The Humble Bundles seem to be helping with this, though. They're getting a lot of independent game studios to think about releasing for Linux, and they show that Linux controls nearly 1/4 of the gaming market. I'm hoping that this helps push similar changes up to the bigger studios.

Except the fusion drives on the comets would make them visible as soon as you light up the fusion drives. At least, if anyone is watching... http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth

... so just pick one and stick to it.

I'm partial to "input" and "output" myself, from the perspective of the object using them (so a client's output goes to the server's input and vice-versa).

If you need to reference both objects' streams at the same time, you've got "myInput", "myOutput", "hisInput", and "hisOutput" for clarity.

Or just pick something fun; "spinwise" and "widdershins" isn't bad, but may confuse your users.

I was basing it on the average atomic weight of each element, in the first periodic table that came up on Google. It's been a while since my last chemistry class (11 years, I think), so I may have gotten it wrong.

But it looked like, since they said there were no radioactive byproducts of the reaction, that they were talking about the most stable (and therefore common) isotopes of each. Therefore, Ni-58 and Cu-63, resulting in an atomic weight difference of 5, which means they need to create 4 neutrons out of thin air.

But, like I said, high-school chemistry was a while ago.

I'm curious how they can get more energy out than they put in, at the same time as getting more MASS out than they put in. Copper is more than just a proton heavier than Nickel (63au vs 56au, I think). Conservation of energy/mass, anyone? Hydrogen+hydrogen fusion produces energy because the resulting helium is lighter than the inputs, and E=mc^2.

I was very disappointed to see that it was a misspelling of "learn" instead of "leer." I was quite curious how a computer could leer from the Net...

If you write your own, you may not want to include propagation beyond any single machine. No risk of getting out that way. Just make it tricky for a user to remove, to show the various techniques that may be needed (hiding in multiple places, being started from registry keys and other locations, running multiple processes that each monitor the others so it's tough to kill them all, ...). Good luck, and ask for permission before doing it!

Umm... It IS executable. It prints "EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!" to the console when run as a COM program. It's just been added to the virus definitions of every piece of antivirus software to allow for simple, risk-free testing.