Switzerland's firearm-related homicide rate per population is 5 timess smaller than that of US but 30 times larger than that of Japan.

Switzerland's firearm-related suicide rate per population is about the same as US but 140 times larger than Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

US has a HUGE gun fatality rate. That doesn't mean that any country with somewhat smaller gun crime rate has "hardly any".

Depending on your route, it might make sense to either visit LIGO Livingston Observatory in Louisiana or LIGO Hanford Observatory in Washington state. The former is preferable because of their cool "science education center", but both of these facilities have public outreach staffs and hold public events regularly. Call ahead and ask about the public tour schedule. They are in the middle of a huge upgrade and their instruments are not in operation, but I think it's still worth your time.

Dear Radio Shack,

I don't buy from you even though you are the only shop in my town that sells electronics components (resistors, capacitors, transistors, ICs, connectors etc.).

You don't offer any value over digikey, Mouser etc., their inventory is huge and they almost always have what I need, if not I'll order from other specialty online retailers. Your offerings are totally laughable.

Sure, I could use your 1/4 Watt 2.2k resistor, but why should I when I need to order other stuff you don't have, anyway?

Please become a digikey partner, or Mouser partner, or whatever partner, so that you have a reasonable inventory. I'll order using your partner's web site and get the parts at your store, with a reduced shipping cost (hopefully zero, but a reasonable amount is OK) and a shorter delivery time.

If you operate this way, I might buy something from your local inventory once in a while.

I've already told this to many friends, but maybe it's worth repeating here.

Please, if you plan to donate to American Red Cross to help Japanese, donate instead to Japanese Red Cross.

You can donate directly to Japanese Red Cross using Google Checkout.
http://www.google.co.jp/intl/en/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

Even if your credit card company charges you some chunk as this is a Yen transaction (though I don't know if this is actually the case), I still believe that it's much better option than sending money to American RC.

Unlike American RC, I actually trust Japanese RC for doing useful things in Japan with smaller overhead costs. I don't have any data to back "smaller overhead costs" part, but I don't remember hearing about some major scandal, and for "doing useful things" part, just look at this report from Japanese RC on 23/Mar:

http://www.jrc.or.jp/english/relief/l4/Vcms4_00002105.html

If you read Japanese, just read this list of donation/fundraising effort. Follow each of the link and you'll find that majority of these efforts are sending money to Japanese RC:

http://www.lifehacker.jp/2011/03/post_1701.html

Excuse me? A random guy is writing something that might be true (or not), but his credibility aside, he is showing neither of these:

• Japan actually turned down the offers from "nations like china and korea" in Kobe.
• The decision was because the offers came from those countries mentioned.

"because it was from nations like china and korea"

Right now there are rescue teams from 10 countries including "nations like china and korea" working in Japan.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/14_12.html

Sure sure, you're talking about Kobe. Would you please give me source that shows that Japan actually turned down the offers from "nations like china and korea" in Kobe? After doing that, would you give me another one that shows that the decision is because the offers came from those countries mentioned?

According to this Japanese article, they already started pumping sea water with boronic acid into the reactor for cooling:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20110313/t10014635191000.html

The water cooling system of the plant itself cannot produce enough cool water because of the power loss or something.

Anyway, this means that they decided to basically trash the plant after everything is (hopefully) contained even though the reactor vessel is intact: The inside of the reactor will be contaminated by I-dont-know-what from the sea water and it will be almost impossible to reuse.

I think the company is taking the route that makes sense, even if that's because there's no other choice or whatever.

I really, really hope it's not too late.

Because the usability of the feature you use every day doesn't count?

I don't know why I RTFA, and I still don't know why Android is the New Windows(TM), but at least now I can save your time.

1. Eventually Android will dominate the market.
You know, separation of software and hardware, blah blah.

2. Market dominated by one OS brand = Virus, malware, we're doomed!
From TFA: "The entire phenomenon of viruses and malware is a result of the proliferation of Windows".

3. Market dominated by one OS brand = Crappy product once in a while, we'll have no choise
Windows ME, Vista.

Science is about discovering the nature of this world, and this might or might not be directly useful for your day-to-day life.

However, science academia plants seeds for most of the major inventions, and often it takes a long time for anybody including academia and private industry to transform it into something you can harvest.

You're using LCD?

Who first discovered the liquid crystals? Yes, it's an Austrian chemist working at an Austrian university.

Did he invent LCD panel? Hell, no, it was RCA engineer who "invented" the fundamentals of LCD some 76 years later. At about the same time, UK government-funded engineers in Royal Radar Establishment developed long-lasting material that made the commercial application of LCD practical.

You're using GPS navigation?

You know that GPS was first proposed in 1956 as a test of general relativity by an American academic? That is because of the clocks running around in the earth bound orbit would have a different "tick" length than the ones on earth.

And general relativity was of course "invented" by another academic, a guy named Albert Einstein or something, in 1915.

And GPS was not possible without the accuracy of atomic clocks, which is entirely based on quantum mechanics of atomic transition, and the first guy who thought about using is as a clock is Lord Kelvin (1879), a British academic.

Oh, you're using internet? I wouldn't talk about DARPA, but anyway.

Between you and slashdot, your message goes through some fiber connection, and in that fiber travels laser light.

Yes, Laser.

It was Einstein (1917) who "invented" the theoretical foundation of laser, which is the rate equation for spontaneous and induced radiation. But that was of course based on Max-Planck's classical radiation theory.

But of course it was Bell Lab that patented the actual implementation of Laser in 1957 (BTW, unlike many many trivial patents filed by private corporations today, this was totally non-trivial).

And speaking of fiber connection, how about optical fibers, the principle of which was first demonstrated by French and Swiss physicists?

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Can you do without these useless, budget-eating science thingie?

Do the private companies care to invest in fundamental science which might or might not directly profit them in 50 years or longer?

I thought so.

Can somebody from the UK confirm? From TFA:

And they're not giving music guys free money (yet). The proposal is about cutting off repeated offenders from the net.

TFA seems to imply that the cost of "identify offenders, notify them, and cut them off" procedure would amount to 500m GPB, though it is not very clear about the numbers and whatnot.

I live in the state of Washington, and Amazon always collects sales tax from me. For example, the last item I've ordered costed 89.99 USD, but the total was 97.46 because Amazon took 7.47 as sales tax. I always thought that this is the way it operates for people in the US, but apparently I't totally confused.

and they're making more money for the lower price! I think this guy can learn something from what some of the Japanese publishers are doing in Japan.

Take for example a successful title, Gyakuten-Saiban: Yomigaeru Gyakuten. This is one of the titles known as "Ace Attorney" series in the USA.

There are three versions of this exact same title in Japan, i.e. the original (Sep.2005, sold at 5040 JPY or about 50 bucks), "Best Price" version (June 2006, sold at 3129 JPY or 31 bucks), and "New Best Price" (Apr. 2008, 2100 JPY or about 21 bucks).

130000 copies of the original version were sold, but they sold 200000 copies of the "Best" and "New Best" combined, so apparently they made more money from the budget-priced versions.

This is not an isolated case, it seems many publishers are lowering the price of popular but older games in Japan.

From the very front page of kernel.org:

The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is: 2.6.16

I don't have any doubt about what you wrote (Linus saying something in line of "2.6 not stable"), but that doesn't make me ignorant nor unreasonable even if I expect 2.6 series to be "stable", whatever that word means. I don't expect 2.6 series to be "stable", but that's another story.