While old bombs are still found daily in Germany, very few of them explode, even fewer explode under uncontrolled conditions, and there is about one incident per decade where humans are hurt - mostly members of the bomb disposal squad.

Obviously, with the power requirement to blow up Alderaan, you need a power density where any one catastrophic reactor failure will blow up the whole thing - or at least reach far enough to cause a chain reaction. So you'd rather put all your risk into a single, well-defended place. Well, in theory. Then the contractors come in.

Actually, http://xkcd.com/164/.

Having driven both in Germany and in the US for quite extended distances, there often is a significant difference. Germany has a much higher population density, and that translates to a much higher traffic density. Moreover, the fact that there are different speed limits for different classes of vehicles (80km/h for trucks and most trailers, 100km/h for many buses and some trailers, unlimited or 120km/h for normal cars) leads to frequent lane changes and other manoeuvring. On the US50, I can just put a brick on the accelerometer, tie the wheel, and go to sleep (or email) for half an hour. Driving on the German Autobahn is often (though not always) more like driving in, say, inner-city Boston. If you are not reasonably alert, there is a high chance of an accident.

We don't have crime in Germany. It went out of style 35 years ago as old-fashioned.

While I would phrase this a bit more conservatively, I agree with the core reasoning. I bought my MacBook Pro because it has among the best hardware combo one can get in a notebook (and that includes keyboard, screen, touchpad, and form factor), and because, under all the glitter, it's a UNIX box. If they ever stop being a good UNIX box, I'll be back to Linux in a heartbeat. I run it on desktop and serves, anyways.

And I'm fairly sure I'm not alone with this sentiment. At the conferences I go to, people started buying Macs when MacOS-X came out. Now there are about 80% Macs, 18% Linux (on everything from ThinkPads to cheap netbooks), and 2% Windows (and those only buy the people who work for Microsoft Research). Admittedly, this is not a large field, but academics are an influential group in general.

Actually, CERN has insane bandwidth requirements that required significant new research into distributed computer systems to realise. For the LHC, they created the LHC Grid, with the 11 tier 1 institutions being connected to CERN via dedicated 10 GBit/s links (and they receive only part of the data each).

The EuroStar takes 2:16 from (central) London to (central) Paris. It's unlikely that you can beat that on any aircraft, if you take times to and from the airport, check-in and check-out times, and waiting time into account. The Eurostar is not only international, but also leaves the Schengen area, which complicates travel a bit. But for national trains, I just go to the station with 5 minutes to spare and walk onto a train with an open ticket (although some discount options require the use of fixed connections).

A polarized window will necessarily reflect at least half of incident light (unless that light happens to be polarized at right angles to the laser light, which is extremely implausible). You really don't want to loose half of the light in the cockpit. And there is no particular reason to believe the laser light would be polarized in any particular plane, since the user can simply turn the laser around its axis. Also, of course, this would be a major change to existing airframes, and hence very expensive to implement. Of course, expensive + does not work looks like a perfect match for the TSA....

Come on! Even a senile pygmy macaque can tell that Fox is all satire.

And of course the iPad is running iOS and apps build with XCode wich uses gcc as the compiler backend. No GNU, no iPad.

Because this works so well for aquifers in modern, developed, industrial countries where the aquifer is fully within the borders of the only country using it? See e.g. the Ogallala Aquifer.