Same here. I disabled the "dynamic" stuff and set the view to "classic" shortly after it was introduced, and today suddenly I have it in my screen.

Looks like a bug.

More or less: in Spanish, "libertad" means "freedom". The word for the adjective "free" is indeed "libre", like in French. In Italian "freedom" is "libertà", and "free" varies with grammatical gender and number: masculine singular is "libero", while femenine is "libera", and plural is "liberi". (Well, while I'm at it, in Spanish the plural form is "libres", and I guess in French it might be the same)

Your grocery store CCTV analogy to network packet inspection would be more accurate if the store demanded to put cameras in your home, not just in their premises.

The in-store measures you mention are analogous to inspecting the packets my computer interchanges with their servers and limiting the amount of concurrent users, which they can do without bugging my communications with other people.

(I realize that you say that "society in general" might not care about it anyway, not necessarily that you would agree with it.)

Before the Hanzi Chinese CCTLDs were approved by ICANN, when the only way to use them was to install CNNIC's "Official Client-end CDN Software" in your computer, the registration of a .cn domain name with Chinese characters automatically gave you the version with the Hanzi Chinese CCTLD.

You can read it here in English: http://cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2005/10/11/3218.htm
It's in the answer to the third question.

I don't have any confirmation, but I don't see why they would change their policy.

I was curious too, and looked for it. I think it might be this one:
http://theoath.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/inflation-1923.jpg

The blog entry where I found it has more context and a couple of other contemporary photos:
http://theoath.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/lehman-bros-employee-its-over-man/

The first thing I did when reading these news was to visit their website and look for a license, until I found the copyright notice you mention. Epic fail indeed. I wanted to do some processing of this content. As it is, it's no more useful for me than functions.wolfram.com, which might or might not have less content but is nicer looking anyway.

As I saw OpenMath in your post I got curious about you and clicked on your homepage link, but it says "This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.".

I can't speak on this specific case, but in general there are specific areas in china and IP ranges where attacks have come from for a while, many of which have no resale value on the market, or political value only to China.
One incident doesn't tell the story, but combined they do.

See http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2009/10/report-on-chinese-government-sponsored.html for more details.

I found quite precise information by searching for [nasa decompression lungs mouth test]:

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=nasa+decompression+lungs+mouth+test

The first link (geoffreylandis.com) is written by a NASA employee.

While it seems that nobody was actually decompressed on purpose (a couple of accidents are mentioned), a bit down the search results there is a link to a NASA publication called "THE EFFECT ON THE CHIMPANZEE OF RAPID DECOMPRESSION TO A NEAR VACUUM".

You might prefer to use do...while instead, to avoid the chance of unintended looping:

do
{
                if (!start_condition) break;
                action1();
                cleanup1();
                if (!test_condition1) break;
                action2();
                cleanup2();
                if (!test_condition2) break;
} while(0);

You can get a MIPS-based desktop system with 72 processors that consumes 300 Watts, from SyCortex. They call it their Deskside Development System for their bigger parallel computers, and they say it does have a fast backbone bus.

It does run Linux, but at $23,695.00 (48 GB RAM) it's not, I suspect, what you were asking for. I would also like some cheap barebones I could just go on populating with CPUs as I wanted.

The GP might like SGI's Molecule better though, it being Atom-based: 5000 chips, that's 10000 cores, in 3U size. But this one is only a concept computer.

If you mean the experiment at Dan Lathrop's Nonlinear Dynamics Lab, they are doing succesive experiments with bigger and bigger spheres. Last was with a 60cm one, and now they are working on the 3m version which is the one with 13.5 tons of sodium as you mention. According to their webpage:

The three meter experiment now spins under motor control--watch our YouTube movie! We are debugging the system with water as a test fluid, and will soon make Lagrangian flow measurements in collaboration with colleagues from the group of J. F. Pinton. Sodium experiments will follow. More...

There is an article about them from 2008 at Universe Today, and also other people in France were doing spinning sodium experiments in 2007.