Poison both cups before you start playing and make sure he drinks from his...

Great, now do it another 300 times to prove to a statistically significant level that you're got ESP. :)

*appluads*

Mod that rant up by 101 points. :)

I need to get this printed on a t-shirt!

I'd say that was a perfectly acceptable metric for deciding whose PC/laptop to fix; so would my girlfriend... ;)

Good point - the US Navy test fired a railgun projectile at Mach 5 speeds at a target 110 nautical miles away utilising 33 megajoules of energy.

NASA is looking at the possibility of using a railgun to launch craft into space at Mach 10 speeds. A rail launcher study using gas propulsion already is under way, but maybe using electromagnetic acceleration is more feasible?

I'd far rather see a country spent more money on healthcare than on killing people. If the US Government really wants to save money, they should build less aircraft carriers - the incoming Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, will cost $14 billion including research and development, and the actual cost of the carrier itself would be $9 billion each - nearly $100 billion in total for a like-for-like replacement of the eleven Nimitz and Enterprise class carriers in active service.

By comparison, the UK spends two and a half times as much on Health as it does on Defence.

You could get around this by having a mobile operating base for any manned mission to Mercury that stays out of direct sunlight to avoid frying its occupants. Its 3:2 spin-orbit resonance means that a single day on Mercury last exactly two Mercury years, or about 176 Earth days - so a single fixed point on the surface would be in daylight continuously for 88 days. Given that its radius is 2,439.7 ± 1.0 km, it has a circumference of 7667.6 km, so you'd only need to be able to move 87.1 km/day, or 3.63km/h.

As I recall, the latest Linux Skype client has been version Skype 2.1 Beta 2 for Linux for well over a year now, with no sign whatsoever of it progressing any further. Then again, I'm not too bothered about that, as newer Windows versions I have used have all been more bloated then previous ones with no appreciable additional functionality worth speaking of.

Will it have a laser that can cut through steel bars in it?

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Does 757 employees (end of Q4, 2009), count as "fairly small"? Well, I suppose it does next Apple's 49,500 employees worldwide...

I would put it on Bill Gates' car. :)