I can assure you it was not for time between nuclear accidents, but don't let that little truth stop you from you from making a slant.

I never claimed it was. I designed the thing; it was pretty clear they meant industrial accident in the normal sense of someone cutting themselves, dropping a hammer on their foot, etc. Nevertheless it struck me as a strange thing to want to put on display, because no matter what value the display showed up to 999, it would either be misinterpreted (e.g. as a nuclear accident) or always look far too low. The only way it would ever be impressive would be if it had a 10-digit display that always showed some very large number (but then that would be dishonest). So what's the point of it? Not for me to question, we were happy to take the customer's money.

I once designed a huge display clock for the reception area of Heysham nuclear power station. The clock had a sweep second hand that traced out a ring of LEDs once per minute, and a counter that showed the number of days since the last industrial accident. The specification called for this counter to have just three digits, which frankly didn't inspire much confidence.

The only part of your post I agreed with was the bit about free energy crap on YouTube.

There is no great conspiracy; there never has been. If small fusion power was feasible, the company that put it on the market would clean up overnight, have an instant monopoly and would put everything else out of business instantly. This hasn't happened, ergo, the technology doesn't exist. Same for super-energy-efficient cars and so on.

Super capacitors can't replace batteries, they just don't have anywhere near the energy density of even current battery technology, which in itself is very poor compared with chemical fuel. What they do have is the ability to take charge quickly, so they could be useful for harvesting waste power in an electric car, e.g. regenerative braking. To hold enough charge to power the car continually long enough for a typical commute would require a semi-trailer's worth of capacitor space.

Yes, the sun does produce all the power we'll ever need - on average >200W/m^2 over the entire earth's surface. That's a lot of power, vastly more than we consume today. The problem is harvesting it - we can't cover the entire earth with solar panels, and if we did, they wouldn't be efficient enough with today's technology. So, since there's no grand conspiracy that we can close down, we'll just have to go back to slow but sure, scientifically tested research in labs. In other words, exactly what we are doing.

OK, I wondered. I'm sure you did. It is short for 'cross Assembler' - the software used to sequence the genome (I skimmed the paper). Not what you thought. No.

No shit.

I wish I could run this in a Parallels Desktop VM, under 10.9. That would be much more convenient than having to set up a separate boot partition. But right now it appears unsupported... unless someone knows better?

Not necessarily. It's often rendered as an NSGradient having the necessary colours at key positions. A glassy effect typically needs four colours, and they are computed off some base "theme" colour. Nevertheless the time to render this is extremely small, probably no greater than decoding and painting a PNG of the same area.

You need to watch this: http://youtu.be/P6MOnehCOUw

Laughs aside, I guess the point is, conspiracies just don't scale.

So why do all the media call the SU-25 a fighter?

Because any military aircraft is a "fighter", in simple terms, as opposed to a civilian aircraft. It's just the usual media assumption that their readers are lazy and stupid, and wouldn't know the difference.

Every minute playing chess would be better spent [fill in your personal alternative here]

Perhaps people like, y'know, playing chess as a game? It's interesting, it passes the time, and it's actually quite challenging to become even moderately good at the game. The fact that algorithms can play chess is irrelevant, playing chess is not an activity that humans play algorithmically - they learn to play it intuitively, using pattern recognition and a bit of analysis, not exhaustive analysis and a whole bunch of rules, tables and a large database of known games to draw on. Chess programs employing 'simple' heuristics don't beat every human player - top players can still beat the top programs, though it's getting close. The programs in typical chess implementations do beat novice players, but in turn they are easily beaten once you get better at the game.

It's like saying there's no point playing soccer because a machine that can fire balls into a net could be easily built that would beat a human goalie every time. It really misses the whole point.

crease the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization

What does that even mean? How can you 'crease the fluidity' of anything? Sound suspiciously like typical management-speak, and I don't think that's what MS needs at all.

Also in the news, we have Unicode! Slashdot, have you heard of it?

It is news, because it's in Düsseldorf! Frankfurt is so last century.

The last few years I've thought it would be awesome if I could watch the fireworks from a small private plane.

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but watching fireworks from a plane is likely to be a big disappointment. Because you can see so much area from a thousand feet or so, the fireworks become comparatively tiny, and also often viewed against a background of urban lighting which makes them hard to see. Even huge public displays like the Sydney NYE displays look pretty unimpressive from the air. Fireworks are only impressive when viewed from the ground against a dark sky, close to their launch point.

I had to replace 2 33W CFL striplights recently. I could not believe how cheap they were - $4.50 (Australian, but that's almost equal to US) for two. How do they make them for that?

Not believing in a deity means accepting on faith that the universe came into existence without the help of a deity.

Certainly there are aspects of belief and "faith" even in an atheistic viewpoint, because there are some things that we simply don't know and, probably, cannot know. But saying "god did it" is a very absurd fallback, because it begs the obvious, childish, yet profound question, "where did god come from?" Adding another level of complexity to explain away the already difficult complexity we're faced with doesn't make the problem simpler!