is an entirely new shower head design which incorporates a Venturi tube drawing from an antibacterial cleanser reservoir. Clean and decontaminate without having to store bottles / bars within the stall. As an added bonus, if you formulated the cleanser correctly it could also act as a hands-free shower stall cleaner.

World Peace is inevitable. We just won't exist when it happens. Honestly, though, I'm more concerned about immortal alien laser-beam equipped sharks with human level intelligence.

If email SPAM is really terrorism in disguise, does that give us any more teeth with which to pursue spammers? I have this dream where busloads of Viagra and mortgage spammers are unceremoniously dropped off at Gitmo pending "further investigation".

Take a bunch of death row inmates or lifers and seed the new martian prison colony. Henceforth, you eliminate the capital punishment debate - just give them a one way ticket to Mars. (Calling Snake Pliskin?)

As software, and not on-chip instructions, (ROM firmware or BIOS), is this not trivial to defeat? Or do I misunderstand? Also, is this going to be deployed for all architectures and operating systems, or do users working with more esoteric hardware / OS combinations get a pass? Also, why do this at the user level at all, when any filtering could be enforced at the ISP level? How effective are Tor, proxies and encryption at evading filtering measures in China? Is there any access (via satellite or other source) to internet feeds outside of Chinese government control?

I have been following the Voyager updates with some interest over the past couple of years. I find it astounding that we are still managing to get useful data from these vehicles which were launched back in the 70's. Certainly, they have exceeded their design mission, and only advances in large aperture radio coverage here on earth have allowed continued communication. To put this in perspective - the one way light time from earth to both vehicles is now on the order of about 30 hours! Interestingly, the vehicles are adorned with a message to prospective lifeforms who would encounter the spacecraft long in the future - a "golden record", which is technology long since obsolete here on earth during only the short 30 year span of the mission. Food for thought.

If it doesn't move and it should: WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't: duct tape.

Came here to say exactly this. Although, IIRC, Lithium reacts, but not explosively. As you go down in the alkali metals (lithium's column in the periodic table), the violence of the reaction increases. Lithium --> Sodium --> Potassium --> Rubidium --> Cesium --> Francium. I think you can get a violent explosion at Sodium or greater.

You'd need to, to get the key to my office to do so. Ordinarily, that wouldn't have been an issue, but for the fact that the engineering simulations I had to run needed to process overnight, what with the lack of an office supercomputer and all. At first, I thought it was just bad luck that my default desktop was showing - that somehow, the simulator had crashed and dumped to the desktop. That is, until I noticed the correlation between this event and the fact that my carpet was clean and trash emptied every time. Now, with the door securely closed and locked, I don't have to worry about losing work, but I do have to clean my own goddamned office. If shutdowns were IT policy, common sense would dictate that there would be some sort of user consultation first - ergo, heed my warning and lock your offices now.

Is there such thing as Amicus Curiae after the fact?

IANAL, but there is a widely held misconception about double jeopardy being functionally equivalent to immunity. This is not the case. An offence comprises both an action and a time of occurence. As an example, if you are tried and falsely convicted of murder, serve your sentence until release and subsequently murder the person whom you were accused of murdering, that constitutes a wholly separate offence for which you can be further prosecuted. In the case of ongoing activity, there are a plethora of offences one may choose to prosecute.

Everyone is talking about giant black holes that will swallow the earth as if that's a bad thing.

What good does it do to reduce gridlock in the sky if you can't simultaneously reduce gridlock in airport security?

I have always found that the best way is to carry two cups of coffee, looking for someone near the front of the line who looks like they could use a cup (helps if it is cold out), offer them the second cup, strike up a brief conversation and slide through.