In a far off, seldom visited corner of my companies campus is a wall of patents granted over the years. A few weeks ago I found myself browsing them and noticed one of them was for a proximity sensor on a phone. In this case it was designed to automatically switch the phone from normal mode to speaker phone depending on proximity but it doesn't take a genius to see other uses for this. It was granted in 1998. Apple "steals" from other companies just as much as they claim people steal from them.

But you can't watch them via a streamed connection as the case against Zediva has shown. Zediva bought individual discs and streamed them on a one-to-one basis to users. For all intents the user had rented a real physical disc but because it was streamed over a network the courts deemed it a violation of copyright. So no, streaming companies cannot just buy used or new discs from just anyone. This would be the same as requiring all used car lots to buy their cars from the licensed dealer (no car auctions, no trade-ins, no private purchases).

Pascals are a unit of pressure.

Metric uses Newtons for force.

1 N is the force required to accelerate 1 kg at 1m/s^2

So on Earth (g ~= 9.8 m/s^2) 1 kg weighs 9.8 Newtons.

In the Foot-pound-second system the unit of mass is a slug

To answer the question more directly.

PHB -> Pointy Haired Boss

In other words Dilbert's boss and synonymous with clueless manager.

Nonsense, the heavy water actually promotes the reaction (it's a neutron moderator). Getting rid of it and cooling with normal fresh or sea water would be doable and simply serve the double role of cooling AND stopping the chain reaction (by virtue of not being heavy water).

It's even safer than that. The primary purpose of heavy water in a CANDU reactor is not to cool, but to act as a neutron moderator (it slows the neutrons down). Without this moderator the reaction stops (CANDU reactors do not use enriched uranium so neutron moderation is required to keep the chain reaction going). In addition to control rods CANDU reactor support either moderator poisoning (they inject chemicals into the moderator tank that absorb neutrons bringing the reaction to an end) or a moderator dump (they actually dump the heavy water from the moderator tank). This coupled with the non-enriched uranium just makes them plain safer. It's a shame they didn't sell more of them.

Actually no, congress didn't outright block the transfer of prisoners from Guantanamo. They simply imposed conditions (admittedly excessive ones) that needed to be met before the transfer could be made (unless I missed something). From the bill (section 9011) I know of we have:

Yes, it's a lot of paper work (there's further notifications required 15 days prior to moving) but none of it is impossible. Also note, at no point does it require further approval of congress. Once the paperwork is submitted the President is good to go. Now admittedly, if he did try this congress would likely try to introduce a new bill blocking it (thus the 45 day notice) but hey, he could veto that one specifically unless overruled by congress in which case it really isn't his fault anymore. But he hasn't. The only thing stopping him at this point is paperwork. No law or specific prohibition from congress is doing it. And that is the disgraceful part of it.

Well, the second article I linked mentioned:

So it's likely they took at least one sample forty miles out (for the record a forty mile radius would be about 5000 square miles so obviously they didn't do uniform sampling over all that area). Hopefully the report itself will have more details, unfortunately I haven't been able to find a copy online anywhere.

As far as I can tell Dr Joye though seems to me fairly level headed and the media has been a little overzealous in reporting on her work. Even she admits there won't be any lasting damage saying “The Gulf is resilient" and “I do believe that it will recover from this insult, but I don’t think it’s going to recover fully by 2012." I believe she just wants people to realize that the damage was more extensive than reported and we may not see the full effect for a couple of years yet.

Another thing she pointed out in an interview she did was her sampling technique appears to be more precise than those typically used by BP and others. Apparently the "pools" of oil are fairly delicate and can be blown away if you don't take your core very carefully (i.e. slowly). BP re-measured several of her sites using her technique and came away with the same results she got. If anything, this should help improve the process used to monitor the area.

From this article:

Sounds like a fairly large survey to me. Definitely the largest to date (much larger than BP's "studies"). Now granted, I don't know if this entire area counts as "wellhead dives" as the language is a little vague but I'm confident we can believe her when she says the damage is extensive and widespread.

This is another interesting article postulating the mechanism behind the oil deposits.

Not strictly true. There where a handful of large piston engined helicopters like the S-58/H-34 which could carry ~6000 lbs (or 12 troops). But yes, turbine powered craft soon became the preferred option.