after first thinking the article was about Romulan fortune tellers.

There's no point in building a heavy lift vehicle to build a lunar base that's going to use the water if we can't access the water. NASA is doing it right...It's a lot cheaper to send a robot to check out the water, see how easy it is to extract the water, and even return a sample to Earth than it is to send people there. And NASA would look really stupid if they get congress to fund a multi-billion dollar lunar base program only to discover that they don't have access to the water that they had counted on.

...but I'm sure it costs a bit more
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ

By the way, we saw it first in Aliens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDy-5IQvuU

It's also known as ALAC. I don't believe that it's an option for the iTunes store, but if you own a CD and want to get it into your iDevice environment, it's a good option.

299,792,458 m /s. It's not just a good idea. It's the law.

We're talking about Stephen Wolfram here. His brain is capable of filtering and analyzing an infinite amount of information. For mere mortals, your mileage may vary.

So do I

OMG! Unicorns!!! should get the job done.

need to work together. That's why we don't see obstruction prosecutions.

Bell Labs won a Nobel prize for the transistor for work that they did before anybody knew whether it was anything more than a cute electronics trick. I don't see anything of that level coming out of Microsoft Research.

The beauty of the old Bell Labs was that to a certain extent, basic research was OK and appreciated. I couldn't imagine any corporate lab today producing anything close to the quality and quantity of fantastic work that came out of Bell Labs. Google certainly has the resources to do it, but the big question is would the shareholders appreciate the long-term value of such an asset?

You're not crazy, you're just showing your age. Most of the people developing social media technology these days have no idea what Henry Kissinger looks or sounds like, and they totally don't get the Monty Python tune...
 

I'm sorry, but pendantic flair is an example of an oxymoron, not irony.

No. It's a valid US patent.
It means that IBM can sue whoever created your HR software and get an injunction to stop its sale in the US. Whoever makes your HR software would then need to fight IBM and a team of wicked sharp lawyers in court, and convince a bunch of dumb-fucks in East Texas, who have nothing better to do for three months than sit in a jury for $12 / day, that the patent isn't valid do to prior art or obviousness.

Welcome to the giant cluster fuck that is the US patent system.

OMG! It's just like Firefox!