Yes, upgrades that aren't Thunderbolt-devices will be difficult. But as others have pointed out, most people don't upgrade, and when they do, so much needs to be changed anyway, that you're almost better off buying a new computer.

For example. I built a Sandy Bridge based computer in January 2011. Two and a half years ago. If I wanted to upgrade to the newest line of CPUs, I'd be forced to buy a new motherboard as well as CPU, as the Haswell isn't socket compatible with Sandy and Ivy Bridge (nor are AMD CPUs). Fortunately it still supports DDR-3, so I wouldn't have to upgrade that though.

But pulling everything out of the case, putting in new hardware, reinstalling drivers, the inevitable bitching from Windows about how I'm a damned, dirty, filthy software pirate for upgrading my hardware really doesn't seem worth it compared to simply buying a new computer.

And if you work in an office? I don't think I know any people who does works in corporate IT, who've upgraded internal hardware - they generally buy new stuff when the old stuff doesn't cut it any more, or when new stuff makes it economically viable to upgrade due to time savings.

And considering the cheapest Mac Pro available in the Apple Store at the moment is $2,499, I don't think this is aimed at home users either - they'd be going for iMacs.

Equally upgradable (or lack thereof), but if it works, why bother?

I'd be very surprised if any of the mileage ratings are accurate. They're all done in laboratory settings simulating very specific things.

Just because your car is rated at xx highway, doesn't mean that's what you'll be getting. It's more of an aid for comparison than accurate ratings.

That being said, it would be nice if the rating had an error bar attached to it. Something like 5.5 l/100 km +/- 0.5 would be helpful

And I'm sure the intent of some of the runners were to win the race - they didn't, and we don't think of them as having won the race.

These people didn't do that, so I think they are mass murderers rather than terrorists.

Are they really mass murderers though? Three people died as a result of the bombs.

According to the FBI, for individuals, mass murder is defined as the person murdering four or more persons during a particular event with no cooling-off period between the murders.

If a human tickets you, you'll know right away. If you are speeding, get pulled over, ticketed and then continue speeding, you'll get ticketed next time as well. If it's the same police officer, other things may happen as well. And hopefully people who get pulled over, do not re-offend straight away.

With automated systems you don't know until much later. Typically days or weeks.

Notice what he said. "I'm afraid to say things like that".

Say, not do. He's obviously not worried about doing illegal and unconstitutional things - he just doesn't want to talk about them.

Via train the way you did it, it would be 42 hours of travel plus the time spent in Boston. Thats nearly 4 solid days of sitting on a train!

I knew that the US prefers imperial over metric, but why on Earth would you want a different way of measuring time?

Even if it was igniting and had good fusion gain, there are such a huge array of serious engineering issues that they have got no economic answers for that it is never going to work commercially.

Generally I find it to be better to wait until I know if something will work, before I start wondering about commercial applications.

In 1900 the idea of visiting the moon would probably have made H. G. Wells somewhat annoyed, as his book wasn't published until 1901 (before powered flight). Humans walked on the Moon a scant 70 years later. Making plans for a commercial suborbital venture would be a bit premature. It would have been premature 20 years ago. 10 years ago - not so much, as Virgin Galactic showed in 2004, because at that point the science of it was well established and it became a relatively easy engineering problem./blockquote

Look at the marriage stats.

Yeah, I know what you mean. The ones that don't end in divorce usually ends with someone dying!

This is like Iran trying to sue some company in the USA for providing instructions for how to use contraceptives on their USA-hosted website.

Ehh ... what? Since when have contraceptives been illegal in Iran?

Well ... the US certainly seems to think that it should be the latter, considering how much they like working on extraditions for things done while not in the US.

To me it seems that France took a look at this policy and found it to be a grand idea.

Did they call it a Freedom air disaster?

Why does it dim your hopes? We already knew that Earth was pretty rare (1 in 8 planets in our solar system) before discovering extra solar planetary systems.

Currently we know of 861 extra solar planets, which moves our rarity to 1 in 869. With an estimated 100 billion to 400 billion extra solar planets in the Milky Way, that becomes quite a few Earth-like planets.

If an Earth-like planet is a million to one, then it's between 100,000 and 400,000. If it's a billion to one, then it's between 100 and 400.

And that's without considering the estimated 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe and the billions of years that planets and life have to develop after our observations.

Landing twice doesn't take skill - just inertia.

Landing in a way that you can walk away from it takes skill.

Multiplayer Sim City does sound interesting, I agree, but they've gone about doing it in entirely the wrong way.

A much smarter way would have been to implement save-games in a Git-like fashion, where you can pick and choose which people to play with.

This obviously won't work for a real time game, but for games like Sim City and the like, it'd work just fine. Hell, a Civilization style game could work fine as well.