I don't have time to look for the Slashdot article, but I think there was a similar story a few years ago about the EU attempting to create an "elite" university to complete with US schools such as Harvard and Yale. When will they ever learn that you cannot just one day decide to create these things from scratch? There are many factors that must first be present in order to allow them to come into existence then become what they are on their own merit. Where do the Europeans and Russians get these ideas from?

What about North Americans of Japanese decent?

Would this constitute a zero day vulnerability?

"....if they are out there to be found." They are out there whether we can find them or not. What I find really strange is why just prior to the fist exoplanet being discovered that scientists bothered debating the existence of exoplanets in the first place.

Scientists are more likely to design a warp drive before they do a truly effective translation program. Anyone who is bilingual would be happy to tell you just how difficult translation is. Human languages are not just sets of words and phrases that can be converted 1 for 1 back and forth. They are extremely complex with shades of meaning and varying context which must be inferred based on associations that only humans are able to make. It seems that monolingual Anglophones are the most difficult people to convince just how terrible computer translators are. In my office in Germany we usually get two or three pieces of correspondence a week where some Anglophone, ignorant of foreign languages, tries to translate their English to German and send it to us thinkiong they are doing us a "favour". It's always good for a laugh....

Most slashdotters are too caught up in their own world. Typical computer users out there don't even know what an operating system is much less know about Linux. Just the word "Linux" comes across as sounding like technobabble. Just mentioning word "Linux" to these people is liable to be as big of a turnoff as would mentioning the word "religion" to a bunch of hippies in any context. All they want to hear is their music.

At what point will the futuristic noise become retro-futuristic?

This whole idea just reeks of a Big Brother type of scenario in any country and sets a very dangerous precedent for the entire world. If the American government is so concerned about people driving too much unnecessarily why not just tax petrol (gasoline) more heavily like they do here in Europe?

Besides the color presumably not matching the surrounding material.
I would be inclined to agree if it were not a grey-scale image.

Florida does have the longest coast line of any state. No, Alaska does.

It's just that our solar power is stored in fossil fuels.

I am sure that a $45 fee per honk would solve that problem.

While it is true that you can run 32 bit binaries under 64 bit Linux, one problem I have had in particular is the combination of the two. I have a 64 bit system but I could only run the 32 bit version of the Java plugin under 32 bit Firefox, which of course breaks most other existing 64 bit plugins that would not work under a 32 bit Firefox installation. There are wrappers and such but the whole thing is just a major PITA. I for one welcome the new 64 bit Java plugin!