Or you can evacuate the inside of your head and create a parallel universe in there with the end of a screwdriver as the point source in the middle, connected to the car via 60,000 feet of tram cable and examine the engine while holding the giraffe and reciting from memory the verse contents of the Egyptian edition of "Lord of the Rings".

That's what surreal mechanics do.

Every time I see this pointlessy show-offy use of latin, all I can think of is telling the OP is caput tuum revelle tuo e culo.

(And now we get an endless debate about whether I should have used clunes, and velle rather than revelle, and that's the real reason for the fall of the Roman empire, not the inability to terminate strings but the fact that they spent most of their time arguing over grammar).

Microsoft isn't admitting failure, it's a brilliant strategy. What they're no doubt planning to do is port Windows Nothing (formerly Windows RT, renamed due to its 0.00% market share), to the Nook. Anything divided by nothing is infinity, so Microsoft will gain infinite market share through this move. Sheer brilliance.

Anyone with launch control undergoes constant drilling and evaluation. If they fail an eval, they have to go through remedial training that's sufficiently obnoxious that few will risk failing. This is well-known among people who work in that sort of job. My guess is that the reason it's being made public in this case is because they want to send a message to someone for some reason (Congress for more funding? Embarrass the unit's CO/force someone's retirement/turf war? Who knows...).

Not only that, but this hasn't made it into law yet. Expect to see intense lobbying by (mostly) US business interests to get this provision spiked before the law becomes final. It's happened before with other law changes for which the initial drafts seemed reasonable, e.g. in the field of copyright.

The belief is actually that intercourse with a virgin cures AIDS. It's a really serious problem, not helped by the fact that it's been unofficially sanctioned by some government officials.

(Before this gets modded 'troll', ask any doctor who's worked in sub-Saharan Africa. The battle against AIDS there is largely a battle against superstition).

You can bet that the MAFIAA is hard at work writing legislation for their wholly owned subsidiary, the US Congress, to rubberstamp for them to redefine "public performance" to be pretty much anything they can charge royalties for.

It also depends on the size of the company. For our first few years we had a 100% retention rate, but the fact that we were only half a dozen people helped with that. Now that we're 400-odd, there is some churn. Not because people are bailing, the company is still a great place to work but people move to other cities, get married, whatever.

I bet it was that Al Kayeeda guy again. His name seems to come up whenever there's an explosion somewhere.

In the late1990s I worked in the research division of $large_corporation. Said corporation filed for a lot of patents, a few of which the researchers even considered patent-worthy (we had lots of lawyers who insisted on patenting everything). One day we got a chance to talk to an ex-USPTO staffer, and asked him about some should-never-have-issued patents in the area we worked in ("should never have issued" meant that they were patents on existing technology, for example one was on something that was at the time present in virtually every PC, laptop, and whatever other computing devices were around at the time). He looked a bit sheepish and said "Yeah, that was one of mine. We couldn't keep up any more so we just started rubberstamping patents until we'd caught up". Luckily this particular one was a defensive patent and the company who filed it (another $large-corporation) wasn't interested in enforcing it, but in just that one case it was only one of hundreds of patents that went through without any appraisal.

A bigger problem is that the examiners are rewarded based on how many patents they process. The "ideal" examiner is one who checks the name and date on the filing, verifies that the filing fee has cleared, and then approves the patent. They're likely to get the employee-of-the-year award for their high productivity.

In Panasonic's case it's not achieving superiority but dealing with inferiority, their consumer-grade camera sensors have always had terrible problems with chroma noise in low-light conditions, so this may just be a way of improving the low-light performance.

The Wayland People's Front will never stand for this! The People's Front of Wayland are just wannabes. Not to mention the Campaign for a Free Wayland.

Love,
Loretta (formerly Stan).

Replying to my own post, should have mentioned that there are experimental techniques that can sort of sometimes detect some of the components used in bombs, lasers to induce Raman scattering in the air above locations of explosives, differential absorption light detection and ranging using backscattering from air, coherent Stokes Raman scattering to find indications of bomb constituents, and so on and so forth. All of them pretty much only work under ideal lab conditions and have awful false positive rates. There's really only one truly effective bomb detector that works in almost all situations, you can get the precursors at places like Shorja Market for a few thousand dinars (it's not worth much), and they have four legs and go "woof".

What's unusual isn't that he got found out, it's that anyone cared enough to take action. As you're pointed out, the Iraq police action has been an absolute goldmine for an army of carpetbaggers who're willing to sell the victims (the Iraqis) anything they want (or at least something claiming to be what they want). The sale of assorted junk that's basically electronic dowsing rods as bomb detectors and similar has been going on for years, and it's reasonably well known to those involved. What's really unusual is that this guy got prosecuted for it. In fact it's quite baffling, I could name (although not from this account) between one and two dozen vendors of similar snake oil who've been doing it for years, companies in the US, the UK, and Europe, for whom the consequences have been nothing (shit, if I wasn't so scrupulously honest (snigger) I'd be selling some souped-up Heathkit in a fancy case as my own $40K bomb detector). What did this guy do to make anyone care enough to prosecute him?

Same in New Zealand. If you want an ISBN you go to the National Library web site, fill in their form, and that's it. No money involved.