and digital currency but isn't too difficult in a small country where banks are able to issue individually identifiable notes (much as the US once did.)

US brick and mortar universities such as MIT have a captive consumer-base. They form a powerful oligopoly in a land where fewer than 50% of the citizens have passports and even fewer are aware that they are paying 2 to 3 times as much for their community college or technical institute than British students pay for Oxford medical school. While it is true that US brick and mortar universities do provide services that can't be found online. For example, the country-club gymnasiums and dormitories, sports, entertainment, party lifestyle and physical networking with the wealthy. But for those who value other university products (e.g. education), MOOC schools can work. The interesting thing with MOOC schools is that US for profit universities are on a level playing field with well-established distance learning universities in the UK, South Africa and elsewhere.

This has been done before. Soldgier's Grove Wisconsin was moved due to flooding by the Kickapoo river. One interesting outcome is that this happened in 1979 during a time of rapidly ising energy prices so the new business district was designed to be heated by solar energy. Several million residents who lived in towns near China's 3-gorges dam were also relocated.

AFAIK this single column capture is very close to what NewTek's Digiview did on the Amiga computer and it was done that way because that was the cheapest, simplest way to digitize an NTSC/PAL frame on a slow computer which just happened to have a clock rate synchronized to the NTSC, PAL or SECAM video refresh rate.

Magyar's technique is more sophisticated but if you panned a tripod at the same rate as someone walking past a video camera during a Digiview capture, you ended up with a space/time distortion somewhere between Magyar's and the motion blur you'd get with an analogue camera. We had as much fun playing with this aspect of Digiview as we had making "proper" still digitizations which required keeping the camera and subject absolutely still while you swapped in Red, Green and Blue filters. A turned head was stretched out into a weird cylinder with hair and chin in place but ears and eyes elongated horizontally. We also found that it it was possible to create anaglyph 3D images by moving the camera horizontally during exposure.

Incandescent? Are we stuck in a time warp? What city has had the money to waste on incandescent streetlights since the 1960s? LEDs are less efficient than the orange sodium streetlights but probably more efficient than the more common high pressure sodium. They have some key advantages. The first is that they can be physically much smaller than high voltage discharge lights which means it takes smaller optics to throw the light where you need it. But where light trespass remains, LEDs present an interesting option. I how many of us end up having to put ugly black-out shades in front of bedroom windows to keep unwanted streetlight glare from keeping us awake? What if an LCD shutter were synchronized to close exactly when street light LEDs were on and open when they're off. Suddenly you see the natural night sky from your bedroom window, are awakened by natural morning sunlight.

The original series built upon a longer history of art, literature, war and peace. It referenced the bible, Greek and Roman classic literature, Shakespeare. You ended up quoting Milton, Dickens... when you thought you were quoting a playboy starship captain. That tradition held until this most recent reboot which had numerous references to previous Star Treks, but no grounding in the real world that that Star Trek plagiarized its ideas from.

I don't think anyone is pretending we'll jam 10,000,000+ allegedly illegal aliens through our court system so who exactly are we talking about with the sneering accusation "illegal?"

Do you really understand US immigration law? Some of the visas granted this year were applied for as long ago as 1988. Do you know how many changes have been made to US immigration law in the past 25 years? Have any of these been reviewed as ex-post facto laws?

I have a friend who was born in the US of Australian parents but because he sensibly chose to go to university at Oxford UK which is half the cost of the cheapest American state college. INS flagged him and now he can never return to his birthplace to visit his friends and family. BTW he is a tech genius who would have qualified under H1B if he were not already banned from contributing to America's future.

Of course they're in favor of it. As I said, xenophobia is always popular. Even this "reform" abolishes the green-card lottery and militarizes our borders.

Including the campaigns where the candidate advocates "reform"? You should really be careful with those generalizations, as generalizing about groups is at the heart of prejudice.

In fact the immigrants with more native-American blood are more likely to be thrown out than those with more European blood. Arizona codified what was otherwise an ad-hoc policy.

If you prefer, but I think "criminal" or "felon" are better words. By comparison the word "illegal" is pretty mild, as it can refer to something as minor as a civil violation. Do you think we should use the milder term to refer to people who've committed bank fraud, theft, murder, rape or other heinous crimes?

Even our sloppy news media usually tries to maintain a spirit of "Presumed innocence" for thieves, murderers, pedophile rapists, fraudsters and other criminals/felons. And so, they typically have the word "alleged" associated with their crime until a trial by jury. Are you saying that everyone who has been tagged as Illegal by the tea party, neo-facists, racist union thugs... has had a fair trial by jury? No, the common American usage for the word "illegal" in reference to a class of immigrants is a crutch for muddled thinking it serves the following purposes:

• It simplifies the hundreds of different problems and circumstances applying to millions of people who may have violated one or more elements of US immigration law and lumps them into a single category of criminal with a simpleminded solution with a one-size-fits-all punishment. Should we have a one-size-fits all punishment for errors in income tax filings?
• It allows us to dehumanize and scapegoat a group of people as the cause of internally generated economic and criminal problems.
• It allows politicians of every party to pretend to do something without having any obvious negative effects on any voters.
• It allows us to be racist and nationalist in polite company, without fear
• It provides a focus for the xenophobia which is at the core of nearly every successful election campaign.