Many specialized gaming-keyboards have dozens of customizable macro-keys. Not being that avid a PC-gamer I know of only one such product by name having purchased one for my younger brother recently (the Roccat Valo, the nordic version of which I believe has 149 keys total, you're free to check the layout image for an accurate count), but know there are others like it on the market.

Well, Larry Page and Sergey Brin will probably use http://sketchup.google.com/

How do yous spell the thing Roger Daltrey does at the beginning of "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who? However it's spelled, place that here.

> There's some kvetching in the NPR story's comments that it's not the first use of cave radios, but that seems to miss the point ..

It is a valid point - not the first ues. It does demonstrate skill for a sixteen-year-old to be ables to design and construpt the device. An amalgam of VLF radio and a digital device. Communication underground has always been a problem. Leaky lines are one such solution, either active or passive.

what you didn't see is the gradual fraying of the cable, and under the right conditions this could cause the cable to bind in the sheath. However, the reason this didn't happen in a lot of systems and why the most common failure is a cable break at end of life, is because it was designed to make sure that the most stressed portions of the cable are also the most exposed, so they don't have anything to bind against, when they start fraying. also the pedal return spring is quite beefy. Get down there with your paws sometime and push on it... same with the brake pedal... your feet have a lot more power available, even under relaxed regimes, and a good engineer takes full advantage of that.

When will people stop asserting blanket statements as though they were fact - and then backing up their 'facts' with anecdotal evidence??

Simply because you know some people with a degree and no aptitude to learn this does not imply that having a degree is not in some way a useful gauge to someone's aptitude to learn. If I stated that I knew some graduates who were good at learning new things and some non-graduates who were bad learners would you take this as evidence enough to change your view? No, I didn't think so . . .

Many of the German plants use *dry* cooling towers. More efficient 4th generation plants will need less cooling that the current crop of 60s rubbish as well, making dry cooling more economically attractive. Finally 8000 wind turbines is going to be eyesore in anyones view surly. current wind farms are and order of magnatute smaller. but >1000s is what you need to realistically replace coal/nuclear.

Wind energy scales to the 3rd power of wind speed. Also from wind patterns you end up in the very low end of the generators capacity for most of its life, that is a 1MW generator spends most of its time generating ~100kW or so. Even in very favorable sites its not very good. Then you don't get the power when you need it so you must have a huge amount of over capacity. In fact far more capitol investment than a nuclear plant. The kind of numbers of generators required would stretch copper to it limit, even well beyond by some estimates.

Add it all up, and *every* study I have read shows that wind is and will be very expensive compared to almost anything else (solar panels can compete for the most expensive, but not solar thermal). Most wind farms around the world make money from subsidies by existing, not by making commercial sense.

Compare to nuclear, the generators can run at capacity 90% of the time, and can load follow (yes they can address peek power), and are also "free" to fuel. Free to fuel here is from the fact that a nuclear power plant sees less than 5% of its amortized cost in fuel. Even big price hikes in U costs don't effect nuclear energy prices much at all. There is over 5000 years worth of U if we reprocess. Far more if we use the oceans U. Then there is Th!

However decommissioning costs are not clear cut yet. We just haven't decommissioned enough reactors. But we could instead reuse the containment builds for new nuclear plants. Since the containment buildings are one of the biggest capitol costs, this could make a big difference, as well as reduce decommissioning costs of current plants.

Now no one seems to want to be next to a nuclear plant. But they are pretty small compared to a 1GW wind farm (which can't give 1GW for the vast majority of of its lifetime). And these days no one wants to be next to wind farms either.

Hopefully it's getting better. I bought a couple of these, 128GB model, and so far I've not been disappointed with read or write speed (in fact it's been snappier than the Seagate I had before). Granted, I'm not running a busy server. As for it not supporting TRIM, oh well, it's half-to-a-third the price of a Corsair, and WinXP which is the OS I put on one of them doesn't even support TRIM.

A really douchy, I mean helpful, move by Bell would be to have every conceivable service running on the machine these DNS queries are redirected to, that would be configured to somehow convey the fact that the queried server doesn't exist, and possibly to display some ads. Like if a person tries to check for their email from IMAP the server would blindly accept any login credentials and return a mailbox with one mail with the subject "Invalid domain" and some adverts as contents. An SMB share would have folders named "Invalid" and "Domain". The possibilities are endless. Think of how convenient and helpful this would be.

If we start to make rules for the many based on the actions of a select few, we're destined for failure.

The fact that a couple of disturbed and mentally unhealthy kids got their adrenaline running by psyching themself with violent video games doesn't mean we should ban these games from all kids. Just like if I use a baseball bat to beat someone to death we shouldn't shut down every single litte-league in the country to stop the children from doing the same.

I think that some age control with games is good. In Finland we use PEGI age recommendations, and some games are also reviewed by the Board of Film Classification. The important classifications are 16+ and 18+. A retailer can refuse to sell a 16+ game to a person younger than 16 without a parents consent. 18+ games are prohibited by law to be sold to minors. If parents choose to buy a game and give it to their child, it's their choice, but a retailer, with no way of knowing the personality or mental maturity of a child, will not be permitted to sell an 18+ game to the child.

This system is by no means perfect, but it stops little impressionable kids from getting their hands on adults-only games, but permits parents to expose their children to such material, if they feel they're mature enough to handle it.

> The contract really means nothing the US
Exactly. Unfortunately the terms for getting an iPhone are essentially the same everywhere, except countries like Italy and the Neatherlands.
Here in Finland I opted to buy an HTC Touch HD for 690 euros and keep my original contract instead of paying 190e for the iPhone upfront, and continuing to pay 32 euros every month for two years to what I hold to be the worst cellphone operator in Finland. I'd have to have 11 euro phonebills for two years to get the same total price, but I don't mind spending an extra 250 euros during the course of 24 months for the freedom to change my contract whenever I please.