So what you're saying is in Soviet Russia, navigation satellite tracks you?

Ebola is a possible bio-weapon. Any vaccine developed would have an immediate market within the armed forces - quite an incentive to develop one, if you ask me.

Isn't this also true of carbon-based proteins (usually what membranes and catalysts are made of)?

Agreed, this is my reason for having a Windows box and a Linux box at work. I use, on a fairly regular basis, Solidworks and Altium Designer. Both are DiretX/3D heavy, and don't work well under emulation. Most of the software dev work, though, is under Linux. At home, I normally have a Linux box, and a Windows laptop.

There was a rather large field campaign called The Severe Thunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study (STEPS) to study electrification done around the year 2000 that involved the use of polarimetric weather radar to observe electrified storms, in conjunction with the New Mexico Tech Lightning Monitoring Array (LMA).

One of the nice things about polarimetric radar is the ability to measure the aggregate orientation of particles, including ice crystals. When scanning active electrified storms, the radars observed polarimetric signatures indicating increased vertical orientation of particles aloft (ice crystals), which then suddenly snapped back to roughly random orientation. This event corresponded well with measurements from the LMA. In other words, they could, using radar, predict lightning strikes. I love science!

You must be referring to the foam absorbers used in an anechoic chamber, these are used for absorption. I was referring to finger stock that's used to minimize leakage out (or into) an enclosure with a door.

802.11a devices (operating at 5.45 GHz) are already supposed to detect radar signals and switch channels if one is found. This is particularly a problem in Europe, where most weather monitoring radars are C-band, and share the same frequency band as 802.11a.

Perfect anything is impossible to achieve when dealing with microwave devices, in my opinion. Particularly shielding - you can reduce it down to a point, and it gets expensive the lower you go. For instance, "quiet chambers" used when testing for EMI compliance typically have doors with beryllium-copper fingers that try to create a faraday shield to keep out external interference. I've never seen any commercial microwave oven that uses these - for good reason too, since they're expensive and won't last very long in a kitchen environment.

Most microwaves would try to ensure that the gap between the metal door and the body is small enough that the waveguide thus formed would have significant attenuation at 2.45 GHz. Any waveguide has a "cutoff" frequency, below which propagation can only occur through evanescent waves, which decay very rapidly. However, the relative power levels involved (microwaves generate 1 kW, or about 60 dBm, while WiFi receivers are sensitive down to about -90 dBm, or 1 picowatt) means that evanescent waves that escape can cause interference.

A winmodem is basically a sound card with an analog telephone line interface. This means all the modulation and channel coding that needs to be done to send/receive data is done in software. Real modems use a DSP to implement the modulation, and have the firmware for the DSP in a Flash chip. The only cost-cutting involved would be to do away with the Flash chip and have the device driver download the firmware each time the modem is power-cycled. Nobody did this with any modems I'm aware of, partly because being external from the PC case, it's hard to say if the modem DSP has already booted and is running firmware or not. With an expansion card, this is not an issue. Back in '98, I was able to update the firmware on a Zyxel 28.8k modem and have it support 56k, since it used a programmable DSP and allowed Flash reprogramming. Greedy marketers would usually prevent this from happening so I'd spend more $$$ to buy the 56k modem - somehow Zyxel were different at the time.