So let me get this straight; if GW won't raise your taxes, influence your personal life, or ban your light bulbs, you're fine with it? OK, then! Was wondering what's really at stake here...

Sensation could be what most people mean by magic. For example, the sensation of warmth is different than knowing that the temp is 75degF. Sensation is something we can fall back on when our big brain has nothing else to offer.

Well, the researchers have managed to pass around a box containing a cat which is both dead and alive, if that helps any. This is just a prelude to the next step in their research. The next step will be to "special copy" a box, send one box off, then both parties look inside their boxes. If one box contains a dead cat, the other cat must be alive (copy entanglement rule). The idea is that a "man in the middle" would not be able to peek inside a box, because that ruins the box (another entanglement rule), and the other party would know it. Also, you would think that the live cat would need kitty litter whereas the dead cat doesn't, but apparently both boxes "smell" equally bad this way. Ok so you get the idea now, right? Answer yes if you're a liar.

This is a state law that allows a teacher (or principal, or school board member) to be removed for not being "fair". The actual wording of the violation: "lack of endeavorment".

or Sharia, or anything idealistic. This is just plain old-fashioned brute-force domination; by the few, for the few, of the many. You would think the people of Iran would be sensitive to this kind of thing, but instead it just gets worse for them.

After 13 years it's still the only car with a direct drive transmission; no clutch, nothing but gears between crankshaft and wheels. In fact, that's the main basis for the hybrid design; using two motors is really incidental, they just enable use of the transmission. Everything else in the design (engine stopped when car stopped, Atkinson cycle engine, electric air conditioning, etc) also follows from use of what Toyota calls the "Hybrid Synergy Drive". What's a little strange is that the car was designed by an American team of engineers based in California. Would be interesting to find out the whole story there, it's pretty difficult to get details other than the head design engineer on the project died a few years ago.

Veracode isn't offering to fix "buggy" code, they're selling "cyber terror" fixes.

It seems likely that, within the next few years, Microsoft will have to base their "OS" on something like a Unix fork: http://developer.apple.com/opensource/. Reasons will be the same as Apple's; *nix is now superior to any other OS, and is improving faster than any other, because more talented people have collaborated more effectively on it. Put another way, Microsoft cannot hope to compete against the entire world's academic and open source community, it's just a continuing hopeless waste of their resources, and a violation of basic fiduciary duty to shareholders. Eventually, Microsoft will have to concentrate their efforts the way Apple has, on marketing a "distro" that works the way their target audience wants and is willing to pay for. Could even put a nice bump in their stock price when it happens, I for one will be watching..