And putting cooking oil on you engine will thrash it too.

Its not a problem with your engine or the fuel, your engine is not ready for ethanol, thats it.

Brazil have been using ethanol for more the 30 years now, and the main problem is with market regulation and prices, as ethanol competes with sugar. That was solved with bi-fuel engines (gasoline and ethanol), you CAN mix them up freely and use whatever is cheaper.

From a envinonmental point of view, ethanol IS better than solar, etc. Solar cars need to use toxic components on the batteries, whereas ethanol is just a matter of ajusting the engine parts that come into contact with the fuel. Ethanol is mixed with water and its more corrosive than gasoline. But engines CAN be converted to run on ethanol only.

And ethanol has been used as a anti-detonant for gasoline for years in Brazil. It actually simplifies the supply chain, because ethanol-only parts can run on gasoline, the opposite is not true.

I think Linux already succeeded at every market you can think of. Servers ? Check. Appliances ? Check. Smartphones ? Check. Tablets ? Check. Supercomputers ? Check.

Oh, the desktop. It doesn't have to succeed, it already has. Why ? You don't need to have 99% of the market, you need to threaten the dominant player in a market. Think about what hapenned with Mozilla and IE. M$ was sitting on its hands with IE6 for almost three years. Then came FF and that made them release IE7 in less then a year. FF doesn't need 90%+ of market share, I sure hope they don't ever achieve it, it just has to set a new quality standard. If M$ stays still, FF or Chrome will steamroll IE.

The very same thing can be said about Linux in the desktop. It doesn't need a big market share, it needs to stay a viable alternative to Windows. So we consumers get the best of both worlds: a good closed source non-free (as in beer) SO and a good free (as in freedom) OS, pick the one that best suits you!

I'm the husband of an Engineering teacher and that's something we already discussed at home. I'm an Engineer myself, so I'm familiar with the requirements of a hard-science course. My advice to you is simply this: do what you think is appropriate and make sure your students understand those rules on the very first class. If you think they shouldn't use an iPod, then say so. If one student drops the course, it's their decision. What isn't fair is to tell a student they can't use their dictionary on the exam. That korean student could have bought a regular dictionary of told in advance she couldn't use the electronic one.

Well, as a Electrial Engineer who designs equipment that have a serial console, I think I give you several reasons that the serial console will be round for some years yet.

First, legacy. Most professional routers have come with a serial management console since ever. So anyone who's been trained to manage these devices use serial consoles for that. Of course, by being an IP equipment, you can manage them by accessing the same console using telnet, and you can upgrade their firmware using that console too. A USB to serial converter is a basic tool for anyone managing these type of routers

Second, design. In a microcontroller, one of the simplest devices you can use is the serial port. A lot of bootloaders for embedded devices (U-Boot, Redboot, CFE) usually start with a banner on the serial console even before configuring the RAM controller on the CPU, so you know your board is running and you can output valuable error messages very early on the boot processes. Other devices, even a true USB console, need much more complex drivers that are loaded later on the boot process or need more configuration options than a simple "115,8n1" somewhere on the manual.

Most domestic routers don't have a serial port. Well, they have, but you can't access them unless you open the case, the bottom line is that domestic users aren't even aware their wifi router have a serial port, much less that they have to use it. How often you need to unbrick your wifi router if you don't load custom firmware on it ? My guess is never.
Third is that it doesn't make a difference, as others have pointed out, if the equipment uses a USB to serial conververter, as the serial device will usually be limited to 115 kbps, even if your serial interface can transmit up to 12 mbps. Only CPUs with USB devices on them will benefit from a faster interface. The iMX line of processors from Freescale is one of them.

Thinking about it, the FOSS community could make a petition so Hans Reiser could continue collaborating with reiserfs4. It's not like he doesn't have the time to do it.

Funny thing is, if one uses the styles in Word correctly, you get a WYSIWYM editor, just never, EVER touch the bold, italic, underscore button. And the sad thing is it's much, much easier to do this in word 2000 then in newer versions.

Warning: Microsoft bashing below

Micro$oft is so bad, that when its software works, they break it on the next version! ;-)

One thing I think people overlook is that piracy is a personal choice. It's SO easy to download a game these days, if you want to pirate, you will, DRM or not. If you decide to purchase the game, it's almost a moral decision, you buy it to support the publisher, not to play the game.

Yes, I do think making a nuclear bomb is ALL ABOUT the fuel cycle. Little Boy wasn't even tested before being dropped in Hiroshima.

Trinity was a implosion-type plutonion bomb, just like Fat Man, while Little Boy was a gun-type uranium bomb. So the gun assembly was not tested before being deployed.