For the confused: This was when the source code was released, not the original game. That was way back in '93.

Actual Football Player just owned the typical slashtitude. Right on!

My "local town" is a datacentre in a field somewhere. Whenever I see an advert telling me that something's big in Cheltenham (a dump; over half the length of my country away) I usually laugh like a drain and then forget what the product was.

Every new death is attributable to the pressmen that created the negative public opinion that caused Foxconn to consider the move in the first place. Nobody else.

What's the matter? disappointed you missed your chance to piss and moan? They took it down after 14 hours. Nobody needs to read another post full of righteous indignationand regurgitated groupthink.

Were these the same voters that asked for reduced class sizes and better grades for their precious snowflake? The same voters that sued the school for sports injuries?

Oh COME ON. The situation is: "here's some money, make our computer infrastructure work. But wait! We'll micromanage even though we know fuck-all." It's not like there isn't already accountability in the total budget, and if nothing else just dump all the data in a public repository somewhere and let paranoid netizens crawl it. Some red tape is an appropriate thing, but this isn't going to stop typical budgetary BS politics like blowing it all before the end of the fiscal year.

Well basically, because nerve agents are reactive (reactive enough to react with your nerves) they're also reasonably chemically unstable. If you left some mustard gas out for a few weeks it would all break down, but we don't usually have that long. Harsh chemicals like mineral acids or strong alkali (lye) are the gold standard for decontamination. The radioactive materials reference is likely things like dirty bomb fallout on walls, roofs. If the radioactive isotopes can be dissolved in water and washed away, they'll break down by the time the water cycle ends up somewhere near humans again.

Problem is, pouring a thousand tuns of sulfuric acid or sodium hydroxide solution into a local drain/river/water table isn't good for anyone. Another class of "really really awesome cleaners" are the peroxy anions, which are made on demand from hydrogen peroxide and weaker bases like baking soda. Hydrogen peroxide breaks down very quickly in the environment and isn't very toxic (don't go swimming in it though).

The actual cleaning mixture is still bloody harsh, but the post-cleanup cleanup is nicer, it's probably cheaper, it's less harmful to people, and the environment is a nice PR bonus.

In further pre-empting of people who didn't RTFA, the game is already supported on PC, Mac, and Linux.

The important question is, How close can this get us to space? The concept can double the top speed of something like SpaceShip 1 (and I guess the top speed, being limited by air friction, goes up as you do) but you'd still need a rocket booster to make a stable orbit. It always struck me as incredibly wasteful to fill up all those rockets with propellant, and then use it from ground level. It was always ... odd to see the space shuttle consume vast quantities of booster fuel to hover stationary above the earth before pulling away slowly.

I had a kneejerk thing to say here about software piracy, but then I realised that in my rush to be relevant, I hadn't RTFA and it was irrelevant.

Yes, I know, this is slashdot, I should GTFO with an attitude like this!

They wouldn't, but consider this: what's the smallest hard drive you can buy, and when was that capacity first launched? In 10 years, this drive will be the only type of technology available...

Amen to that. I've worked MedChem in both industry and academia, and neither of them are particularly cheap. In industry we were shovelling cash into furnaces (automated chromatography, LC/MS on every floor, 2 fume hoods each, 400MHz NMR for 12 scientists) because the relative cost of the trials were something like 90-95% of the total cost of bringing a drug to market.

Lots of things that oil is used for today could be done by other methods only marginally more expensive (power, car fuel). However, lots of things that oil does can't be easily replaced, such as aromatic hydrocarbon feedstocks, or most plastics precursors. Now I know oil won't stop, it'll just make a lot of things a lot more expensive that have absolutely nothing to do with what the public thinks of as oil-derived.

To me, using oil for cars is like heating your home by burning toilet paper. When you've run out, you're going to regret it, and there are plenty of other things you can use instead.

The journal "Synthesis" only publishes procedures that have been independantly verified. It's used as a gold standard for reaction conditions. If the chemistry you want to do is in Synthesis, you're sorted. Problem is, it's also very elite and very expensive. It'll always be possible to publish fraudulent data in a mediocre journal.