Of course, the crazy colour will also affect resale value, so the money you save in insurance you lose in depreciation.

Hehe, yeah, actually, come to think if it, by those criteria, the asteroid belt is full of earth sized planets. Yikes.

The graph in the TED talk says " 2 Re" - so, under twice the radius of Earth?

Preserving the software is one thing, but the experience of running one of these programs on the original hardware is considerably different.

With Star Raiders, for instance, the joystick is necessary to enjoy the same experience as an original user. Arguably the boot up sequence too and the CRT monitor.

Another example: "Daredevil Dennis" on the BBC Micro. The internal speaker on the system produces the sounds. Good luck reproducing that efficiently. And just the reality of sitting in front of the machine itself, loading the program from 5.25" disk and using the original keyboard to play the game completely alters the whole thing.

- not to mention the fact that an emulation of the hardware is going to be imperfect.

I'm not aware of any, although there are judicial rulings in various countries that have taken a similar view, for example this. See also the UK Competition Act, specifically disallowing certain vertical restraints.

For the same reason that the person who manufactured your TV shouldn't be allowed to dictate which channels you're able to watch. This sort of behaviour creates vast monopolies and stifles competition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSP_Go ?

Pretty much all future consoles will only be able to download content from the hardware manufacturer's website, making this a moot point. We ought to be asking the EU to force Apple, Nintendo and MS to open up the market for downloadable apps. I guess someone is doing this at the mo?

G.O. is really stunning and worth visiting. Go in the afternoon, then take one of the fast boats up the Thames from there to Central London as the sun is setting. Really very excellent, but make sure you know the boat times in advance. Visit LMNT in Hackney (http://www.lmnt.co.uk/) - It's a crazy restaurant and you'll see a different part of London. You could have gone to White Mischief (http://www.whitemischief.info/) for some Steampunk goodness, but it looks like it's not on while you're there so how about The Horse Hospital (http://www.thehorsehospital.com/). Plenty of interest to see there. Don't bother with a laptop, there's too much else to be spending your time on.

Also, did you realise that TIME is CUBIC in NATURE?

Of course, the bit that seems to have been disproved here is the "Cosmic String", which Wikipedia tells me is unrelated to String Theory in any large way.

Along similar lines, from Richard Feynman: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything. I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with a n experiment, they cook up an explanation - a fix-up to say, "Well, it might be true." For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there's a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that's all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there's no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn't eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn't produce anything; it has to be excused most of the time. It doesn't look right."