If you define an emergency as a peaceful demonstration of public disfavor in their government, then there is no difference at all.

It is very short sighted to think they could "mutually remove each other from human memory" without taking a few of us with them.

At the very least there would be some forensic evidence left over. The watch would have been tracked, the arm found and the hounds unleashed. There would be a blood trail easily tracked by a tracking dog to either the girl or the site in which she was loaded into a vehicle. The condo would have been examined for blood indicative of the act. Their vehicles would have been checked in the same manner. The girl would not have been found alive in the case of her arm being removed, but something would have been found. Dismemberment is just too messy.

Does buying a new netbook with XP installed count as a product?

How well will 7 run on a netbook? Considering the main purpose (in my mind, anyway) of a netbook is as a thin web client, having an un-patched hole in the TCP/IP stack of an OS makes it "not feasible" for installation on a netbook in my mind. I am not certain anyone with a XP netboook can move on to 7.

He did not even come close to saying anything of the like.

On the subject of money, at first blush this appears to be a pretty sweet deal for out-of-print book copyright holders. I linked to wikipedia for the quick-and-dirty version.

So if you are paying attention and actively defending the copyright of your (out-of-print) book, Google will pay you a fee for scanning the book into their database. This will provide your (out-of-print) book with increased visibility, provide a platform for the (out-of-print) book to be sold, create a brand new advertising revenue stream and give the rights holder of the (out-of-print) book a fairly sizable cut.

It is difficult for me to see the drawbacks to someone who's book is now out of print. Not only do they receive financial compensation, but they could reach a new audience and have renewed interest in their book. My concerns are the broad interpretation of fair use Google is using. It is a change from the super narrow view of fair use *AA's have been pushing for years. Of course, there has been no court ruling on Google's interpretation because of the settlement. I think the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers stand to make a great deal of money alongside Google in this venture, which is why they relented and settled.

Is this a robot or a cyborg? Sounds more like cybernetic gray goo to me. Who knew it would literally be gray goo?

I did not catch on until well after being rid of Chem Lab, but reverse engineering results was the expected practice. Physics Lab was about carefully assembling, conducting and measuring experiments, then performing error analysis to explain differences between experimental results and theory. According to my chemistry major friends, working backwards from the answer was accepted because the lab TAs had no expectations of students performing the experiments well. As a Physics major, I spent a great deal of time in the lab trying to perform the experiment correctly, but could never get the exact answer. Others would phone in the experiment and spend 30 minutes reverse engineering the expected numbers. Since my numbers were always a bit off, I generally earned 75-85% on my labs.

I guess I should have caught on earlier.

Have you found it yet?

In short, for a time Einstein was as correct as Newton was for a time.

Document you experience, please. I think that would be a most excellent book to add to my shelf, "Language X Was Never Meant to do Y." If that is not enough material, fill in with what it was supposed to be used for.

Just to tack onto the above point, I agree overtly educational games are a waste of energy. Puzzles and resource management games, like Oregon Trail, have a much better chance at successfully completing your requirements.

I think an intellectual hero as the players avatar would be a nice touch. A Susan Calvin or Hari Seldon character that uses knowledge and wisdom (a Tom Swift without the natural genius) to solve problems. Instead of the absent minded professor and his beautiful-yet-intelligent-and-spunky daughter needing rescuing, have the scientist do the rescuing. Or better yet, have the absent minded professor's hard working apprentice do the rescuing. You know, a young man or woman that your target demographic can relate to.

I am a married geek and my sister was married to a geek. Being a geek or a jock or a car salesman are all orthogonal to a challenging marriage. All marriages are challenging to all types of people. You say "spousal sports neglect" has no bearing on your situation, but sports neglect is no different from "lan party neglect." We all do things that segregate us from our spouses in some way because we are different people. A key (there are many keys to making it work) is finding a way to relate to each other across those differences.

Lan party neglect (along with losing job-itis) were contributors to my sister's marriage dissolving. They could never broach that gap in their personalities as he just came to expect her support and understanding for parties lasting till 4:00 AM and pizza boxes and soda cans everywhere the next day. She felt neglected and taken advantage of.

I am not a crafty person, but my wife likes making soaps, etching glassware and such. We went to AFO this past weekend and I opened her eyes to an entirely new realm of crafting. Can she, as an artisan of a certain fashion, replicate trinkets and props from anime? Suddenly one of our differences became another point of connection.

There is no silver bullet to making a marriage work, but there is something that is close. You must manage your marriage expectations. Marriage is not some magical thing that will transform your relationship. All the good and all the bad that existed in your relationship before are still there after getting married. The mind tarnishes the good by thinking a wedding will make the good into spectacular. The mind burnishes the bad by thinking a wedding will make the bad vanish. The tragedy, only the perception of the good and bad in the relationship has changed and a great relationship suddenly seems lackluster in the face of marriage. (Women who have a fairytale view are more susceptible to this than others.) If your relationship is strong enough to get married (and survive the wedding "festivities") it will be as strong afterward, but not magically stronger. Both of you must realize that a wedding will not change the other person.

My wife and I got married at a courthouse. We did not fly to Vegas, we did not have 500 hundred guests and we did not honeymoon in the Mediterranean. I told my wife we could have a wedding or we could have a housewarming party. $30k will buy you a nice wedding, but it also goes a long way towards a prime mortgage down payment or pays the lease on an apartment for a few months. We both want a house, but we will have our wedding at the house warming party. We both think that is fairytale enough.

Yes, you need to compare energy at the source. What raw material are you using to initially generate the power and what are the losses at the plant, through the lines, at the inverter and in the car system itself. If you want to be really exact, you can factor energy required for mining coal, pumping oil, shipping, refining, etc.

And as for the energy of a gallon of gasoline, there is a simple experiment that involves measuring the raise in temperature of water when heated by burning a material. Since you know the specific heat of the water, you can figure the energy required to raise it X degrees. If the only energy input is the burning material, you have the chemical energy of the material. It may be a little tricky with gasoline. Also, I think 87 octane has a lower energy density.