It is the last thing America needs too! American consumer culture is wrecking the sustainability of many economies.

Teleporting by a week is a fantastic breakthrough! Before now they've only managed a few nanoseconds.

If we have independent observations from different parties, each using different methods then we can use the numbers in conjunction with eachother.

In the LHC case we have pretty much the same set of information being analysed by different people but using the same science, we then don't gain anything except verification of calculations. Even then, scientists very seldom run all their calculations from scratch but use common packages (MathCAD etc) and models. If they all run the same calcs then that's hardly verification.

What is far more important in the LHC case is this: Do scientists have sufficient understanding of the laws of physics? Asking them is pointless because they don't know how much they don't know and are thus incapable of making a reasonable guess as to whether something will happen that exceeds the bounds of their knowledge.

What we're talking about is more possibility than probability.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5791294.html

Windows people use the recycling bin instead of the trash can.

Starter is basically the version you ask for if your going to replace with Linux.

Priced low enough that you couldn't be arsed to ask for a refund

And B&W will look fine.

Consider Moondust. How does the boat thing skim over the dust? There is no atmosphere so it can't be riding on a cushion of air like a ground effect vehicle or a hovercraft. It skims (as opposed to rides like a wheeled or tracked vehicle) so it must float on the dust as if it was water (ie. is kept up by the density of the dust rather than the mechanical robustness of the particles). If so, then an earthquake would not unsettle the density.

I'm starting to see cracks in the "hard science"...

One of the things that photographers really liked about Leica film cameras is that they use very quiet shutters, allowing them to be used for unobtrusive candid shots.

Perhaps this law might consider banning Leicas too.

Like most laws of this sort, there is almost no chance of making it work.

If you want technical accuracy then I suggest reading one of those O Reilly animal books. It would by no means be a thriller.
A techie might cringe when the laws of physics get abused. A relationship psychologist probably cringes when reading chicklit and they all fall in love and hive happily ever after. A ballistics expert probably cringes when the good guy manages to fire two head shots at 50 yards. A real forensic scientist spews when CSI can solve a crime between two ad breaks.

All works of fiction are just fiction for entertainment purposes. Get over it.

When you move heat, you're concentrating the heat and making the hot side hotter. Heat sinks are rated in Watts/degree so a heat sink that is 10 degrees above ambient will dump heat 5 times as fast as a heat sink at 2 degrees above ambient. Thus, a Peltier device pumping heat into a heatsink will cause the heatsink to run hotter and work more effectively.

Kubuntu 8.10 was shipped with KDE4. I think a lot of the reason for this is that Shuttleworth has said that Ubuntu needs to be more like OSX and likes the shiny pixel show.

Unfortunately what seems to have got lost is that OSX uses shiny pixel shows to improve understanding and just for their own sake.

KDE4 seems to have a whole lot of gratuitous pixel shows that do nothing except show off the programmers' abilities to play with graphics.

I'm a KDE user since long ago and can't stomach KDE4. The pointless graphics just annoy. I'm very happy with 3.5.

Now I fully understand that the KDE folk are playing with new architectures etc and these will take a good time to stabilise. But then it should not have been rolled out in a major distro. What's broken is putting it in Kubununtu.

Most people installing a distro want the damn thing to work properly. They don't want to be guinea pigs.

The integrators don't just stick on whatever sticker they choose.

The integrator has to submit test units to Microsoft certified labs who charge a testing/certification fee to run a Microsoft specified set of tests that certifies the the unit is worthy of having the sticker. In other words, MS said it is OK to put whatever sticker an a particular device. As part of this, Microsoft should have done all the driver tests etc. so when MS blame the integrators for bad drivers etc then that's also a bit hollow: they passed MS tests and MS said that they are OK.

If the taxpayer is doing the investing then the taxpayers (ie the government) should own the networks. The private telcos are free to compete and provide better services. If the taxpayers invest in private telcos then the taxpayers should have partial ownership of the telcos and profits should go back to the people (ie govermnet).

After all, the big bank bail out is not by just giving money to the banks. The government has bought loans from the banks.

The way economists measure "value" does not distinguish between creating value by manufacture or by branding.

As far as any economic measures go, Nike created $59 of value when they take a $1 pair of imported sneakers and sell them off for $60.

Branding is one of USA's strongest exports: Coke, for instance, sells licensing to quite a few worldwide companies to sell stuff with a Coke label on it.

The sick part about branding is that it is all just image and does not actually produce any tangible value. If times get tight then people will quickly shy away from their Nikes and buy the same product under the Yoyo brand for $10.