Do yourself a favor, though, and make sure you're going to a theater with a top-drawer sound system. Seeing it in IMAX 3d the first time, with a killer sound system, spoiled me.

I second this. However, I personally was a bit disappointed with the mix of the soundtrack. (Although, this is probably due to me being a bit of a Daft Punk fan and already having heard the entire soundtrack on fairly high-end phones.) I would definitely recommend listening to the soundtrack CD if you like Daft Punk in addition to seeing the movie.

No, they are shipping a Linux system that doesn't run under any recent hardware.

It runs just fine on all of the hardware that I have. It's not like you can't add non-free to your sources.list and install the non-free firmware.

Not that bad, assuming someone else will write a script that configures the system and loads all proprietary firmware.

It already exists. The whole reason that it took us so long to remove the non-free firmware is because we had to have a mechanism to allow for users who wanted to run on systems which required it to load the firmware. Of course, if the article actually bothered to link to the original blog posting or the announcement e-mail, it would have been obvious to you.

This is also a good property for remote mining: You plant your explosive charge and then bury a string of explosives 10 feet apart apart to the staging area.

Almost no one uses nitroglycerin for mining any more. The stuff is so horribly unstable that you could easily set it off just by burying it, it's expensive, and it's highly toxic. Most mining and other blasting uses ANFO coupled with a high explosive primer instead.

Personally I would assume our country is one of the countries with least corruption and things like this. I doubt the government/court would treat him different just because Team America world police says so.

I would be very surprised myself if Sweden were to bring Assange in for questioning and then extradite him to the US (or somehow make him available for extraordinary rendition), but it wouldn't be the first time that I was surprised or disgusted by the actions of a country. It would be surprising if Assange was less paranoid than I after reading some of the more lurid cables from the US.

So, while Sweden may have perfectly honorable intentions, the actions of Assange with regards to his extradition to Sweden don't have much bearing on his guilt or innocence.

If he really was innocent why wouldn't he talk to the authorities? His lawyer claims he'd talk to the authorities via skype, the Swedish Embassy in London

You're the head of an organization which has managed to seriously piss off a few dozen countries. You have personally read and dealt with many documents which indicate that the countries you have angered routinely ignore their own rules when it suits their national interests. You are now being asked to place yourself in the custody of a country which has ties to (or is one of) the countries whose secrets you have exposed, and seems to be under serious pressure to make you go away.

What would you do?

I know I'd personally try to maintain my own personal security for as long as possible, while trying to resolve the situtation through public, legal means, even if I was certain that the acts in question were consensual.

I cannot believe someone thought it was a good idea to FedEx radioactive material.

We ship radioactive material via FedEx all the time. It's properly packaged, labeled, and there's nothing particularly exciting about it. In fact, the dry ice that it is packed in is generally considered to be more dangerous than the radioactivity itself. (In this case, I'm talking about 250Ci of 32P ATP, which is laughably small, but I believe you can send milicurie amounts through FedEx when properly packaged.)

the requirement also includes the ability for network administrators to enforce S/MIME on all messages on the network, which cannot be enforced using a client side plugin.

This can be easily handled with modifications to gmail for specific users who actually need it so that messages which are not in S/MIME containers are rejected. So while it may not be something that gmail can handle right this second, it's certainly something that can be specified in the RFQ so that Google can make the business decision to meet (or not meet) that requirement.

Gmail doesn't [support S/MIME], and it's a gaping hole in their messaging offering when compared to pretty much any popular messaging application on the market.

There are various client-side plugins which support S/MIME for Gmail (which is actually the right place to do it). See Gmail S/MIME and other similar plugins.

So the price tag is about $100 billion. Will the contributions the space station makes to Science and society at large be sufficient to provide a $4 billion/year real rate of return in perpetuity, give or take? Does it even come close? If not, it's a net loss to the economy and inhibits economic growth, and there's a bunch of people who'd like to talk to their politicians about that come Tuesday.

It's a certainty that if we're ever to leave this spheroid, we need to build things like the ISS to learn how to live in microgravity environments with limited earth interaction for long periods of time. We won't know if the ISS paid off for a while, but at least it's a project which is forward looking and leads farther along the roads that we need to travel in the future.

While we certainly need to look for ROI in the projects that the government funds, the ROI for many things that the government needs to do is very difficult to measure. Consider how difficult it is to measure the relative importance and ROI of education versus infrastructure expendatures. We know for sure that they affect GDP, but it's hard to say how much, and which schools or projects do it better?

Why is the US objecting to a standard that it has not ever taken the time to actually use?

Anyone in the US who actually does quantitative research uses the metric system. I can't remember the last time I attempted to mass something in pounds.

They didn't say that you needed to speak English to be a citizen. They said for immigrants to vote, they need to learn English to pass the citizenship test.

Sure, but whether someone is an immigrant or not is orthogonal to whether or not they are a citizen, so I ignored the feeble canard entirely.

To me the only question becomes what's reasonable?

It's reasonable to have it translated into every language you reasonably expect to have people require to exercise their franchise, and to allow people to petition to have ballots in languages that they speak fluently when they aren't able to speak another translated language with enough fluency to be comfortable voting.

There's almost no problem with the voting board being primarily reactive with regards to translated ballots and election materials.

For immigrants to vote, they must be Citizens. To become one if they aren't already, they need to understand English.

You don't need to speak English to be a US Citizen, because the US allows naturalization by birth. And moreover, there are lots of people who have a working knowledge of English, but are far more comfortable with another language. it's perfectly fine to have ballots and election material printed in multiple languages to avoid disenfranchising individuals who are legitimate voters.

If the currents were faster than swimmers could swim, then I'd expect you to quickly outdistance 150m. Though even in those cases, if you got close enough into the same current, it'd probably be close enough to be useful.

Of course, people will still find all kinds of innovative ways to drown themselves...

Were you guys using davits or a chute? 4 minutes is very impressive with davits with any signficant freeboard.

In my experience, once people get into trouble on a beach, they tend to be unable to swim or be in waves, which makes lifesaving devices pretty much useless. You have to actually go out and get them by swimming or using a boat.