US: I cast... magic missile

China: Why you cast magic missile? There nothing to attack!

Even the Cell, the most widely deployed non-standard architecture ever, was only used in the PS3, and was more trouble than it was worth.

I think you are forgetting about the Roadrunner supercomputer which has 12,960 PowerXCell processors. It was #1 on the supercomputer Top 500 in 2008. It's still at #7 as of November 2010.

For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous

Yeah seriously... haven't they seen The Thing? Luckily Kurt Russell and Keith David are still around to protect us.

Take a closer look at the base of the figurine. Recognise it?

That will teach me to not RTFA and just go by the summary. The figurine clearly has an Apple logo for its base. However, the summary and article both make it sound as if Apple is suing over Steve's likeness, not the use of their logo. So, you can understand why I found it all confusing.

Umm... what right does Apple have to sue over Steve's likeness? Shouldn't suit be brought by Steve himself rather than Apple? Did he sign over rights to his likeness to Apple?

I could see it if perhaps the figurine were based on a copyrighted image owned by Apple that contained Steve, but unless he's in a very specific pose or something it might be hard to prove.

Next thing we'll see is Apple trademarking Steve altogether and using him for their logo...

Actually, you'd have to do more than that in order to make it street legal. It has no mirrors and no signal lights, for starters.

You wouldn't want it the way it was originally designed anyway, other than as something to look at. I've seen the original prop, and the inside was pretty barren. Other than the basic controls, a seat, and a seatbelt, the entire inside is pretty much just sheet aluminum. The guy I saw backing it off a trailer (with lots of help btw, as with no back window and no mirrors, he couldn't see WTF he was doing) was sweating his balls off in there, even with the top down, as it was the middle of summer, and there was no insulation between him and the heat of the engine, nor any air conditioning.

A prop-accurate Tumbler would pretty much only be good for a prop or a conversation piece.

Ok, but those applications are relatively significant...

Eclipse. (Open|Libre)Office. Lotus Notes and just about any other desktop application made by IBM in the last eight to ten years. Many others.

The apps I listed are very important for a lot of businesses. A lot of critical applications only exist on the Mac because of Java.

I don't think Java on the Mac is going away entirely. If there were no JVM at all on the Mac, it would pretty much kill the platform in the business segment of the market. I think it's more the case that Apple has looked at things like OpenJDK and decided that it's not worth the resources to maintain their own JVM in a near vacuum. I imagine that it's intended for the slack to be picked up from some other direction, we just haven't heard the plan yet.

Have they used the Large Hardon Collider to make a black hole yet?

There has never been more of a need for the -1 obvious flag.

Obligatory: http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

I think you should mention I pay $35 per month or year.

Sorry, I thought the following made it clear:

It is not very hard to rack up $35 in long distance charges in a year otherwise.

But yes, to be clear, it's $35 per year.

Is that a one time fee or an annual fee?

One time fee, as far as I recall. It's just basically so that they can confirm that you are the actual owner of that phone number. They send a message to your phone (hence why the Skype Credits are required), then you message back to confirm that you got the message. Otherwise nefarious types could use the service to masquerade as though they were calling from your number.

The service is great. I pay $35 for unlimited calling across Canada and the US. It's a no brainer for me. Working from home? No problem, I make all the conference calls I want without tying up the home phone. Need to phone mom long distance? No problem. Working from my girlfriend's place where there's no landline? No problem.

There is the occasional issue. Sometimes (rarely), calls drop. Sometimes (very rarely) there is a number somewhere in the US I can't call. Honestly the biggest problem I have is that my number comes up weird on call display, so there's times when people I'm phoning don't answer because they think I'm some telemarketer, but really that's just my own fault for not shelling out $14 for some Skype credits so they can send an SMS message to my cell phone to confirm that they can use my cell number for call display.

Really their problem is they need to advertise better. When I tell people what I pay for my service, they immediately say "Holy crap that's cheap!" Most people just don't know it's out there, or if they do, they think it's only for Skype-to-Skype calling, and don't know you can call regular phones with it.

It would be nice if they had Skype-In support here (Canada), but really for what I'm paying, I can hardly complain. I easily am recouping in long distance savings what I'm paying out. It is not very hard to rack up $35 in long distance charges in a year otherwise.

The noise over Miracles wasn't about internet trolls getting uppity just for fun (though it is fun). These guys didn't say, "hey these things are amazing" when they called them miracles. They suggested that these various natural things were no less than god's direct intervention in the physical world and implied that they couldn't be satisfactorily explained by science. Then they said they don't want to hear from any scientists about any of these subjects because, "[those] motherfuckers lyin'". Yeah, scientists of the world are part of a giant conspiracy to lie about where rainbows come from... fuckwits.

Anyone that has listened to ICP for any reasonable length of time knows that their songs are meant to be tongue in cheek, and this one is no different.

If you take all their songs as literally as the critics are taking this one, then you'd actually believe they've murdered half the planet for little reason other than their own amusement, because that's primarily what their songs are about. I will go out on a limb and say that if all their songs were true, they'd be on Death Row by now.

Miracles just tries to send a message that there are wonders all around us that we all take for granted. It does it in a tongue in cheek way. It wouldn't be an ICP song if it didn't. Get over it.

Seriously, next you people are going to tell me that Weird Al really bashed in the head of "good old Mister Fender", because he sang about it. Get real.

The designers also hope that one day the underwear can release drugs to relieve pain and treat wounds.

Or how about Viagra when they sense foreplay? That would make a hojillion dollars. Add in a mild heater to combat shrinkage on those cold nights, and you have yourself a winner.

The problem is not targeted ads. I don't mind having targeted ads at all. What I do mind is that stuff that I wanted to keep private being suddenly open to Everyone and to my friends and networks. Yes.. it's naked greed indeed. I disabled my account earlier today and don't see myself going back. Too much of a time sink anyway.

Agreed. The targeted ads themselves don't give the advertiser any of your data.

I actually ran an ad on Facebook for a couple of months to advertise the Fan Page for a charity that I volunteer for (shameless plug... it's the National Wild Turkey Federation). All the ad targeting does is select parameters to match when deciding whether to show your ad to people. You can select things like gender, age, location, interests, etc. It tells you roughly how many people will match your criteria. As an advertiser, this is REALLY useful. I was able to target my ad and say "I only want to show this thing to people over 18 within 50 miles of my city that are interested in X, Y, and Z". That is the kind of direct targetability that everyone in the advertising industry wants. If someone doesn't match your criteria, they just plain won't be shown your ad, and you won't have to pay.

It does NOT give you a list of their names and/or profiles, or anything else of their information. You get a number that says your criteria matches X number of profiles. That is it. And it does this without those profiles needing the information your criteria tries to match being public. I really fail to see how it's any invasion of privacy in and of itself.

I'm not claiming that Facebook doesn't have some shitty privacy policies of late, but as the parent states, the targeted ads are not the problem here.

What I mean is this attitude with schools has been around for a long time. We had the vice principal sneaking around while classes were in session because he wanted to personally do locker checks and that was 20 years ago. He definitely didn't consider your locker personal space.

There is a lot of established case law that says that school lockers are the property of the school and hence not considered private. Heck in my school, it was mandatory to provide the office with the combination to the lock you had on your locker. We certainly had no expectations of privacy. It was fairly routine for anyone at the school that got themselves on the wrong side of the law to find out that the police had come to the school and asked the principal to open up their locker for them, which the principal would readily do.

IMHO, if you're stupid enough to store contraband at school, you deserve to get caught.