Uh, multi-threading wasn't available for the PC until the Pentium 4 was released. Prior to that, x86 processors were incapable of it in anything but multitasking and non-simultaneous multi-threading (same thing, really). If it can't be done simultaneously, there isn't much point to multi-threading.

That was a full year after Windows XP was released, which came with support for simultaneous multi-threading.

So I'm not sure what systems you were running with multi-threading, but they for damn sure weren't x86, so there was absolutely no point for a Windows developer to pay any attention to you. It's like saying "my sailboat does 50 knots" to someone who races motorcycles. That may be extremely impressive to a sailor, but to a biker won't be impressive in the slightest.

Have you read some of the crazy shit some string theorists publish? You only think you're joking (and your "misinterpretation" is only about 50 milli-Tiplers of crazy). 100 years from now the publications in string theory-related journals will be a textbook example of how a scientific community can collapse into uselessness.

Well, theoretically, (unless the theory has changed) during the big bang matter could have been compressed past the Swartzschild radius due to pressure and black-holes formed that mass much less than is required for a black hole to form today from gravity alone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordial_black_hole Most of these will have evaporated by now (or maybe not depending on how you interpret the string theory), but if they can exist there should still be a great many of these in the universe. We know that a black hole can carry a charge, and the surface gravity can be calculated. It is possible that there may be some of these in the solar system, perhaps in many years we will discover a way to detect them, and increase their charge to the point where they could be manipulated electromagnetically.

The motivation to overclassify is not very strong. It's blatantly against the rules to use classification to hide something embarassing to the US government; The classification on almost all classified documents "leaked" recently was decided long before the embarassing event occured. And yes, people do get reprimanded and punished for applying inappropriate classificiation routinely, since the system is way too complex to be done well.

These are old documents. Assuming they are black and white scans or original sources in simple text based formats, you're probably looking at less than 100TB of data. Any medium sized business could build out the infrastructure to search that.

Fixed that for you.

That has potentially far reaching effects assuming they can eventually find a way to install these things throughout the body (or even better just on targeted cells). You could install one of these devices on each cancer cell, for example, and power a pump that forced chemo drugs into the cells. That means that cancer cells would receive a much higher dose than non-cancer cells meaning less side effects and/or more effective treatments. Of course, there's a million problems to be solved before such a treatment could become reality, but the possibilities are endless.

if it needs to be in a vacuum then it would use a vacuum tube

It would have to be in a tube to be a vaccuum tube, but it would still be a transistor. The way a vaccuum tube works is electricity heats a filiment (cathode), analogous to a transistor's emitter, which throws out electrons and photons. There is a mesh, analogous to a transistor's gate, that the current to be amplified is fed to which controls controls how much energy reaches the tube's anode. The anode is analogous to a transistor's collector.

Even if this were inside a vaccume tube, it would still be a transistor, while an old-fashioned amplifier tube is not a transistor.

Careful, that song is probably copyrighted.

"Funny" gains no karma. The way to tell if someone doesn't care about karma? If they joke a lot, they're no karma whore. And some of us are swimming in karma and really don't worry about it.

Funny. When I go on a vacation I look for culture, history, local entertainment, new experiences. 3 hours of nothingness sounds like the exact opposite of what I'd want.

So are you saying it's ok to rob banks, because that's where the money is kept?