Holy fuck. I've seen servers with extensive startup scripts but no desktop should take that long. My windows 8 gets from power button to password in in 6 seconds, it's usable immediately. I could boot and shut down over 50 times while you boot up once!

You need to analyze all the running processes and then uninstall them. All of them. Except the virus scanner (you haven't got 2 virus scanners doing realtime have you?). You also don't have enough RAM

I don't see how that's relevant. They're still measuring it.

with the cunning use of words

Bullshit. My uneducated guess is that they will instead use the analisys techniques outlined here

Yeh, it's so convenient to keep your Tesla charging apparatus on the street.

what does slashdot do?

Scratch that. We pontificate. We're very good at that.

I was watching this recently posted video of Ray Kurzweil interviewing Robert Freitas, a "nanobot theoretician", about the current state of nanotech. Freitas suggested the use of DRM techniques as a way of preventing the malicious use of nanotechnology. Seems like a "good" application to me. There's another video of RK interviewing Eric Drexler whichh is also interesting.

No. They spent a billion dollars on it. They were clutching at shadows after the lights were turned on.

You want to look at ugly people? Think of the hotness!

hmmmm. I mainly agree, but as a point of accuracy...

900M is about right according to wikipedia

The thing is, for much of that time Earth would have been a ball of lava, so once it cooled down life got going quite quickly.

The summary actually says the the universe was about 15 million years old and would have lasted several million years. So...yeh, too short for anything useful to happen. One wonders what could be cool enough after only 15B years , and do you really need something as big as a planet?

OK, so the heavy elements began to be manufactured after just 3 million years, but were they manufactured in large numbers?

And how long does it take for those heavy elements to disperse through the universe and then coalesce into a planet around a suitable star? Seems like it might be longer than 15 million years.

And life took 500 million years to get started after Earth formed. For sure, for some of that time the Earth was too hot for life to occur but 15 million years seems too short for anything useful to happen. Maybe some RNA and some enzymes if you're lucky, but that would be about it.

Firstly, most of those desalination plants are already built, and second, I really doubt that getting to this water is simply a matter of "a few more pipes". Deep water oil rigs can cost Billions, plus you have to buy the rest of the infrastructure. The Sydney desalination plant "only" cost $1.08 Billion.

Not that I read TFA or anything, but since thuse aquifers are under the ocean, I'm pretty sure they've got nothing to do with the water table in Lybia.

In PNG human meat is referred to as "long pig"

And just for kicks, here is a Kangaroo giving himself a bouncy ride http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6VKtk1FesY