It's been discussed to death, but for that kind of price they really are a steal.

Lost at C:\
Found at C

Excellent point!

Will it run Linux?

I'm not being facetious, I got stung by the lack of support by Nvidia for their Optimus graphics cards on my ASUS U30JC.

Thankfully Martin Juhl has been working on a solution using VirtualGL, which gives us the use of our Nvidia cards under linux

If you are using the English language then the terms East West etc. are valid. These terms have their origins in Graeco-Roman culture, i.e. the occident and the orient which identify regions that had cultural similarites and connections. Of course with such generalisations there will inevitably be some blurred lines and inaccuracies. With the advent of colonialisation and globalisation the geographic/directional connotations of West and East have lost some of their importance.

In Japanese you may use whatever terms you like, as you might know all foreigners could be referred to as gaikokujin or the more impolite gaijin, but the economic and cultural power of the "Western" nations in the 19th and 20th centuries has led to the term Western becoming adopted in some senses. In fact

from wikipedia.

Before you make any silly western colonial superiority statements against me, I am from a nation that suffered from colonialsm, so I am not biased in that regard.

You misunderstand me, I never made an assumption about the used browser. In fact I too use the default browser, so your point is moot.

Try the classic comments mode. I have it set to that, and I no longer have problems reading /. from my HTC Legend.

@JDmetro

Ah do you remember Plumbers Don't Wear Ties? Possibly the worst game ever made. I remember GamesMaster made a big deal out of it at the time.

Occam would like his razor back.

A universe without an all encompassing sentience is a simpler, more reasonable assumption compared to a sentient universe. That does not rule it out, or forbid it; it just make it less likely. Likewise, the universe does not actively prevent things from occurring, one example is the that of the so-called forbidden transitions in energy states of a nucleus. They are nominally forbidden by selection rules, but there is a finite, measurable probability for a transition to occur.

In your defence, a sentient universe would certainly be interesting, but as you stated, we already have enough difficulty understanding our sentience let alone something on the scale of the universe.

Personally I like to use the wavefunction of the universe

Ducks...

They shoot a laser beam through the sample, which they measure with a detector at the other side. Then they apply an electric field to the flakes at high frequency (> 1 MHz). They scan the frequency of the electric field from 4 kHz up to 3MHz. When the frequency of the electric field is the same as the frequency of the rotating flake you get a resonance which appears as a sudden spike in the laser detector. That's how they know what the rotation rate is, and the dielectric response of graphite to an electric field is well known so they can cross check this with theory.

...and technically we do have video systems that can acquire data up to 1 peta Hz (or if you're american you'd say 1 quadrillion Hz). Femtosecond lasers are used in chemistry for more than a decade now to image fast chemical reactions.

Hope this rambling post helps!

A closer pronunciation is "ill-aawn rew-ah".

From a friendly martian.

I do!
feck...

I never claimed his work was original, only an idiot would, especially since Clonus was already mentioned by someone else; anyway there are only seven basic plots (according to Christopher Booker). It's not hard to find the same stories and ideas cropping up again and again in fiction. What is relevant is what influenced the script for the Island. The Clonus Horror was a minor low budget film, the film rights to Spares -which was a very successful book by a well known author- was bought by DreamWorks who went on to produce The Island after those rights lapsed. It is simplistic to think Spares or Clonus are the sole influence/inspiration for The Island, but it is certainly disingenuous to suggest Spares had nothing to do with it, or any apparent connections are only coincidental.

It might have also been "inspired" by Spares by Michael Marshall Smith. From wikipedia: