Okay, I admit I don't know if the Finnish state church service is called a mass, but the term was irresistable.

Is this the same bug reported days ago and patched before it went public? And which requires being able to execute code on the machine in the first place? This one? Kind of old news if so.

I am not a lawyer, but just because there is no precedent in law, doesn't mean a new law can't be binding, does it? If there was precedent that it was not allowed, that would be a strong argument, but a law requiring a remedy for a crime which didn't exist until recently is bound to have no precedent.

Perhaps some lawyer could explain this leap of logic. There's no precedent for fining or jailing people for sending spam, posting kiddie porn, or cyberbullying, either. Does that mean there can't be? Is this a quirk of Irish law or just a poorly written story?

There are very few opaque objects, people are translucent. A small percentage of photons manages to pass through without hitting anything which will stop them. Both intensity and frequency (color) deliver information.

BTW: there's some prior art on this, Dr Jerry Tiemann had proof of concept going prior to 1993, at GE's Corporate Research Center. GE Medical Systems declined to fund development. I believe he was using an algorithm developed by Dr Glen Row for transforming fan beam data to parallel beam, to produce more resolution with less computation. Jerry was disappointed that GE was putting resources into cold fusion at the time, instead of photon imaging. Yes, that's the father of Michael Tiemann, the Redhat CTO.

"One scientist puts the travel time at 180,000 years based on current space flight technology, while another explains that it could be quite quick if we build a matter-antimatter drive, and can figure out how to bring along 530 times as much mass in fuel as is contained in the ship and cargo itself."

As this article explains, there's new science afoot, and propulsion need not require expulsion of mass any more. Note that energy would still be needed, and the technique needs to be engineered up from the current proof of concept stage to an actual ship, but the need for big mass may be gone.

Since the acceleration is based on mv=mv, accelerating low mass particles to very high velocity might offer a very high thrust to mass ratio. In other words that "530 times" is open to improvement if higher exhaust velocities are used.

The real limiting factor is how much acceleration the payload can take, and what your target top velocity (cruising speed) will be before braking starts, and of course available energy regardless of mass requirements. Assuming Vmax of .5c gets to the destination in a lifetime, but doesn't get data back. If entangled particles could be used to pass data, the requirements would no longer include return hardware, and results would be in quickly. Interesting speculation. Of course there are nearer systems, and while ideal planets haven't been seen, they could exist and would be currently undetectable.

This will make commercials harder to identify automatically, not that anyone would use that to drop commercials, of course.

However, not to worry. Note that the House and Senate passed different bills, allowing them to say "we are protecting you" at election time. If you think they will resolve the differences between the versions and actually pass any law, then you are pretty gullible. And if such a bill were passed and signed into law, the Supreme Court would probably rule that volume is part of Freedom of Speech, just like money, even though my version of the amendment doesn't include any right to make me listen.

On a related note, I see that politicians can bypass "do not call" if you ever voted, since that now counts as a "prior business relationship." I get calls from parties I never joined, and they assure me they have the right. My right to blow a whistle in their ear is protected, too.

Don't confuse "jet engines" (thrust) with gas turbines (rotary power). It certainly sounds as if the turbines deliver power to the generator(s?) and possibly the wheels. As far as I can tell this is not "jet" tech, but "turbo-prop" engineering, using the spinning turbine to drive something via gears.

Note that Chrysler built about 50 turbine cars in the 60's but buyers didn't like the engine noise.

I got started doing CLI image processing with netpbm decades ago, and the approach is still valid. It was designed to work as a CLI program, and is a great solution for batch processing. In addition, you have libraries to manipulate data in the native format, so it's possible to add some functionality which you need by just a small program doing the operation, with all the i/o and many of the transforms done for you.

If that's the secret of a stable society, it explains why we have so much trouble. The perfect stable society would be a group of atheists who practice free love. Only... what would they do about hormonal teen aged children?

To see why SSD won't make disk obsolete, look at the history of bubble memory. It was (is) fast, and highly resistant to vibration, and doesn't have the limited lifetime of flash memory. The killer problem seems to have been lack of need for the greater reliability or disk and flash, which would justify the cost and size. I hear rumors that a small quantity is still made and used for space environments, because of radiation resistance, but unless wikileaks documents this it's just rumor. In any case, disk kept getting bigger and faster, flash ate the rest of the market, and bubble... well, burst.

My thought is that before SSD becomes a real competitor with disk that one of the emerging technologies will overtake it, providing better lifetime, faster write (ie. rewrite without an erase operation), and all flash will either vanish, or remain in the 4-32GB thumb drive niche, where it now rules.

Once these are bred in large numbers they can be released and will push the normal mosquitoes out by sheer numbers. If we are really lucky and this is a dominant gene, we can release them and they will gradually spread the trait through the wild population.

The limiting characteristic is dominance of the gene, without it the malaria strain can be reduced but not eliminated in the wild. The intent to place the gene in the wild is mentioned in the Arizona Republic article, and by the BBC.