There were rifles in the US War of Independence, and both sides had them. But they weren't the main infantry weapon because of the slow reloading time.

Spain's fences surround two cities. That's not quite the same as cutting a continent in half.

We are talking about US citizens, right?

What on Earth does that have to do with it? It's perfectly reasonable for the law to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in matters like residence. I'll even grant that it's not unreasonable for it to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in the question of who can vote - although that flies in the face of the professed reason for the US War of Independence; and as someone who lives and pays taxes in a country where I'm not a citizen it sometimes irritates me that I can't be fully involved in politics. But in basic matters of human rights like the right to the presumption of innocence, which is what this is about, nationality should be completely irrelevant.

The courts decide what the law means, as well. That sometimes ends up in effect changing it, although from a strict legal point of view it isn't.

I'm not a real physicist, but by coincidence I happen to be reading a good book about the LHC and the Higgs field at the moment. (The Particle at the End of the Universe, by Sean Carroll: highly recommended). The explanation given, as I understand it, is that what really matters isn't particles but fields: particles are what we perceive when a field has a concentration of energy in one* place. (* Except that we're talking quantum mechanics here, so the Gabor-Heisenberg-Weyl uncertainty principle applies).

FWIW, the mass of the Higgs is less than that of the top quark, but considerably more than that of the other quarks.

When I wrote that line, what I really had in mind was a specific platformer-creation tool which was responsible for a rash of crappy games on Kongregate a few years ago, but I couldn't (and still can't) remember the name.

It really dawned on me that game programming just does not mean what I think it means.

Do you think it means AAA FPGs and RPSes? The vast majority of games are much smaller scale than that.

It's possible that the game programming camp is setting the children up with a point-and-click game dev engine (although I hope not); but it might well be giving them a framework like PyGame and a lot of help to get a couple of simple 2D games running. If it fosters the kind of experiences that my generation had growing up in the early days of home computers, it's a good thing.

Weekend hackathons, on the other hand, allow far more time than is necessary to get an alpha version of a simple game running. When I worked in the industry, I once put together an alpha for a word game in 2 hours. It wasn't optimised, it had one bug in the UI, it had placeholder graphics, and as we play-tested it we made major changes to the scoring system, but it was playable and enough fun to get the green light for further development.

The English don't even have their own word for "style of cooking", and use the French cuisine. But one area where English cuisine excels is desserts. A English restaurant will have two or three times as many desserts as a Spanish one, and they'll all be tempting.

Having RTFA (I'm sorry), they think that it's probable that way back when Charon's orbit around Pluto was elliptical enough to generate tidal forces which would have warmed its interior. They don't know whether the cracks exist, and if they don't find any then it puts an upper bound on the historical eccentricity of the orbit.

Don't you need to keep the original file and the code you used to transform it, so that you have an audit trail which shows how you got the current data?

Having the interest to look for the operating manual, read it, and test it, all with the aim of learning and having fun rather than under any obligation, seems rather close to the Jargon File definition of a hacker.

Yes. A couple while I was still at school, some commercially published and some for the Java4k contest.

Only about 25 years ago. We'd had the family computer (Amstrad CPC6128, a gift from my Grandad) for a year and I was bored of all the games. The manual had a big chapter on BASIC, so I decided to make my own game. It was an absolutely rubbish game, but everyone has to start somewhere.

If there aren't clouds you probably won't see much anyway. According to SETI the estimated peak rate in London is 0.2 meteors per hour.