"The first incandescent lamp [developed by Woodward and Evans] was constructed at Morrison's brass foundry in Toronto, and was a very crude affair. It consisted of a water gauge glass with a piece of carbon, filed by hand and drilled at each end, for the electrodes, and hermetically sealed at both ends, having a petcock at one end with a brass tube to exhaust the air. Woodward made the mistake of filling the tube or globe of this lamp with nitrogen after having exhausted the air. Prof. Elihu Thomson is quoted as having said that had he stopped when he had the tube exhausted he would have had the honor of being the inventor of the incandescent light as used for commercial purposes... the principle of the incandescent lamp dates several decades before the Woodward experiments, and that King, Chanzy, Farmer and others in the twenty years preceding 1860 made and used incandescent lamps much superior to the very imperfect one upon which Woodward's claims are based. Moreover, the Edison claims, as sustained in the courts, were not on the discovery of the principles of the incandescent lamp but on a definite combination of parts—all well known—which resulted in the production of a practical form of the incandescent lamp."[1] (From Wikipedia)

Dude, this is what Darwinism is all about. I am so fed up with all these people who are a) mis-diagnosed, b) have an allergy but it clears up and they don't get re-tested, c) due to their mother's vanity, they did not get breast milk as an infant and hence, have allergies and d) are forever whining about it.

Bring on the bees!!

So, you come home drunk one night. You lurch towards the window to get some air and, as you do so, you bump clumsily into the hive breaking it open. The bees, sensing that something is very wrong, attack the intruder.....

The only reason that Uranium was used was because of the potential for producing weapons-grade isotopes as a by-product. Thorium reactors do not allow for that. The Indians are on the right track here. Pardon the pun but more power to them!

I have a bridged network of three wrt54g's out in the country. One of which connected to the internet cable moden. There are regular power outages in the area. My network covers 18 acres and I've never had to do anything but turn it on in the spring. I'd like to replace it but I'm not getting the sense of reliability with Cicso's E4200 (dd-wrt loses it's config on power up). Does this WNDR3700 boot up flawlessly every time?

Firstly, they are going to incorporate the api's to run android apps. That solves the ecosystem problem. That said, they need to split the company into hardware and software vendors. The hardware company should focus on: 1. Outperforming in every aspect against other phones - They have the high-end market. They need to own it. I know so many sr. execs who don't what they are doing and their kids get them to move to an iPhone. 2. Provide phones with two (2) sim cards. Many corporate users and travellers want a second line on their phones. The Chinese and Indians already have such a product, why is RIM not leading in this? 3. Focus on a hands-free standard with the automobile car stereo manufacturers. Bluetooth should be easy as pie and mandatory in every vehicle. 4. Make the GPS as good as or better than Garmin. Right now, the GPS is dog-slow and almost useless. 5. More and better drop tests and waterproofing. 6. Equivalent functionality between the phone and the playbook. In other words, no tethering. Either the phone or the playbook should be able to be the full communications device. The software company needs to prioritize: 1. Social networking. RIM should have the best social netwroking phone on the market. Period. 2. Voice recognition - either drop it or make it work. 3. Create a feedback loop with their customers. Right now, you don't get any sense as a customer that you can have any input and/or feature requests. 4. A decent music player. 5. A decent file catagorization system. 6. Better document reading/editing (more formats) 7. An apps ecosystem that works (including the Android apps) 8. Biometric security

Oracle does things for one reason and one reason alone: to win by controlling the market. Beat the competition at all costs. That is the driving force of Larry Ellison and the mantra behind the company. Don't ever dream or wish with these guys - they don't operate that way. Example: Oracle will keep MySQL so long as it leads to sales of one sort or another. The same with all the other open source code that it controls. If it's too much hassle and shows no returns, goodbye.

Fairpoint is not doing this for any reason other than the fact that farmers in Vermont are in dire straights and will rent themselves and their horses out more cheaply than ATV's and Ditch Witches (A horizontal boring machine). It's a sad commentary on how a once proud tradition has been reduced to taking a hand-out from a company steadfastly refuses to put a penny into its operational equipment.

I think he means gender. Identifying sex is much, much harder. Are two people who are hugging having sex?

At a company that I worked for, one user had a laptop with 64 Meg of Ram and Windows 2000 on it. The problem was that it was so slow that he simply couldn't use the machine. It was costing the company a fortune in man-hours while he waited for the software to load and run. I was asked what could be done about the problem. I took the laptop out to a back room and, on the way, I tripped. The machine went flying and the display broke. Fortunately, no one seemed to mind my clumsiness and the user got a new machine. His productivity increased ten-fold.