"The Inverted World" (1974)

Great plot of a "world" that some of its inhabitants perceive as being of hyperbolical geometry.

Actually, the wheel in circular shape is just the most common type as it is pretty fit for a frequently found - albeit boring - shape of surface to ride on, i.e. a flat surface, in an over-simplified manner called a "road". ;-)

If the surface (the "road", in a more general sense) given had been designed properly (and skilfully), a square wheel might just be the right shape for a smooth ride on it:

http://mathtourist.blogspot.com/2011/05/riding-on-square-wheels.html :-)

I'd suggest Linux Mint, and in particular, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE).

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1818

DVD Audio is still around.

DVD-Audio authoring software is available for various OS platforms:

For Linux (and BSD and Solaris),
http://dvd-audio.sourceforge.net/

For Mac OS
Burn - open source, free
still running on PPC Macs from OS X 10.3.9, also on Intel Macs, a 64bit-version available, too:
http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html

Minnetonka Disc Welder - commercial
http://www.minnetonkaaudio.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70&Itemid=93&lang=en

For Windows
Minnetonka Disc Welder - commercial
http://www.minnetonkaaudio.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70&Itemid=93&lang=en
DVD-Audio Solo - commercial
http://www.cirlinca.com/

You'll also need a DVD recorder capable of DVD-Audio and a respective player.
For PCs, LG Electronics and Pioneer used to have such hardware.

That was only after a couple of years when Apple had been the biggest online seller of DRM-ridden music, worldwide. They sold nearly a billion of DRM'ed music files.

Apple has been the "Sheriff of Nottingham" in terms of DRM for years before they started to be a kind of "Robin Hood" against DRM, so to speak.

Also, as far as I know, this heroic anti-DRM attitude in the iTunes Store still doesn't apply to the movie/video/TV-show content.

Apple lawyers are already trying hard to do so. Very hard.

Worldwide.

"that the company restore its quarterly dividend which Jobs suspended in 1995"

Jobs couldn't suspend anything at Apple in 1995.

Jobs wasn't even at Apple in 1995 to do so.

AFAIK, "dark matter" is supposed to be "exotic matter" so buckyball structures don't belong here.

Also, AFAIRC, it is called "dark" in the sense that it does not interact with light (photons) at all.
It doesn't reflect light, it doesn't absorb certain frequencies of light, either.

So spectrography (or is it spectroscopy?) - which has been used for the detection of the buckies mentioned in the article - wouldn't be of any help to detect dark matter, let alone analyze its internal structure.

"I was uneasy when I first noticed that Apple had taken ownership of CUPS, and in this case my experience is that that disquiet is justified."

  As a Gnu/Linux and Mac OS X user (with an ever growing tendency towards Linux and FOSS) I have been looking forward to this moment as well.

Now that Apple's decided to fork CUPS eventually, we don't have to be too interested in what their fork's fate will be in the future, do we?

Little Red Riding Hood will come to our rescue here
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-January/161306.html

and so will
http://www.openprinting.org/

"What I wonder is how they would get the cable up there."

They'd rather try to get the cable down here, I presume.

That means, they might prefer to manufacture two cables up there in geo-stationary orbit, then lowering one end of cable #1 down to earth's surface (this might still be a challenging task, though), sending one end of cable #2 even farther outwards, for use with the counterweight.

People on submarines are subject to military rule, with perpetrators being shot, their bodies thrown out of the back door immediately.

Oh, wait... ;-)

"2026" and nevertheless "could be"?

So Her Majesty's government is certainly not preparing anything similar to what J.F. Cooper called a "hasty pudding"...

Thus, High Speed Rail may or may not reach the Scottish border before the end of the current century, anybody willing to place a bet against that?

"Airbus' actuaries tell them that the short-run cost of performing immediate repairs is greater than the long-run cost of their insurance rates after a mechanical failure."

Well, that puts things (read: the company`s preferences) into a very interesting perspective, doesn't it?

This might happen rather sooner than later.

My bet's on Mac OS X 10.8 "Common House Cat"
(or whatever the Code Name will be, the "Big Cat" series finally being done...)

There's at least 6 billion of "them" and counting...

On a more speculative side, there might be highly developed life forms elsewhere in the universe that we carbon-based blighters wouldn't even recognize as "life" if we stumbled over one of them (and perhaps vice versa).