There may be something to this. Certainly if I hear someone using the terms "liver", "fava beans" and "chianti" too often in a conversation, I start to get worried.

Pokemon Snap had a similar concept, minus the war setting of course...

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/judicialethics/ABA_MCJC_approved.authcheckdam.pdf

RULE 1.2

Promoting Confidence in the Judiciary. A judge shall act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the independence,* integrity,* and impartiality* of the judiciary, and shall avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety.

Nevile Shute, the author of books such as "On the Beach" and "A Town Like Alice" was a professional aeronautical engineer turned author. In the early 1930's, he worked a private company that was producing an airship. His company was in competition with a much better funded government effort. He wrote a novel about his experience, called "Slide Rule", that is still in print.

In it, he contrasts the private company style to the government effort, and made a lot of good observations that are worth thinking about even today. In the end, the government project went way over budget, and their airship crashed. By contrast, the well managed private effort worked great. Nevile felt that one of the main reasons why airships were abandoned in the 1930's was due to bad government designs.

It would be interesting to do a genetic test of the spelling bee winners, and see if perhaps they have some genes that are present at a higher rate in the Indian population.

I'm Red-Green color blind you insensitive clod!

If you live in the US, you can do both. First send in a provisional patent to the USPTO using their electronic filing system (costs $110), then publish your idea. You have a year to decide to patent the idea or not, and if you decide not to, all you are out is $110.

Any relationship between ELF and SPEW (Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare)?

The flexible path that would go to shallow gravity well destinations, such as asteroids or the martian moons, makes a lot of sense to me. This lets NASA gradually transition from the international space station to long duration space voyages, while avoiding the big problem of lifting the huge amount of mass needed to enter and return from gravity wells. To show how much simpler the shallow gravity well problem is, consider that efficient, low-power thrusters mounted on a platform similar to the international space station could do the trick. At the same time, this lets us gain access to materials (ice, metals, etc.) present in the space environment, and also lets us do a lot of interesting fundamental science.

It's not clear to me from the press release if these are really the lost slow scan tapes, or just a really good restoration from 40 year-old tapes of the broadcast, which still suffered from the limited analog conversion problems of that era.

To me, Nesson's conduct is right on the line between brilliant tactics, and just plain nuts. I can see it either way.

Pinky in mouth... We award the plaintiffs one Trillion dollars!

Not actually too far off. A case could be made for $250 million dollars (one quarter trillion dollars), based on 1,700 songs available, and $150,000 damages per song.

Yes, I guess when you go onto the Internet using Windows, you should expect these sort of things...

I'm not too happy about the ruling that MediaSentry evidence was legally obtained. Then again, since apparently it's now OK to snoop on other computers for purposes of obtaining evidence to use against someone, perhaps I'm just a bit slow to recognize that this is the dawn of a whole new industry!