Short term memory seems to be electrical and long-term chemical. This article seems to support this hypothesis, showing the connection between statically-charged connections between molecules within the synaptic structure.

Whether the location of the electrically-bonded connections changes or not, the chemistry will reconstruct the electrical charges of the original memory. more or less.

Volt meets Resistance. I couldn't resist.

On a serious note, GM does not have a good record with respect to embracing effective change. Its management is still intellectually corrupt, except it is no longer led by executives who came up through sales/marketing and now has had government surrogates put in their places.

GM has never had a working grip on the obvious, and I'm old enough to remember when GM-made cars were more than half of the world's output. They no longer have a monopoly, nor the world's biggest dealer network, and only, apparently, one profitable brand of auto -- Cadillac.

So, as I told a friend who had inherited money in 2001 -- "Sell GM short. They're going down."

It's true again, How long must GM wait before it can return to the courts for relief?.

Funny, that! I switched away from Gnome in Mint 11 due to stability issues!

I installed Crunchbang-XFCE last week am in complete heaven! It is Debian stable well-configured and does precisely what I want it to and nothing more; it looks decent to my eyes and it does not crash nor lose its volume control; it remembers its dock apps when restarted and offers quicker access to apps and documents with a customizable menu function activated by the mouse or keyboard shortcuts.

It acts like blackbox with docks and panels and, like BB is fully customizable.

Did I mention it has not hiccupped in a week of thorough testing/normal use?

I'm a Mint user, not a developer, so this is conjecture and uninformed opinion only --

The use of Synaptic is thought to be too hard for newbies to grasp, so other apps were developed, like the Mint Software Center, or whatever it's called and GDebi. These latter two are what the Mint team expect you to use, so the more comprehensive app is, while not hidden, not so easy to find.

If you use XFCE, you can make your own menu and put Synaptic at the top if you like.

I remember those years -- Gnome on Sawfish under TurboLinux looked real good. I loved the way it glistened. But it kept crashing, so I went back to whatever KDE was current then, 1.1, 1.2 I forgit.

So I am reminded of this when I try KDE-4. Pretty but dumb and unstable as well.

I will try trinity!

I prefer Blackbox's (and OpenBox and Fluxbox) use of a right mouse click to bring up the application menu and the scroll wheel to switch between desktops.

I prefer to open applications by clicking on the file I want to work on in a file manager window, but I like to use the mouse to open applications without an associated file, like a browser or mail client or a terminal window.

Although I now prefer Mint after having a great experience with Mint-10 (Ubuntu Maverick), Mint-11 seems to have dropped some features I had liked and is not nearly so rock-stable, so I am shopping for a new and STABLE -- meaning chromium won't go 'snap' and kill all my tabs and panel applets won't disappear and reappear on reboots. Mint-10 would have uptimes of weeks, and never really need to be rebooted; 11 is more quirky -- but, to be fair, is seems to have improved over time.

This doesn't seem to be Canonical's fault entirely; I had used and loved SimplyMEPIS in the past, based on my experience with 6,0 I tried SimplyMepis-11 and KDE-4 loses me entirely. I cannot grasp its concept of 'activities.' Isn't this what virtual desktops are for? And Kwin crashed regularly for me. I have been a KDE user since version 1.0 (Caldera Open Linux-1.3) and I wished I could find it stable or even usable, but I cannot. Perhaps I will upgrade to Mepis-8.5.

Or I may go back to Red Hat. I used their 6.2 version for almost five years as a desktop machine, upgrading libraries as needed to allow newer and newer versions of Netscape, Opera, Sylpheed, Pan, VLC and kernels to be installed until Linux's move to the 2.x series of kernels and glibc and GCC changes made upgrading impossible. So CentOS (RHEL-6.1) is looking pretty good to me about now.

Canonical seems to have decided their future lies in tablets and smart devices. Perhaps that's where the money will be. But a computer needs a more complete operating system than a device does. Dumbing down Linux is a poor idea; Excluding full desktop environments from distros solely because they need to fit on a CD-ROM when DVD drives are nearly ubiquitous in most of the world not smart.

So, I'll install Ocelot, I guess, and give it a try. Mebbe in virtualization on Ultimate Edition 2.6.3 (Lucid with all updates). Sure it's lurid, but it's stable -- I used it before Mint and it broke only through upgrading through Maverick to Natty.

Which seems to prove the point.

Pellets of hydrides are not new, either. And I suspect the ninety pence (about $1.44 USD assuming 100 pence per pound) figure quoted is for the matrix; the cost of the hydrogen is doubtless not included, since it really can't be calculated realistically until the costs of producing hydrogen-laden hydrides is determined.

More PR fluff. Perhaps alternative fuels is in a funding bubble.....

I have a bit of experience with Wankel rotary motors, having been a crew chief for a racing team that ran one, a 13B Mazda peripheral port which reportedly developed more than 300 bhp at 8700 rpm. I dunno 'bout that, but it was geared for 173 mph at that rpm and it got there right quick. It got 1 lpg (lap per gallon -- about 2.5 miles).

The efficiency problem in ICEs is thermal loss. The rotaries had, of course, a rotating combustion chamber, meaning the much of the heat of combustion was lost heating the cases instead of driving the wheels. Otherwise, rotaries would be perfect for diesel-cycle use.

Which brings me to the motor in question. It seems to use shock waves to start combustion instead of spark or, in a diesel, compression itself. But it seems to have the same heat-loss problems the Wankel design has. To me anyway. And without "lubricant", what will keep it from packing up after a few minutes like steam engines did before Watt's improvements?

Color me skeptical, At best.

The same video shown in the linked article is from UTube, uploaded Oct. 29, 2009.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf_-IMgla34

The concept of a detonation-wave engine is not new either. I remember reading about one in Popular Mechanics or one of its clones in the fifties or early sixties of the past century.

Seems like PR fluff to me. And that's not new, either.