In 1994 a friend and I assembled a .22 from hardware store pipe, a hacksaw, a drill, some nails, and springs. It had a hammer and a trigger. We followed no plans...we just knew you needed a barrel, and something to smack the rim of the bullets we had...and we improvised

Ah, but you forgot something something Libertarian something something Internet something something Freedom!

Leaving it running for at least 2 weeks is not exactly promptly in my book. Even putting it in the release code disabled, without notification, is shady as hell. The forums are apparently riddled with complaints about gpu problems, including dead graphics cards on machines running the bitcoin software. While it's entirely possible it's pure co-incidence, it's also entirely possible they damaged thousands of dollars worth of high end graphics cards - which given they can easily cost $500 a pop, wouldn't take many. Consumer grade GPUs aren't designed to run full throttle for weeks at a time. Especially if, for example, a gamer has a manual fan control so they can shut up the half dozen case fans when idling, and ramp them up when they start a gaming session (I use this exact setup). A couple of generations back, I fitted after market copper heatsinks and fans to my GPUs to improve cooling at lower fan speeds, but the downside was they had to be manually controlled via a rheostat, so if something like this had been running without my knowledge it could easily have literally cooked my gpus without me being any the wiser as I ramped them down when to cut noise I was just browsing slashdot et al. Those cards are still trucking in a friend's machine several years later, incidentially.

Criminal damage in the course of trespass for profit? Seriously bad judgement, and really not funny. Worth jail time? No. Worth some real consequences? Yes.

The problem is also the heat sink. Without convection and conduction, you're left with heat radiation, which is pretty damn slow. Worse, any such heat sink would actually pick up more heat due to being in direct sunlight - the existing solar shield on it to protect the instruments was at 400k! Would depend on the design, but I imagine it would be tricky to even break even against solar heating - that's a lot of energy headed your way all the time (and solar panels only convert a small part of it). So if you packed some kind of big folding heatsink to get it in the launch vehicle, you'd also need a folding shield to protect that too. Complex and heavy, and that's before you even start on the active heat pump system, which is a nightmare engineering job in space in and of itself - you really can't afford it to fail.

Frankly carrying your own dump tank of coolant (which eventually gets effectively depleted) seems like it probably was the sensible option. We got 4 years of unique data gathering, and it will take a lot longer before we finish processing it. Space is a really harsh environment, even for machines.

Christians don't believe in many Gods - Odin, Zeus, Mars, Allah, His Noodliness, Cthulu, to name a few. I just believe in one less. By the way, the clue is in the name - atheist. As in not a theist, i.e. not a believer. I don't think about, or worry about, Gods or their absence, except when theists turn up, usually to tell them politely I'm an atheist, so thank you, but not interested, and now would you kindly stop ringing my doorbell every weekend and posting wasted flyers through my door.

To borrow phrasing from a subsequent reply - "atheists are also making a decision based on a belief of their own: that there is not a God."

This is not correct. I simply don't factor belief in Gods into my decisions at all. As a Christian, do you classify yourself as a non-Odinist? Do you factor your non belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster into your every day life and decisions? Are you an active, dues paid member of the 'Thor is not a real God' club, meetings on Thor'sday, except every second week, on Woden'sday? (Seriously, look up how many old Gods have days of the week named after them - romance languages like French use the Roman gods instead)

So unless you can tell me with a straight face that on Saturdays you actively excercise your non-belief in Saturn, aka Chronos, father of Zeus, and use it affect your decisions and thought process, then please give atheists the same courtesy and accept that we simply don't believe the same things as you, and that does make our non belief in Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, or Mary Mother Of God (forgive me, not sure which sect you are) any more a religous belief than your non belief in Saturn, Woden etc makes you an active non Wodenist or non Saturnist.

The whole thing about proof is our response to getting bugged by evangelical theists of all stripes. 'MY God is the one true God, and my faith is the one true faith, and you should believe it too!' - to which we say, 'Fine. Prove it.'. We certainly don't spend our days thinking about it, or incorporating it in our decisions. Well, maybe Dawkins does. But he's a sexist blowhard, and is not a representative of all atheists, any more than Abu Hamza represents all Muslims, or Koran burning Terry Jones represents all Christians. Most of us are normal, quiet people who simply don't have a particular belief that some others do, and there's plenty to go around. Not being religious does not make us weird, strange, scary or sinful. We just don't want the State to dictate what beliefs we should be forced to live by.

TLDR; if atheism is a religion, then NOT collecting stamps is the most popular hobby in the world. I have some 'What Would Cthulu do? Devour all!' bumper stickers so you can factor your not-Cthuluist religion into your daily life.

Once you've got the ADE version epub, you can easily strip off the DRM using a calibre plugin, so you don't have to faff about with authorising devices in future when you change reader/app.

I did that with the books I bought for my kobo; I've since upgraded to a kindle paperwhite, and used calibre to convert the drm-removed files to mobi, and can read them on that now. If a higher-res kobo with built in light had been available at the time, I probably would have stuck with that...

