A) no, mobile phone penetration is not that great - I don't think it's 50% of mobile phones yet, it's certainly less than 50% of the population.

B) If trees take out the power lines, you'd be stupid to waste your limited battery power just wasting time on the internet, you might need it for an emergency.

C) What makes you think cell phone towers are immune to power and connectivity losses?

I was on a long drive south yesterday (out of Sandy's path, but not as an evacuation - just returning to where I live) and saw a lot of cherrypicker utility trucks convoying north. I saw maybe 50 trucks in the space of 20 minutes in groups of 6-10. Hopefully the long warning time for this storm will let the utilities prepare sufficiently...

Oh, I was definitely being snarky (perpetual motion? infinite mass?). I understand the aerial refueling idea - a certain Mr. Clancy always wrote lovingly of the KC-135. Sometimes figuratively, and once more literally when he called it something like "airplanes having sex". In general I'm in favor of any idea that will reduce the orbital debris problem.

What will refuel the refueling robots? Refueling-robot-refueling robots? Hopefully they're universal and can refuel each other, at which point we have a perpetual motion machine (as opposed to an infinite mass of fuel-hungry robots in geostationary orbit).

That's pretty much correct...good thing I'm not an IT admin. I mean administrate as in they're in my house, similar to the submitter's situation.

Yeah, that's what I meant - since point 1 was that he needed to be able to do the installs himself.

Microsoft Security Essentials is the only thing I have running on most of the Windows computers I administer (note: they're XP, not 7). I've never had any problems. Install that and don't worry too much about it. Install noscript on Firefox and tell him not to use IE; that will avoid most of the remaining problems. Let all software autoupdate as much as it wants.

You do want to do two other things. 1) Keep that install disc, and make sure the kid knows how to install Windows himself, plus install his games himself. I think WOW and probably LOL are both cloud-based saves so wiping the HDD is no issue. Reinstalling Windows is generally 1/4 the time and hassle of actually fixing a malware problem.

2) Let him know that he is only likely to get viruses doing things he shouldn't. Drive-by downloads on legit sites are rare. Drive-by-downloads on warez, gold sellers (for WOW), and porn are a lot more common. If he is going to do that stuff (you can't stop him) at least make sure he knows that those are dangerous sites. If his computer is acting funny after visiting one, and a reboot doesn't fix it, then wipe the install.

I like how the editor got one typo out of the title from the submission (quite->quiet) but not "survellance" for surveillance.

Surely they wouldn't follow him into space, and it's kind of a supervillian thing to do!

That is a semantic argument, and totally correct.

He said it's a heat pump operating in heating mode. It is quite literally importing heat from someplace else - usually the outside of the house where the external unit on the A/C is. He is using one unit of energy to run the pump to import another 4 units of energy from outside the house - thus 4 units from 1 unit, 400% efficiency. It's just outdoors, not another dimension.

Does anyone else think that this new monkey looks a lot like that badly restored painting of Jesus that was in the news a few weeks ago? Monkey (from TFA), Jesus; you decide.

I think it's a great thing for the public - but it's a terrible bellwether for the company selling the hardware.

They caught up after the Slim redesign and many years of effort - in the early going it was pretty rough. You may recall there were folks who bought multiple PS3s at launch to resell on eBay for inflated prices, only to find they couldn't even sell them at MSRP. I agree with you that the PS3 is fine now, but its launch was widely considered to be a failure.

I refuse to watch videos of things I can read instead - thanks for digging this up. 350$ is less unreasonable. Pachter wins again....