I wear this watch from Think Geek, because you always seem to forget your flash drive just when you need it most. It also means that I don't have to wear a "geek badge" flash drive lanyard while I'm at work.

Also, it's a great conversation-starter. No, I don't mean that I go around showing off my nerdy flash drive watch. If you are wearing a watch, inevitably you will be approached by people who have forgotten their time-telling device of choice. I've made a few good friends that way.

Let me rephrase it slightly: The black hole produced by colliding two photons would exert less attractive force than a Helium atom moving at the same speed. The black hole might have as much mass as 20002 protons at rest, but it still has half the mass of a Helium atom moving at the same speed. Since atoms of that size moving at such speeds are an incredibly commonplace occurrence, the point still stands.

The Luddites that believe the LHC is going to destroy the Earth are really starting to get on my nerves. It is obvious even with a simplistic high-school level of understanding that any black holes formed by the LHC (if such a thing is even possible) are completely harmless. If we were to collide two protons with enough energy to produce a black hole, you would end up with (very temporarily) a black hole that has the mass (and thus gravitational pull) of two protons, with an electric charge of +2.

Let's take a look at a Helium atom. Helium nuclei are (usually) composed of two protons and two neutrons, thus they have roughly twice as much mass (and gravitational pull) as our aforementioned black hole. This nucleus also carries an electric charge of +2. That means that Helium nuclei exert more attractive force on their surroundings than the worst-case scenario black hole that can be produced by the LHC.

In the most extreme case, the closest that one of these miniature black holes would get to sucking in the matter around them would be to capture an electron or two into orbit around them in the same way as a Helium nuclei would, before the black hole evaporates. That would be quite an exciting, interesting, and completely harmless development.

Why would it not be legal? The law, by default, allows for anything to be contained in contracts except for specific exceptions that are deemed generally unconscionable. It makes perfect sense to include a clause like the one the OP is talking about when buying the source to a program for incorporation in a larger closed-source ecosystem. If you end up being given something with a GPL-esque license and forced to open-source some or all of your code, at least you have someone to sue for damages.

One word: echolocation.

It will be a long time until any of the science from the target planet comes home. It will almost immediately begin delivering useful data in the meantime, however. There are a lot of things to see on the way out of the solar system, and a lot of interesting data to be gathered during the journey.

That's true, but it could easily collect other data along the way. We could get some more interesting details about the outer reaches of our solar system than Voyager has provided, take pictures of parts of the sky that are obscured by other objects from our perspective, observe the CMB, etc. I'm sure that there's plenty of interesting things that we could come up with to have it do during the journey.

We aren't as far off as you think. What's important is being able to constantly accelerate during the journey. Slow and steady acceleration wins the race. You're not going to do that with a chemical rocket, but with an on-board nuclear reactor and a few advancements in ion propulsion or vacuum propellers, we could make the trip. We could easily launch a probe to start making the journey in the next five years, if we allocated the budget to do so. Humans could make the trip as well, given the right accommodations--only a few years would be passing on-board. None of the technology to do this is very far-fetched at all, but we just aren't willing to spend the money.

That's exactly the problem. I don't care how a game looks, but their camera angle ruined the gameplay itself.

It may have been a great game, but they absolutely ruined it with the camera. The fact that the center of rotation was still on your character, which was permanently stuck covering up one side of your screen, meant that the camera, and thus your weapon, rotated faster in one direction than the other. This only compounded the problems that arose from the fact that you couldn't see what was coming from the "slow" direction.

I understand that they were going for some kind of "cinematic view" or something, but it completely got in the way of the gameplay.

I wonder if we will actually be able to see more than 60% of the screen, this time? From the screen shots in TFA, it doesn't look like it. Within 5 seconds of gaining control in the first game, I opened up the menu to look for a way to change the perspective. When I realized that you couldn't, I gave it about 15 (incredibly frustrating) minutes before I simply shut it off, never to be played again. That was a UI decision right on par with Microsoft's ribbon, if you ask me.

"Difficult to label and identify in a way that people could trust"? Simply putting a term like "made from artificially-grown flesh", or whatever they decide to call it, on the label would constitute an express warranty. If that warranty is breached (by including regular meat), the customers can sue (and win). What's their complaint, here? Do they just have a total ignorance of basic business law?

In my opinion, programmers are born, not taught. People who naturally break their decisions down into logic structures will immediately see the usefulness in programming and find it interesting from the start. People who don't think this way will never enjoy or become proficient at programming. Changing the way that you present the introductory material isn't likely to change this. Advertising an intro class on "video game programming" might cause your enrollment to swell, but I doubt it will noticeably affect the number of people who make it through the program. If a student doesn't already intuitively understand basic constructs such as if-else chains, loops, variables, etc. in their own decision-making process before they take the class, they aren't going to be able to suddenly start thinking that way once you give them a lecture on the subject.

Although this is most likely a joke product, I would definitely go for something like this for gaming. MMOs in particular require an absolutely insane number of buttons to control your character proficiently. Changing the movement keys to TFGH, binding every other key within reach, and using an 8-button mouse still falls short most of the time.

No matter how good Chrome's JavaScript performance gets, it will never be faster, more reliable, or safer than simply not running any JavaScript at all. Blocking all JavaScript by default, with the ability to individually white-list individual items (close, but not quite, Opera), is a bare minimum requirement for safe web surfing. Blocking advertisements does more to speed up real-world browsing speed (not just benchmarks) than any other single change. Until another browser implements these two features, Firefox is the only rational option for home browsing.

I'm not a Firefox fanboy, I'm just aware of my needs. In the business arena, I wouldn't recommend anything but Internet Explorer (behind a proxy, of course), because no other browser comes with the enterprise management tools necessary for large deployments. That's another area that I wish more browsers would improve upon.

If either Opera or Chrome would implement those two feature sets along with their superior rendering performance, they would blow the web browser market wide open. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet, since most technical people are well aware of these issues.