Well it's certainly pretty straightfoward to remove the adobe digital editions drm from the epub and get a vanilla, unrestricted epub at the end of it - as long as you have the key to download and open it in the first place, anyway. As I understand it, epub DRM is done as an additional layer, separate from the XML/CSS that makes up the document itself, and no particular scheme is part of the spec - once the drm layer is removed from the content, it's no different to an unrestricted epub. But the file itself is an epub extension, so the ADEPT DRM is admittedly inside the zip file, and you need something capable of reading adobe digital editions restricted epubs to read it, i.e. pretty much any e-reader except the kindle. For me, the drm layer is a wrapper round the content that once removed gives a vanilla epub, but as you define it, no, it's not a separate wrapper with a custom extension.

And what are IT supposed to do? Leave a known vulnerable version with dozens of critical flaws - including the HIGHLY exploitable browser plugin - on business critical PCs across the org, including the business critical ones of that small group?

Who's neck would it be if those machines got remote rooted by some chinese hacker driveby? I'm betting not yours.

Perhaps a dialog with IT where you don't install the browser plugin at least, and firewall the group off from the rest of the network in exchange for a tested, custom (i.e. slower) rollout for your setup. It wouldn't hurt if your department volunteered to cough up the cash to pay for the extra engineer time required...

Or you could start evaluating alternative platforms for your business critical software that don't have more holes than my colander?

For future reference, the adobe digital edition version is the drm-wrapped epub for transferring to any compatible app/reader. For kobo store to kobo reader, they use their own format (though it's still epub inside I think) - the formatting is a little better sometimes than the epub version. So you can buy in the kobo store, on pc or reader, and then sync directly over wifi into the kobo without needing to run it through calibre or any pc first - once it's in your kobo store library, you can delete and download direct as many times as you like. If you don't have wifi, you can download it in the kobo desktop app (again in kobo's own library format) and sync to the kobo over usb. I haven't tried it in wine (the desktop app is windows or osx only), but that may work better for getting it onto the reader than going via adobe crapware.

Of course, that still leaves you with getting a permanent copy to put in calibre via adobe digital editions, left as an exercise for the reader. Given you'd already paid for it, I'd probably have just pirated the drm free version...

The funkiest part for me is that you can have a more or less effective placebo. A sugar pill painkiller in a 'name brand' box is a more effective placebo than one in plain packaging, and both are more effective at the apparent relief of mild pain than doing nothing. Also, having a sit down consult with a doctor followed by placebo is more effective than a placebo just given by a pharmacist. When it comes to mild depression, most anti-depressants are barely more effective than placebo (though severe depression responds significantly better to meds). Of course, talk therapy is also effective in many cases, and you could argue that itself is a form of placebo.

Obviously there are many illnesses, diseases and damage where placebos are ineffective, and using them instead of actual treatment is downright dangerous - Steve Jobs being a recent example - but the effect of placebo making you feel better where feeling better with no serious physical underlying cause is the goal, should definitely not be dismissed.

Of course, knowing that what you're getting is a placebo destroys the effect, which makes it hard to study with informed patient consent...

Even when you're not concentrating (and nobody concentrates 100% on driving all the time, it's near impossible for normal people, i.e. non F1 drivers) - your eyes are still pointed at the road, hands are on the wheel, and your ears are free. While we might not be giving driving our full attention, if something DOES trip our 'oh shiit!' reaction - and we're pretty good at that - we can rapidly spin back up to full alert, including a healthy dose of adrenaline; not always fast enough, especially if we're speeding (because speed limits are based in part upon human reaction times) but it gives us a reasonable chance of reacting to events.

If your eyes aren't on the road for several seconds at a time or even longer, you may well miss one of those cues until well, it's too late to react in time. If your eyes are spending more time than a quick flick - aka the mirror-scan timescale - not looking where you're going, then you're going to be much more likely to have a crash. Whether you're texting, screwing with changing the MP3 player with your eyes off the road, poking at the GPS, yelling over your shoulder at the kids in the back, it's distracted driving and you're more dangerous to yourself and everyone else around you.

Much as I like the idea of the extra large pixels in the CCD in the One - and the hugely visible improvement with low-light snaps that comes with that - I'm a bit concerned about the amount of post processing it seems to do on normal light photos, making them rather smoothed and blurred out in reviews. Waiting to see if a 3rd party camera app avoids that, or it's done at a lower level. Other than that (and the non-removable battery, sigh) the One is definitely on the top of my list for next upgrade. The only one that might displace it now I think is a nexus 5 - if they can make the specs good, a decent body, and keep it half the price of the competition off-contract, I'll definitely be tempted.

Bear in mind, a big part of the screen increases is due to
a) much thinner bezels, and occupying that real estate with screen
b) (mostly) getting rid of the big row of physical buttons at the bottom, and going to soft buttons as part of the main screen that can be minimised away.

The rest is mostly making it longer.

Take the original galaxy S - 122.4 x 64.2 x 9.9 mm (often used as a benchmark for a 'real' sized 4" android phone)
The new htc one is 137.4 x 68.2 x 9.3mm (and a beauty to hold, supposedly)

So that's a 4" screen going to a 4.7", for an extra 12% in length (15mm) and extra 6% width (a mere 4mm). The rest of the front is mainly speakers.

Or the galaxy S4 - 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.6mm - 11% longer, 8% wider, 30% thinner for going from 4" to 5".

For a 25% increase in diagonal screen size, I don't think a half a cm extra width is making it really that much bigger.