Slight correction:

Trades were executed in Chicago at the same time as the change was announced in Washington D.C. in a classical physics sense.

The trades were made at 2:00pm on the dot in Chicago. Which implies that the trades were made with a 0s thinking/processing time. The graphs I saw were timed down to the millisecond, so assuming they got the information at 2:00.000 (which wasn't possible) they decided to execute the trade in less than 1 millisecond. It's probably theoretically possible, I assume that the information was at least guessable and I'm sure many traders were prepared for this eventuality.

Of course, it's possible someone anticipated the outcome of the decision, and scheduled the trades for 2:00, and was planning to reverse them in some way later if the information tuned out to not be what they had expected.

"What evidence do we have that the Roman Empire existed?"

Well, there's all the ruins stretching from Italy to England. And tons of written material left behind.

Try something harder next time.

No, all you have to do is work out how to get the spiders to file reports!

Well, reading around, it seems that spiders of up to 100mg can be lifted by a mass of threads forming a fan about 1m long.

Assuming Spiderman is a skinny kid, he might weigh as little as 50kg, so he should be easily able to lift himself by producing a fan shaped mass of silk with a length of as little as 500km.

I'm pretty sure that isn't profitability that is stopping us from getting FTL drive.

Maybe it's xenophobia. Last time we did that in the movies, a bunch of pointy eared illegal aliens dropped by.

Pretty much every space launch company in the US does work for the DoD/NRO if they can. Military contracts are where the big money is.

They killed the goose that layed the golden eggs.

The uber-green and anti-nuke activists likely don't live there, and probably consider these folks collateral damage in their larger fight. Ideally, such activists would be up-front about the economic costs of some of their stands. Even beyond this now-impoverished small town, growing economies need affordable energy; that's just an economic fact. High energy costs reverberate through the entire supply chain, and raise the costs of virtually every good-and-service that normal people use.

Everybody wants clean air and water, but some green initiatives come with a serious price-tag.

You can try voting for a third party, but we tried that last election in the UK and look where that got us. (basically a worst-of-both worlds coalition). Mind you, we actually had a credible third party to vote for.

I'll admit, Christian Rock isn't a genre I know anything about*, but music often goes in cycles. Some new sound will get invented an picked up by a bunch of people, gradually get more popular until large companies start trying to jump on the band wagon, at which point it all starts to get a bit crap and commercial and kids start saying to each other, "$GENRE is crap, lets make something new" and the whole cycle begins again.

*I'm going to stick behind the saying, 'The devil has all the best tunes'.

My office is slowly migrating to 7. We have no plans to go with Windows 8 on the desktop.

And I'm sure all of the materials, and power are provided for free, too. And the design work. Not to mention the shipping costs.

It's more that in the UK we've just assumed that the government has the capability to intercept all of our communications for years, but we rely on their incompetence to keep us safe.

It works out ok generally.

If a major bank is caught laundering drug money they get a slap on the wrist and nobody involved even gets charged, much less prosecuted.

What were you expecting?

Generally, if the U.S. government is committed to an idea, that's my first tip-off that it is a bad one. At least, anytime since about 1913 when the statists and authoritarians took over.

Notice I didn't issue a blanket "grains are harmful". I stick to the blindingly obvious: processed sugars and highly-processed grains (and the foods they tend to be packaged in) are harmful. Even the government scientists will tell you that whole-grain bread made from freshly-milled wheat is better for you than Twinkies or that Wonderbread with a 2-month shelf life. Problem is, they still subsidize the hell out of the raw materials for Twinkies and Wonderbread. They would also (grudginly) agree that fresh vegetables picked that day from your garden are probably more nutritious than something harvested halfway across the country and shipped through three major distribution hubs before arriving at your local supermarket.

If you just look at things simply and empirically, it is very easy to test these questions. Problem is Americans are in love with "Science" as an overarching authority, and industry as a supplier of all needs, and would rather see huge edifices of logical supposition built upon studies done decades ago (of often questionable financial sources) rather than look at the evidence right before their eyes. Vary your diet for a month, and see if there's a difference in your health. Ain't that hard to do...

If you're a business, you can get ADSL from BT Enterprise, who, it turns out, are just re-selling Plusnet services.

Oh, and if you think that being called 'BT' means that they might have some extra pull when you have a problem with your line then you must be smoking something.

The privatization of BT/GPO has lead to a situation so tangled and messed up you couldn't really make it up.

Oh, and it also made a small number of people very rich, so mission accomplished there then.