Like a frozen metal pole, licking spam is only the prelude to a much longer, more terrifying ordeal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_film_registry

Thanks. I went and out and looked it up. Here ya'll go.

I'm surprised they didn't include Birth Of A Nation.

It's similar to how car manufacturers can add a body kit and a Type R sticker to a Civic, and sell it for $5000 more to idiots looking to go faster. (the extra weight from the body kit would actually make it slower....)

But the Type R sticker adds extra horsepower which overcomes the body kit weight. And don't discount the acceleration boost provided by the spoiler.

I've seen what happens when a rapid polarity reversal occurs. If you don't take care, the tachyon flux can cause an uncontrolled neutrino emission and cause a breach in the dilithium chamber.

The probable cause of this is a sudden shift in the tilt of our molten core. This would realign our magnetic poles.

But it may also be indicative of a bigger problem. There was a film a few years back which explored the possibility of a sudden loss of angular momentum within the Earth's core. Without the spinning core, the magnetic field would be lost and our planet would lose the protection afforded to us by the magnetosphere. Essentially, we would become windswept by the solar wind and would end up without an atmosphere, much like Mars.

The solution, the scientists in the film agreed, was to prepare several nuclear bombs which could be transported to the edge of the core (below the mantle) and detonated, thus restarting the spinning core. It seemed like a crazy theory, but with this sudden acceleration of the NMP, I think it might be wise to keep an eye on all of our options.

A yurt is essentially a surface biogas chamber. Owing mainly to the yak milk they drink all year long.

What do you mean by quality?

A lot of manufacturers will do this, actually. Their first device will contain very high quality, standard HW that is somewhat overspec for what they intend, but due to driver support and ease of implementation they can get it out the door in a reasonable amount of time. Then for their successor device they will take the lessons learned, use cheaper parts, use better optimized software, and sell it as the "cheaper" version.

You are getting lousier HW, but arguably better SW, so the performance gap isn't as big as their marketing lit will let on. On paper, the expensive first gen device looks better, but when the rubber hits the anus it's pretty much a wash.

I can't help but be struck by the seemingly limited amount of spatial and mathematical reasoning capabilities of many who have exceptional social intelligence. In fact, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the two traits. The evidence seems enough to even posit that there is a maximal beyond which it is impossible to expand new intelligence and thus the capacity must be split between various capabilities.

In some, the trait of sociability takes center stage whereas in others it is mathematical genius. Likewise, we see an exceptional ability of females to maximize their social circles. To whit, the mental capabilities of females and males being the same, it would seem that females would be more likely to develop large social circles and thrive within this mentally untaxing environment while males would thrive in problem solving and mental exercises requiring strenuous mental effort (such as in the hard sciences).

Taking this further, it also explains the apparent inability of many computer engineers to interact in normal social circles. With much of their brain showing traits of strong mathematical acuity, their amygdala itself is underdeveloped. Perhaps it is this unbalance that is the root cause of "geekiness".

Naturally, this is not the final word on all this, but it is an interesting step towards a more full biological understanding of character and intelligences.

But the virus required a vector, which was unprotected Windows systems. If the virus never reached the target devices, then how would the virus infect them?

If these top security facilities can't prevent viruses, how can protect ourselves with our measly little free AV software packages?

What antivirus software would have protected the victims of this virus? Kaspersky? AVG? Windows Security Essentials? ClamAV?

While on the one hand, it is important to prevent infections from becoming a massive swarm with the ability to hammer away at particular locations in a DDOS, in this particular case it seems like specific machines were infected with the goal of harming them directly. Since these machines are running on specialized hardware, it doesn't really make sense to consider StuxNet a "swarm" virus. The swarming aspect only seems to have helped it spread in an organic way towards the targeted systems.

On the very end lay the centrifuges, but between those and the Internet lay Windows PCs. Would having Norton (or any other AV) running on startup have blocked this virus?

If none, then what hope do we really have of protecting ourselves from deliberate attacks on our network infrastructure?

Quite frightening, actually. (Unless Windows Security Essentials would have caught it.)

This game is so great! But the gameplay on a PC is subpar... You should definitely buy the specialized hardware that we just so happen to be selling!

keep it secret

Patents are, by design, open for review. They aren't secret by any stretch of the imagination.

Would a company develop phones if there were no patent protection? Almost certainly. The difference would likely be in how they protect their designs. Would they hold them close as trade secrets? Or would they use stronger contract verbiage to bind licensees?

It's an interesting question but only as a hypothetical. The patent system isn't going to be thrown out because people find it inconvenient. In fact, it's going to be kept because those inconveniences keep the system working.

When you say "finished product" are you precluding the possibility of inventing a useful component that could be used in many different applications? Let's say you invented a new kind of drain stopper that only makes sense used in tandem with existing drains. Surely, you would want to assign patent rights to the inventor of the new drain stopper even though his invention isn't a complete device but rather a part of a larger device.