i think they meant by actual time used

Actually I think the slashdot editors deliberately make the poll questions a bit ambiguous. That way, you get more discussion. :-)

Average power is low now, but there is a clear path to at least kilowatt average powers (see the LBNL NGLS) and 10s of KW are pretty straightforward.

A clear path to kilowatt powers, that's sounds a bit like the stories about the EUV sources years ago. Reality turned out to be quite a bit harder...

There has been quite a bit of work on EUV / Xray optics, but again the parts are really expensive (an X-ray mirror runs $1M. )

Are those normal incidence or grazing incidence mirrors? For proper imaging, you need to image one area onto another area with low aberrations, not one focal point onto another focal point. This is far easier to do with mirrors designed for normal incidence than for grazing incidence. Even then, it turns out that you need about 10 reflections from the EUV source to the silicon wafers; it's because with every reflection you lose about 1/3 of the power that we would like to have a kilowatt to start with. If the reflection losses are a bit larger due to a larger number of mirrors or a higher per-mirror loss, then you need to start with even more power.

ASML aren't a "light source maker", they don't "make" anything actually.

With the acquisition of Cymer, ASML is actually a light source maker.

integrate stuff from different suppliers, and have contractors bolt it together.

It is true that ASML outsources the manufacturing of most components as far as it involves materials processing (machining, coating, soldering) and off-the-shelf components (pumps, filters, sensors, computers, bolts, cables, etc.). But the actual assembly and tuning of these thousands of components is done by ASML's own employees in ASML's own cleanrooms. As I am typing this, this is happening about 15 meters below my office.

Given the wide variety in technologies used in these scanners, and given how fast the technology changes, it wouldn't make much sense to do all the materials processing in-house. For me as a design engineer it is quite cool that I generally only need to worry whether the design of a component is manufacturable by some supplier in the world, rather than that I have to keep in mind what our own tools, which have to be used because they are not yet written off. That would slow down development tremendously -- it is already hard enough to keep up with Moore's law without such a restriction.

(The above are my own views/opinions yadda yadda)

"a bunch of 193nm immersion tools (for triple patterning) the EUV may never make economic sense for fabs."

A problem with dual/triple patterning is that it is mostly suitable for making parallel lines, not complex patterns. It happens that this works very well for NAND memory, but for CPUs, not so much.

Another problem is that you need 2x or 3x the number of process steps, which puts the higher price for EUV machines into perspective.

I expect that the primary target at the moment is to develop the technology. Once we're there, more attention can go to reducing costs.

Disclosure: I work at ASML on the EUV source. But this are my own views; I don't officially represent the company.

... automatically reply with "my_secret_ssid" to trick your machine into connecting to them.

This is only an issue for password-less systems or cases where the attacker knows the password, because the handshake protocol requires both the access point and the client to know the password. In either of those cases, an attacker could just as well sniff the network traffic.

Is there a scenario where (hidden_SSID + WPA2) is actually more insecure than (broadcast_SSID + WPA2)?

mortality rate of 1000 for men and 600 for women, per 100,000 ... In London alone the expected death rate on that day alonw was 219 people ...

It's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. Every living person will die at some point. Comparing a single cause of death against all causes of death combined will result in a small number for most causes of death. In this case, you're comparing death rates for people who mostly had a long and healthy life behind them to a death cause that hit mostly people between 20 and 50 years old, and moreover that also involved 700 injuries. (I'd like to know how many of those 700 are actually people who were rendered severy crippled for the rest of their lives.)

It would be more fair to compare the numbers against deaths from accidents (e.g. traffic or work-related). For comparison, traffic deaths in Greater London were 204 in the year 2009; compared to that, the 52 deaths on 7/7 is not that small of a number.

... it was once innate that the earth is flat. People studying "scratch, itch, or not blink" and not too long ago smoking ...

The concept of a flat earth was never "innate", at least in Western cultures over the past 2200 years.

According to the wiki, as early as 1604, smoking was considered unhealthy, which is pretty soon given that tobacco became known after the discovery of America. Only the tobacco industry was actively trying to play down the risks of smoking.

They're checking for TATP or something similar, even though no sane person would carry it in liquid form.

You have it backwards. TATP is a solid explosive compound that can be produced from liquid acetone, liquid hydrogen peroxide, and an acid. If TSA is afraid of TATP, then it makes sense to check that people aren't carrying hydrogen peroxide.

My practice with hotels is to find the cheapest one available, and then only sleep there. ... What do you do with hotels that requires you to actually study up on reviews beforehand?

I followed this strategy plenty of times and my experience is that I will end up with a smelly room (body odor and/or smoke absorbed into the carpet and curtains), excessive street noise, a half-broken water knob(*) in the shower, noisy/drunk neighbors who also went for the cheapest option, and/or a really greasy breakfast.

I would actually prefer to stay in a hostel, but alas my SO doesn't like the idea of bunk beds and shared bathrooms.

(*) Why does each and every hotel bathroom have a different system for adjusting the water flow and temperature of the shower that involves unlabeled knobs and that requires two minutes of fiddling to figure out?

The problem with Android permissions is that a lot of apps request internet and sdcard access and there is no way to know what kind of data is going to be exchanged. Benign usage would be downloading ads and dynamic content, for the apps that are just a wrapper for a website. But for all I know, an app could be scanning the sd card for interesting data and feeding it to big brother.

"... if they took the 22,000 wire tap orders and an estimated 22 million phones and came up with that figure. That may not be accurate."

The letter states that there were 25k wire-tap orders over 2012 and that this is explicitly not the number of suspects, since some suspects use "very many" phone numbers. The letter doesn't mention 1 in 1000; that's the media spin on it.

Why does slashdot post an artocle about Netherlands at midnight local time?

I just returned from holiday in Ireland and apparently temperatures were exceptionally high. One day, my shoe soles were essentially paved (they looked like road surface) because the roads I had walked on were molten. I wonder whether this droplet has anything to do with the weather conditions.

By the way: exceptional weather means a week of sunny weather with 24-28 degrees C temperatures. Irish asphalt is probably optimized for cooler and rainier weather. :-)

word processor that you're using that does all those things BETTER than MS Word

The main difference with some of my coworkers is that I note the problems myself, curse, and fix them before asking someone else to read my work. Over time I found a work flow that tends not to generate too many issues (print to PDF via cutePDF, avoid copy/paste of text with references as much as possible, don't deal with the equation editor, don't convert back and forth between .doc and .docx).

And if I write something with lots of equations and I'm sure that coworkers will not need to revise future versions (i.e. a write-once document), I do it in LaTeX. That has its own set of disadvantages, but I find myself cursing a lot less if I use it.

... anti-ms trolls are always careful not to include a SINGLE fact ...

The documents that we deal with here contain company-secret information, so I am not going to share any problematic documents just to convince you. However, I can tell you that they are usually rather old (Office 2003) macro-enabled templates that are now being used with Office 2010. I'm sure the "error reference not found" result from bad copy/paste actions by the user, but I consider it an design error of MS Word that I never see any warning about broken references.

By the way, libreoffice (my version is about 2 years old) invariably chokes on our company Office templates (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) as well.