What maintains our atmosphere is the magnetic field generated by the liquid mantle rotating around the core. The magnetic field deflects the solar wind which would blow it off. It's thought by some that Mars lost it's atmosphere and surface water when the liquid mantle cooled and solidified. Mars has no magnetic field.

I worked in the Electrical Engineering Dept of an Electric Utility (Eventually Eng Systems Admin). We did everything sooner, faster and better than they did. We strung the first lans - after they heard we got a memo from the IT VP "No one can buy LAN equip without my approval". We were under the VP of engineering so we tore it up. This was a while back so if someone in a remote location had no email, the system would automatically FAX a copy of the email to them. The backup system not only backed up our servers but backed up the hard drive on every individual computer. For a friend I wrote a program on the mainframe that would parse a COBOL program and create a structure chart. It became the most executed piece of code in IT. They'd code the program, create the chart go for approval and if there was a change they'de change the code and create a new chart - just the reverse of what they were supposed to do. Budget? Every time they built a transmission line or substation (I wrote a 3D substation design system) - fairly costly items, we would specify what hardware and software would be required (using the term loosely) to build it. It would be capititalized into the structure and depreciated over time. IT was pure expense. Now it's C++ (which Linus Torvalds calls "a horrible language" and Java (C++--)). Real men code in C.

The guys installed a huge coil of copper wire in the wall around the door. Powered on it became a huge electromagnet. As the authorities carried magnetic media through the door, on the way out the data was destroyed. Not foolproof I must admit, but clever.

Give them the address, tell them you want you want your computer back and they can have everything else in the place. What's the thief going to do? Call the police and tell them someone stole all his stolen stuff?

There are good number of idiots in the world. Some even have PhDs. Sometimes they are put into positions where they can do stupid things. This is an instance of this. It could have been much worse.

On August 11, 1942, US Patent 2,292,387 was granted to George Antheil and "Hedy Kiesler Markey", Heddy Lamarr's married name at the time. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. It was never implemented at the time. Perhaps owing to this lag in development, the patent was little-known until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Lamarr an award for this contribution. Lamarr and Antheil's frequency-hopping idea serves as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Wi-Fi. Antheil was pianist who wrote some Hollywood film music and performed. He was one brick short of a load and was known to come out to perform and lay a pistol on the piano implying that he would shoot anyone who disturbed the performance. In 1933 Heddy Lamarr became famous (or infamous) for making the film "Ecstasy" in which she appeared nude and was depicted having an orgasm. It was banned pretty much everywhere. When promoting war bonds she offered to kiss any man who bought at least $250K. She raised $7 million in one night. President Obama has ordered an overhaul of the patent system. Currently 500,000 patent applications haven't even been opened. I'm personally considering a patent on "selling things for money". If you have an algorithm you want to patent, consider programming that piece of code into an FPGA using VHDL and patent the circuit. Patents on circuits hold up very well in court.

Seems to work reasonably well. It automatically deletes useless, boring, inconsequential stuff...like paying bills, taxes, etc.

Intel's chips have been running on a RISC core for quite a while. The rest of the CISC instruction set is converted by microcode into RISC instructions. Just noticed the person before me said the same thing.

At a party back in the 70's. John Lennon was there. He saw it too.

I'm 62. Learning languages is fairly easy. They're almost all like C except maybe LISP and a couple others. Someone mentioned PL/SQL which is straightforward and based on Ada. C is currently the most widely used language with Java losing market share and Objective-C skyrocketing (Mac, iPhone, iPad). Bjarne Stroustrup said he's he's sorry he developed C++ ("C lets you shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder but if you do you blow your whole leg off"). With multi-core processors and stagnant clock speeds, nothing runs any faster unless you code you code for multi-core. This is not easy. I've been using the Intel compilers & Intel Parallel Studio which integrates with Visual Studio on Windows and Eclipse on Linux. Learning this will give you a leg up over guys who continue to churn out sequential code as 4 -processor/10-core servers hit the market. Also, take a look at NVidia's Parallel NSight for CUDA programming (Massively Parallel Programming). The fastest supercomputer in the world uses multicore Intel & NVidia Fermi processors (as do several others in the top ten). Security is fascinating! Read about hacking, kernel exploits, web application obfuscation, cryptovirology, rootkits, social engineering and everything else you can get your hands on. Learn Metasploit. Most companies are incredibly vulnerable and don't know it. Using CUDA (above) you can access any hashed password system in a few days - max. You can become a wizard. But none of this will guarantee you a job if you're 60 and not a sniveling corporate weasel. If you're lucky, some startup will realize your worth. Or go into business for yourself.

Any techie with real security know-how (from either side - both is better) and who has read Sun Tzu (therefore knowing better than the military how to conduct a war) could handle anything given the manuals. You want the best in cyber warfare and that is someone who eats, sleeps and shits the stuff. You're going to throw an Air Force pilot at a security breach? Would you have your pole-vaulter run the 1,000 meter for your team?

I remember my father gathering his three children together and he ordered "I want you kids cut out all this goddamn swearing around here!". After we pulled ourselves together after several minutes of unbridled laughter, we pointed out the obvious source of this behavior. If he didn't stop we wouldn't and for him to stop swearing would be like changing his native tongue. The issue never arose again. Swearing? I'd worry more about my children and the rapid influx of cheap, 80% pure Afghani heroin that's flooding the country. In my priorities, swearing would be fairly far down the list of concerns for my children.