The minimum design lifetime isn't the actual lifetime of the mission. I believe there is enough helium for three years, but the multistage cooler is designed to be able to run in the event of coolant loss. ASTRO-H replaces ASTRO-E2 which suffered a catastrophic coolant loss. There are more details here, but it's behind a paywall.

The forthcoming ASTRO-H X-ray observatory mission will have a cooling system that will be able to run without coolent. The X-ray microcalorimeter detectors must be cooled down to 50 mK in temperature. ASTRO-H should be launched in 2014.

Really? Most fundamental medical advances are created in academia, mostly with public money. Many companies just take the relatively small step to a commercial product. William H. Oldendorf would have done his pioneering work on the CAT scan, whether there was a patent system or not. Indeed, looking at his wikipedia biography, he worked in public institutions for most of his life.

It has been one of the wettest ever Junes here in the UK and it is still raining heavily. When it is not raining it's heavy cloud. Although that's stereotypical weather here, it's more like what you'd expect in the winter. I'm feeling like an extra in Waterworld and shall shortly be growing gills... The problems started when drought measures were brought in to combat falling water reserves.

Oh really? I trust that you will now go home and put your head in a microwave oven for a few minutes. Of course some radio waves are harmless and some are harmful, it's just a question of where the boundary lies. Given that you're unlikely to have a smart meter sitting next to you all day, it's pretty unlikely to be harmful.

As mentioned below, it can play 1080P video:
video.

The dark matter in the universe started with a random fluctuation field - see the pictures of the cosmic background radiation. The random distribution gives a tidal torque on matter, giving it angular momentum. As the dark matter collapses into smaller and smaller regions, the angular momentum is conserved. When smaller sub-units of matter collide together the momentum will also build up. See Peebles 1969 for one of the first papers.

Or use Qt with C++, get the high productivity and the ability to run on multiple platforms.

Seems like Opera ignores the anti-aliasing settings. I've switched anti aliasing off in both environments, but opera blurs ahead anyway.

Facebook is guilty as well - I have a choice of 4 questions - name of 1st grade teacher - can't remember - city or town mother was born in - too obvious - last 5 characters of driver's license - okay question probably - street you lived on when you were 8 - not appropriate for me. Why can't I choose something better than this?

Unfortunately you're correct. I tried KOffice as OpenOffice does suck in many ways, but when it couldn't render text properly on paper I had to give up.

If you're going to the trouble of messing with PCI hardware, I'm sure one of these tiny circuits, which can be hidden in a USB socket, could be used to take over a machine remotely much more easily. Adding radio remote access would be pretty easy.

Dear Barack - You're a prick, Yours Tony Blair and David Cameron.

Forge an email and stop someone entering the US for life!

I might doubt the cost too, but 8 bit microcontrollers are very popular now, even with the widespread availability of 32 bit systems. Many consumer devices include Microchip and Atmel chips if they don't need more power. There's also a bit Arduino (Atmel) hobby crowd.

Private Eye, a UK satirical/current affairs magazine comes out twice a month with quite a bit of investigative journalism and lots of things you don't read any where else. They website contains hardly any of their content and they still have quite a few subscribers.