The hydrogen is a fuel that can be stored (with problems, as mentioned above). There are solar reactors that do what you propose, but this special reactor would be able to generate energy for later usage. Even if our hydrogen storage mechanisms are not perfect yet, this helps to solve one part of the problem.

An 8088 is still a 16 bit machine. It has 16 bit registers and supports arithmetic operations on 16 bit values. Just the data bus is 8 bit and hence pushing those 16 bit values around the system takes more time...

Sounds like a rather good plan. I am currently reading the Heechee trilogy by Frederik Pohl. The spaceships there never enter an atmosphere, except for the landing pods. Those are rather small. This sounds like a good idea for me. Even in Star Trek we have the idea of big space ships and small shuttle crafts -- ok, those are reusable, but I think the idea here could be: Use a small Soyuz type spacecraft and rocket to get into LEO. Then dock to your re-usable non-reentry spaceship that takes you to Mars / asteroids / whatever. With Mars the problem would of course be, to get a small-ish Soyuz-like rocket to the ground. I guess here you would want some Apollo style lander, but with a heat shield.

Democratic does not always equal morally or ethically correct. The society is made up of egoistic individuals. Most of us would buy products from Iran. Heck, I am buying stuff from Apple, produced at "the evil Foxconn". Because it's affordable and cool! But I am glad that there are institutions (many of them democratically elected) that serve as a moral / ethical watchdog. I am glad that they are applying sanctions. Our individual egotism is useful in day to day life, but hinders the greater society's values. So I think the system as we have it is already on a good track. It just needs some tweaking.

The keys of your first and second post were so close together... Could have happened to anyone...

Then just rename it 'The Hobbit (book) - For other uses, see Hobbit (disambiguation)'. :^)

But now I checked streaming. I used to love the cinema. And I still go to our local Arthouse cinema for non-mainstream movies. And also every now and then with my spouse to the mainstream cinema. But the latter ist getting less and less attractive. Prices are insane, especially with 3D, and also for snacks and drinks. An evening there for a single person with soft drink and popcorn can cost as much as 20 to 25 EUR, depending on length of movie and if it's in 3D. I couldn't care less for the 3D, but alas many movies are released 3D-only nowadays.

In contrast, renting a nice movie on the AppleTV / iTunes for between 1 and 4 EUR plus homegrown food and drinks makes for a nice evening and still a good experience.

What I can't stand at all anymore are movies on TV with a ton of commercial breaks and bad editing! E.g. Die Hard was on a couple of weeks ago, and they cut out *every* scene that was deemed too violent. Which in itself is sort of understandable, but it ruined the plot. There was suspense being build up, you knew there would be a brawl or shooting and: BAM! Cut to the next scene, Bruce Willis is somewhere else, bleeding slightly more. What a downer.

"You're holding it wrong!" ;)

The problem with these demos is, they use ray tracing like we did in 1980 (i.e. Whitted style). All computations are highly coherent and efficient. As soon as you want to have more natural rendering, with diffuse illumination etc. Parellization doesn't scale proportionally anymore. Rays become heavily incoherent, memory access scatters and you get cache misses etc. So the real feat would have been if tey show 7.7x speed with diffuse global illumination.

Uh oh, treading on very shallow ground here. We already had this kind of stuff in a slightly different setting, some 70 years back. It was not so much turning people away from fertility treatment, but rather making sure they are infertile. The question always is: where do you draw the line? If there's a risk of injury / disability in your family or with your pregnancy, the doctor should inform the parents, so that they can make a decision, if they want to get pregnant or if they really want to carry out the baby. But simply saying "people with ... defects ... would be turned away" is borderline unethical.

I am not sure, but I guess that costs per launch are a reason. With Soyuz, a bunch of russian companies manufacture the rocket parts and final assembly and erection happen in Kourou. I guess that this frees ESAs resources considerably, compared to having to make an Ariane 4 in Europe. Furthermore, I don't see any Ariane 4 integration buildings anymore on ESAs map of the Centre Spatial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_Centre_Spatial_Guyanais-en.svg
It is likely that the buildings that were used for Ariane 4 have been assimilated by the Ariane 5 pipeline. So either way you would have had to build a new integration and erection facility, so it seems that Soyuz-ST was the most efficient and reliable way to do that.

Well, the N900 was a great platform, but you can't buy it anymore (at least here in Germany), since Nokia stopped producing it, I think. And the whole open Linux-based smartphone idea at Nokia died as well.

I am not quite sure if it would work in all cases. One certain example comes to mind, where it might not have worked. This example I won't mention, for Godwin's sake. But some opponents are just too suicidal to be coerced into non-aggressive behaviour in a MAD setting.

I think half of you points are invalid. The planned failure is a mere rumor, I would think. Is there any proof for that? From my experience, Apple hardware has about the same failure rate as other manufacturers. We have dozens of Apple devices in use, besides dozens of other manufacturer's laptops, workstations, servers and assorted hardware. iMac, MBP, iPod, iPhone, iPad... My work laptop is a MBP from late 2008. It is now 3.5 years old, has traveled with me for thousands of miles, seen every day use (as in 8hrs / day). And apart from the battery being replaced after three years, the thing is happily working and very, very sturdy. The same goes for our other Apple laptops. The iPod Touch (2nd gen) are also now quite old and are still in use for coding and teaching.

And again, Apple should not be singled out when it comes to Carrier IQ and the GPS story. The same problems persist(ed?) on numerous other smartphones as well. The GPS flaw was fixed very quickly and the Carrier IQ version that once came with iOS was not sending keystrokes and similar stuff, as seemed to happen on other platforms. Since iOS 5 this piece of the software has been removed anyway. I think it is a good thing that the community takes a close look at Apple's releases, and that flaws like this get mentioned. The downside is of course that fixes might take some time to get incorporated, if we are unlucky. Compared to pure Open Source systems, I cannot easily patch my iPhone (although I heard some fixes make it into Cydia quite quickly).

The walled garden argument is a weak one. Apple's goal was to make the software platform of iOS a rather secure one, and their solution is the iOS developer program. This system is a system of trust, and it means that software developed for iOS comes from a trusted source (you, the developer). I think this is a good idea. To fund this system, one pays 79 EUR per year, and if you do so, you can use the whole toolchain of Apple's development framework to do whatever you like on your iPhone. If you don't want to do that, it's fine. You can wait for the latest Jailbreak to be released. The frameworks and APIs are well documented and in that sense quite open (yes, many things are not free as in speech, but many other things on iOS are).

I guess the correct reasoning is: Apple should not be singled out. The whole IT hardware industry is producing in low wage countries like China, Thailand, Indonesia for mostly abysmally low wages. As is the clothes industry, which in parts is even worse. And we all are at fault and should be changing our behaviour. This is a fundamental issue that runs deep in our societies. However, I think things will change. Wages in China are continuing to rise, the RMB will get stronger, and workforces will shift to other countries. This will continue as well with other countries. It might take a while. All the while we should ponder where this leaves us, in Europe and the US. Wealth will be redistributed from this part of the world, more to the east, and possibly south. Maybe not at the corporate level, but rather at the level of individual people. Our wages here in Europe are (at least in some parts) not even outgrowing inflation. Anyway: there is definitely need for a more "fair" and equal approach to manufacturing of IT goods.