Oddly enough, tobacco smokers who also smoked pot had a much-decreased risk of lung cancer compared with the guys who only smoke tobacco. Sorry I misplaced the link to the study, but the cancer risk of marijuana appears to be a lot less than you would expect.

See, this is part of why Veronica Mars is such a great show. The tech is unobtrusively right. The hacking is less Hollywood and more "open up a guy's laptop when he's out of the room and copy some of his files onto your flash drive".

I think this is more of a generation gap thing. She knows how to do a few things, like open Microsoft Word and type in it, but when faced with anything unusual she loses the willingness to read the words on the screen or get help from tech support or Google. Someone who can find their way around a computer would have had much less trouble.

If plain PDF files are acceptable, then why not just use "File->Export as PDF" in OpenOffice? I've gone that route a few times, and it worked just fine.

I doubt the variations in vaccination rates for smallpox are that significant. If you want to do real damage with smallpox attacks, you should infect people in the areas most likely to cause the infection to spread. Infect an international airport, and spread disease everywhere. Infect a bus terminal. Infect a state capital building and infect disproportionately important people. If gay bath houses were still operating, I'd say infect them and let the disease spread. If you want to spread terror, this is the kind of thing you've got to think about!

Wait, that's your big example of how it could go wrong? Some terrorists finding out that most Americans aren't vaccinated for smallpox? Everybody knows that. The real determining factors in a smallpox outbreak are things like "can we quarantine affected areas effectively?" and "how fast can we administer vaccines?".

Crysis ran just fine on the hardware that was current when it came out. It just happens to have a lot of fancy features that kicked every GPU's ass, so they're disabled by default until the hardware catches up. It's future proofing.

Your keyboard milage may vary. Personally, I have trouble using any other kind of keyboard these days. It's just easier on the hands.

California's market is big enough that this will make energy efficiency a more important R&D goal for TV manufacturers, and in a few years the costs will come down to the point where all the new TVs meet the standard. It's just like what happened with refrigerators. Hopefully.

But if you have more storage capacity (and therefore can use a higher bit rate) the quality differences between AAC and MP3 are debatable.

If you have DRM-free standard AAC, then why would you want to transcode to MP3? Is there some cranky old media player that can't handle AAC?

Uranium still isn't scarce enough to make recycling spent fuel economical. And fast breeder reactors will probably be coming one of these days, though I'm not counting on it anytime soon. And the Hyperion reactors burn up about 50% of the fuel. And they can be easily modified to run on thorium instead of uranium.

The article says they are like TRIGA reactors, in that they use a uranium hydride fuel which gives them a large negative thermal coefficient of reactivity with very little time delay, thus making them inherently pretty damn safe. The similarities end there. The Hyperion reactor is a tub of UH3 with heat pipes to carry heat off to do useful work. There's no pool of water. It's just supposed to reach a high temperature and stay there.

That's neat, but the Hyperion reactor also has a very cute design: there are no moving parts except for the SCRAM mechanism. The reaction itself is inherently self-limiting.

The reactor just gives heat through heat pipes. You can use that as process heat for various industrial purposes (as the oil sands guys want to do) or you can use it to make steam for a turbine. Hyperion doesn't try to offer an integrated solution, although they have some partners who are designing turbines to be easily compatible.