Wow, the US and UK seem to be in a contest of "who can become a police state first". Looks like you guys in the UK are winning.

I bet this whole thing flops, and in 10 years we'll be asking, "where are our flying cars and 3D televisions?".

I suspect that they had adequate probable cause in that these guys had already been convicted last year of conspiracy to murder. If you ask me, this trial was a huge waste of public money to prove that these people really were terrorists (well, duh... conspiracy to murder isn't terrorism? WTF?).

What's worse, it seems to have been only thinly reported that another 3 people they were trying to convict (who were acquitted on a hung jury last year) were actually acquitted again. This should be seen as a scandalous waste of resources which could have been spent bringing other cases to trial earlier in my opinion.

I worked on an evolved version of this idea called Mini-MagOrion. The "mini" refers to using very small (initially non-critical) charges, removing the hot-button issue of carrying nukes to orbit. The "mag" refers to using a magnetic confinement field to capture the blast and direct it, instead of the pusher-plate in the original proposal. The "orion" was the name of the original proposal (Project Orion). There's a (small) wikipedia entry on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-Mag_Orion

As always, the devil is in the details. While the concept is definitely doable, there are many operational (and social) problems with this. For example, taking out every Earth satellite with the EMPs. Also, the performance is not quite as spectacular as you mentioned, it's still good enough to transport 100 tons to Mars within 3 months, or to Jupiter in about one year though.

Even better: it's not quite done, but classes have already started and faculty have moved in. There's still construction going on in some areas, unpainted areas, unfurnished classrooms, etc.

A recent patch fixed the ~60 degree AC in some rooms. There's still a strange bug that causes the fire alarms to go off all the time.

I'm still waiting for SP1.

Sure, but he was comparing an AK-47 to a 50 cal, not the 50 cal to smaller calibers.

What about those of us who idolize House and his addictions?

But I have fond memories of the exploit called Win Nuke to cause the BSOD. Back in the day, I was a freshman in college and a football player on our floor was continuously giving me a hard time. In those days, we telnetted into the DEC Alpha to check our email. Also, in those days our IPs were statically assigned and we had no firewall. Those were quite obviously better, more trusting days of the internet. Anyhow, one day I waited until I knew he was in his room and checking email from his computer. I used finger on UNIX to get his IP address. Then, nuke away! I could here him banging, cussing, and throwing his stuff around. So, whenever I needed a little fun, I simply delivered that little exploit. One day he came back from a drunken binge and went to check his email and I felt it was a perfect time to test his patience level. After carefully delivering the little packet, I heard a smashing sound. My guess is he decided to do a body slam, WWF style, on his PC. As I walked by I casually asked what happened as I saw the computer smashed to smithereens. He told me to, "Get outta here, shit nugget!" It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Moral: Leave the IT guy alone.

Sony would fight this in court as something that fell under a contract not as Copyright infringment. That is what I'm getting at. Which would then modify what the penalties would / could possibly be. If it's found to be a true Copyright infringement that is equivalent to that of an individual person pirating digital media, then the same laws should apply. I believe that Sony will use their full legal force to argue the case as a contractual issue not a copyright issue.

American exchanges use *11 as special codes.

• 411 is directory assistance
• 611 is for customer service
• 711 is the deaf-to-speech TDD service
• 911 is the emergency number

In many places another number (generally 311 or 711) is used as a non-emergency information service.

Given enough energy, you can go to alpha centauri and back in 4 seconds.

Except that the G-force of that sort of acceleration would turn your brain to soup, which makes the prospect somewhat less attractive.

An AI based on suitably robust tech might travel to Alpha Centauri at close to light speed though.

You mean the replublitard right is blowing things out of proportion and making a lot of noise over nothing because they're irrelevant little piss-ants trying to regain their political footing? Say it isn't so!

So only 136 people in the UK file share? Sounds like it's not a very big industry.

Amigas, Macs and STs predate the advent of cheap PC clones by a number of years. It wasn't until the end of the 80s that sub $1000 pc clones hit the market and dominated it.

Can I hire these guys to make me money? Seriously, I've never seen number fudging like this.