No, I understand that this particular story was about the reverse effects of antimatter.
I was taking the excuse of this news to point out the idea of negative mass being the ideal way to circumvent E=MC2. If your net mass is zero, then the massive energy that would be converted into mass does not need to happen. I agree with your assessment of what kind of mass antimatter has--positive mass--but if there were negative mass, that's the way to Warp 5.

I have been thinking this for twenty years.

Think of E=MC2.

Faster than light travel is only impossible when you have a net positive mass. If your mass is net zero, (meaning in your magnetic grip you hold matter and antimatter in the same functional unit but not touching each other (two magnetic bottles), then you could travel faster than the speed of light.

For all of the morons out there who are so uncreative as to still be using a damned Windows OS, I pity you and wish that you could set up a curtain so the rest of us don't have to see the ugly machinations going on in your Windows ecosystem.
As I write this from my 27-inch iMac, I know that nobody's perfect. Macs are 99% awesome but even they have a tiny blemish or two.
But that's nothing like the ongoing decade-long bloodbath going on in the Microsoft camp. So, Microsoft itself cannot get it right? Them asking you to clean up a mess they pushed on you? Are you freaking kidding?

In the Apple world, we have had the occasional inconvenience as Apple reacted, proactively, to protect from some zero-day Java exploits. (Thank you, you Apple bastards.)
But that is NOTHING like living in Microsoft's jungle with all those rabid wild animals sniffing around, looking for fresh meat.

Please, God, cannot somebody please take that stupid abomination of a language Python out in back and shoot it in the head until dead. I have never used a less friendly piece of Monkey Pus than the "language" Python.

This was my first computer! I spent $1,000 on it. It was awesome and I still have it. I'm sure if I popped some fresh batteries in it it would still work. The funny thing is I'm betting Bill Gates also wrote the manual which was famously a mess with references to non-existent sections. Still, this got me into software development. I remember I had a tape-backup drive that I used to store off programs and after I had been storing them on tape for a long while I noticed that I had a variable-speed tape player and I was never able to recover a dang thing from tape. Still, I loved this and eventually got a floppy disk drive for it that would store 250K. Still have all that in a bin.

So, they're going to do this for all six pay phones in New York City? I should clarify to mean working pay phones. The subways are full of the derelict hulks of formerly working pay phones. Across the five boroughs, pay phones--especially working ones--are as scarce as hen's teeth. Actual step-inside phone booths are even less abundant.

Yahoo, this is all fine but I think the rest of the world would be happier if you would first stop the tsunami of spam email that comes from @yahoo.com servers. It's ridiculous. Unless you want to block every moron who still uses an @yahoo.com email address, you are stuck putting up with a tidal wave of spam.

This is rich. They're going to tax Indian entrepreneurs. So, who? What has India invented? The last thing they invented was Sanscrit. The rest has been derivative.
But I will say the only impact this law will have is making sure it stays that way. To a person who lives in the United States, this is comical. "Don't interfere with your enemy when he's committing suicide."

I have firebug on my mac no problem. But for my windows 7 pc, FF8 does not support firebug.

As I said, XPather remains the reason I keep FF3.6.

There's a good reason. Firefox 3.6 is the last version that supports those nice-to-have goodies such as Firebug and, in my case, XPather. After 3.6 Firefox started to progress so quickly through the versions no plugin maker could keep up.

I cannot understand why MapReduce has been turned into such a holy creation. The idea could not be simpler: you have a big dataset? Break it apart into pieces that are free of external dependencies, process the pieces in parallel and then aggregate the matches from the processed pieces.
This is not Hadoop, with its elaborate application plumbing or CouchDB with its curious use of MapReduce as part of its querying system.
MapReduce is too simple for all acclaim. It's too obvious.

The person who wrote this article was an idiot. First of all, it describes several brilliant innovations Oracle brought to the table:

It's a key-value store I guess they have to steal that idea to join the category.
Consistency can be throttled so that a write does not complete until it has gone to one, a quorum or all replication nodes. Duh! For years that has been a feature on nearly every incumbent NoSQL DB such as CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and others.
It allows you to attach a version number to an object. Duh! again. Another common and central features in CouchDB.

This should be a no brainer. Hadoop is merely MapReduce plus the plumbing to care and feed for it. All the various nodes and TaskTrackers, it's not that complicated at all. You can learn the basics in a night and master it in a month.

Why are you spending your money like that? Sneaker-net your drives to AWS EBS. It's a no-brainer.