This is somehow worse than if someone broke a compact florescent lightbulb and wiped mercury on their pants? We still sell CFLs to anyone that wants one, even if they're going to toss them in trash when they're done. And unlike low-level radiation, your body has no protective mechanism from mercury.

At least radioactive contamination tells you that it's there by helpfully announcing its presence. Good luck trying to find the mercury smears random Joe left behind everywhere.

Losing heat by radiation is only slow when there's lots of stuff around you radiating back. According to this humans lose between 50% and 60% of their heat from radiation. When you are floating exposed in space NONE of that heat comes back. It's not instant freezing, but it's not exactly slow either.

Oh wait, I just learned to read a little better. That point release version requires a full install of Quake3 to be present already. Oops.

I think they mean the usual id procedure of open sourcing old engines. You can find the source, as well as the last supported release version, on id's site.

I noticed the summary mentioned several attempts that have failed, but makes no mention of other ISPs that are still doing it. Time Warner Cable is one that has been doing this for a while now (maybe a year?). Anyone know of others?

You're totally right about reprocessing fuel: if it's still (radioactively) hot then there is useful energy in there. But it's not right to say that we'd have waste with a half-life of decades instead of centuries. Radioactivity and half-life are inversely proportional. Something that is very radioactive has a short half-life (it's so active because it's decaying quickly). The more we reprocess the longer the half-life of the leftovers gets because we are taking out all the short half-life materials to be used as fuel. So after lots of reprocessing we'd more likely end up with waste that has a half-life in the millions of years than decades.

But that's really okay, because long half-life things aren't all that radioactive. Given a long enough half-life, you could carry radioactive waste around in your pocket and never receive any radiation from it in your lifetime, just because it takes so long for it to decay at all.

Amen to this. I was actually a little disappointed to hear that LucasArts would be going with Steam as I only buy DRM-free versions via GOG.

I know, I know. Steam has minimal intrusion and they promise they'll release patches to remove the DRM if they go out of business. I, however, much prefer the no-intrusion system where I don't have take any promises on faith.

Interesting point. To come back to the child porn situation, what if someone had put Miley's face on an image of a nude man? Based on the interpretation of the law that the prosecutor seems to have, this should also count as child porn, but I dare to bet that most people wouldn't put it in the same context as when it's a nude female body. They'd see it as the dumb trick that it is.

Or what if there was a nature photo of two buffalo (or whatever) having sex, and someone put Miley's face on one of them? Is that bestiality? Is that child porn? Or is it just a stupid cut and paste?

What if Miley's face didn't cover the original model's face, but was added on somewhere else? Like a two-headed nude woman or something. Does that count as child porn?

There's all sorts of variations that might run afoul of interpreting the law this way, but pretty clearly are not situations that we should be worried about.

It's not just about throughput, but also latency. As far as gaming goes, the latency is the more important factor. There's no way you can get an internet connection to be comparable to a LAN in latency. It's a question of at least 100ms versus 5ms round-trip time. And when the server on the other end gets busy, it gets even worse.

I'm a big fan of Blizzard titles (but then, who isn't?). My friends and I still get together on at least a monthly basis to play Starcraft or War3 on a LAN. Given that, it should be no surprise that I think this is a very bad move by Blizzard. There's no way my friend's place is going to get an internet connection that is capable of handling all of us simultaneously, with latency comparable to a LAN.

If they keep on this path, Starcraft2 will be largely irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. I doubt it will have the staying power of Starcraft 1 simply because you can't play a pick-up game with friends. Yes, I'll probably still get it eventually for the single-player and occasion B.net game, but you can bet that the pirated version cracked to include a B.net clone for LAN is looking mighty good in comparison.

While we don't yet know what "super" features B.net 2.0 is going to have that are supposed to make up for LAN play, it has been confirmed that B.net play will be free for Starcraft 2 purchasers. However, rumors are starting to fly that B.net will not be free for Diablo3. The statement that SC2 play will be free was carefully worded, and Blizzard responses on D3 have evasive, but with not re-assuring implications.

Given that Diablo3 also has been confirmed to lack LAN play, the only way to play multiplayer is via B.net. If the rumors are true, then the only way to get D3 multiplayer is to pay for it. This is a total reverse from the old days of "spawned" copies of Blizzard games where you could have several players all using the same copy of the game.

I think the removal of LAN play signals the decline of Blizzard as a long-term game maker. Which is too bad as they have wonderful legacy support. SC2 and D3 will still sell like crazy I'm sure, but 10 years from now we'll probably still be playing Starcraft 1 at LAN parties. That or some enterprising pirate will save the day.

Anyway, there's a petition to include LAN play, not that it will do much good. Doesn't hurt to try.

So they spent a lot of effort to "hide" his kidnapping, but a cursory browse through the wikipedia page history shows all these changes. I understand that most people don't ever look at the history, but for anyone that was actually interested in David the information wasn't hidden at all.

Despite the fact that Jobs, rather famously, only makes an annual salary of $1?

Well, if he's got bear hands then I don't see the problem. I think they'd be a lot more useful for killing a buffalo than typing in code.

It's been a while since I've done any physics, but I'm fairly confident that your orbital height is determined by your orbital speed. If we think of an orbit as a circle parameterized by (R*cos t, R*sin t), then the velocity is (-R*sin t, R*cos t) which has length (i.e. speed) sqrt(2)*R. So if the height R gets smaller, then so does the speed; or vice versa.

There's no extra fuel used to change speeds after you've changed orbital heights: you change height by changing your speed. This is why geosychronous orbits are so valuable: not only is there only one plane in which it is possible (above the equator), but only one orbit in that plane actually works (the one that matches the speed of earth's rotation).

I believe someone from Sweden posted in a previous story that their jails were already full up, even without people turning themselves in. Apparently, there's a waiting line for when you do your time, with the exception that violent criminals skip to the front.