This is my great-great-great-grandfather. He has had his head replaced twice and his, erm, "handle" replaced three times. Grandad is a randy old gentleman.

I used to recommend AVG, and have since switched to telling family members to use Windows Security Essentials. AVG isn't the lightweight, unobtrusive piece of software it used to be.

It could also mean that panspermia happens (life seeding earth), but that there's not just a single type of life floating around in space. I can envision a universe full of bacteria that make their way into assorted planetary niches every once in awhile.

I think most of the innovation is in the hand held arena these days. New markets often get the focus of developers and manufacturers for awhile, but I think in time we'll circle back to consoles as graphics, processing, and sensing technologies improve.

Seems like a perfect solution to declining readership - sue them until they pay.

Comcast is clearly the best and fastest in my area, but there are others. I had Qwest DSL for a long while, through a local ISP. There's a wireless ISP that requires carrying around a good-sized radio receiver. Dial-up still exists.

Like you say, though, there's just Comcast for me. With Verizon moving out of the wired business, I doubt I'll get FIOS anytime soon.

I believe this is simply short-hand for "selected by evolutionary processes". Even good science writers like to use "designed" on occasion, just like how physicists talk about electrons "wanting" to find the lowest energy state.

I suspect that a fair amount of this is emergent behavior - complex patterns from simple rules. For example, if two bots are making test purchases of a stock, one penny greater than the last buy, up to a fixed, you end up getting these odd patterns. The two programmers may not have planned the interaction at all, though they have these weird Game of Life sort of patterns in the data.

I tried to switch to a single space for my editor girlfriend, but I find my 30+ years of typing impossible to shake. Fortunately she still loves me. Plus my Droid adds a period if I hit the space bar twice.

Actually, I bought an R4 for homebrew. There are a lot of simple games and applications like Colors! that easily make the cost worthwhile.

I look forward to using parallel ports again. Of course, I may have problems figuring out which of the million pins just got a tiny bend in them.

I recently became a Netflix convert. The DVD-in-the-mail trick is okay, as I'm a patient guy and don't mind planning ahead. What really impressed me was the streaming. True, it's not perfect, but the value of convenience far outweighs subtle quality issues.

It's not always expensive to litigate. The classic example is the one against McDonald's.

Why not create two sets of identical-looking Faraday cages, one metal and the other non-conducting plastic. Randomly hand them out to experimenters and let them figure out which is which after the results are in.

Science is pretty good at detecting problems that kill you instantly. In this case, it would be a correlation between BPA exposure while pregnant and breast cancer your children get forty years later. It's difficult to make studies that prove this firmly.