Simply route weapon power to forward shield ...

Ionise the ash cloud with lasers and use an electro magnetic field ? :D

Actually according to some news outlet traffic of eurostar shuttles (between france and england) has more than doubled. I also found news saying there was an increased number of high speed train at least between paris and brussels.
I would say, yes, overall the train activity has increased to partially absorb the grounded passengers.

The problem is one of spare capacity however. The rail system may be fantastic but it is also already pretty heavily used. sure they can double the number of train on some lines for some time but they only have so many trains and so many lines to make them run on. Building a train takes some time, and I doubt they will be ordering much more new ones just because of a temporary lapse in plane traffic.

Additionaly train is more interesting than plane only under some conditions of population density and maximum distance. sure you average train station can be in the middle of a city but even high speed train run only around 300-350km/h thats slow when compared to the 750-800km/h of a jetliner. for really long distances train _is_ slow. Since boarding is much faster however and stations are usually easier to reach, it makes complete sense when the added transport time is compensated by the gained boarding/checking/local transport time

As much as I would like to agree with you, Japan didn't surrender after a first explosion on one of their cities, do you seriously think it would have surrendered after a show off over the ocean ?

(disclaimer, I am not american, I am not japanese)

I wouldn't be so sure if I were you, this guy http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/ seems to know what he is talking about (or maybe it's just me ...)

He does seem to be pretty much alone though ...

I just wish they would include some kind of sed in the default shell

oh and while I am at it, how about a way to set a variable from the result of an expression without resorting to a pseudo for loop ?
you know something like
set var=`echo toto`
instead of
for /F %%x in (`echo toto`) do set var=%%x

even better how about an improved version of echo which would be able to write the following to a file when %var% is 1 ?
echo var=%var%>>test.bat

try it and have sooooo much fun discovering that the "right" syntax is
echo var=^%var%>>test.bat

how sick is that ?

almost ? it _is_ universally better !

sounds like a very stupid thing to do for an ISP : If amy of their customers uploads illegal content the ISP could be held accountable since they are the owners...

I also use NTFS with ntfs-3g as the linux driver.

however I can't say I am really satisfied. while it works flawlessly for simple uses, I find that permissions don't map very well between linux and Windows,leading to some very frustrating situations where changing permissions in unix results in locked files on window or the reverse requiring a sudo to fix. there is most likely a fix for this but it is not obvious :(

I really would like a truly portable filesystem which enforces an authentification and authorization scheme with support across multiple OSes.

Yes that is what it means. A subsidy is not alway a direct gift of money.

Subsidies can be provided in the form of a tax break which is exactly what happens in the case of French Diesel.

You don't get it: cylons have been secretly developped by the US army and are being sent in space as we speak.What do you think was on the shuttle ! Once combined into a mothership they will deflect nibiru and we are all safe... for some time.

I am afraid you lack perspective, the currently prevailing order is very recent. I'll be generous and give a hundred years.

Music and art has existed for at least a few millenia. Some of the most acclaimed pieces of music were written at a time when the media industry didn't exist. Ever heard about these guys : Mozart, Beethoven, Salieri, Bach, Tchaikosky, Prokofiev,... ? if not, you should give it a try, you probably heard some of their work already even if you don't know it.

My point being that the motivation for art is (was ?)_not_ money but art itself. Some of the greatest artists known to us were poor or ended up dying poor but still painted of wrote music that enlighten us today.
And I am not even sure this is not the case today.

The media industry is being made obsolete by the advances of technology, and it's trying to fight it. Good luck with that. In the end artists will revert to being sponsored by rich people, they will stage live performances where they can get people to pay to come see them, and the media industry will disappear or transform beyond recognition.

How do you define a game ?
Even real life games are just a set of rules (more or less complex), to apply the rules you may need a physical item, but in most games you can easily use anything as a token for such or such piece of the game.

Now video games are just extremely complex sets of rules (thus information) encoded as a computer program along with images and sounds both of which also are information.

Do they throw in a chair with that one ?

You mean that on a major version number change they can't even partially break backward compatibility? I think they did too ... just not on this.

Does it really matter ? all the rechargeable batteries get slower and slower as they recharge. charging the first 80% is much faster than charging the remaining 20%.

Even if that ratio is brought back to 50% to make the battery marketable (recharge and go in 3 minutes),it's ok. On a 500 miles battery that would leave 250miles autonomy.
And the capacity is bound to be increased as the technology progresses.

I don't have the time to check right now, but I think I read that the electric motors are more efficient than gas powered ones, therefore an electric car could go the same distance with less energy no ? where you need 3Megawatts to go 500 miles with gas, you may end up needing only 1Megawatt, thus only 500kW for 250 miles.

There is no going around the fact that motorized transportation requires a dense energy source and that there is little difference between a dense energy source and a bomb.