The problem I have is that all the issues you raise also apply to pedestrians, yet suggest to a pro-helmet cyclist that they should wear a helmet when walking across the road and they just laugh. I have no problem with people wearing helmets, in fact I would encourage it, but I want the choice for myself.

Thunderbolt uses active cables. There is a circuit at each end of the cable which handles the physical transmission. This means the cables will always be expensive, although costs will probably come down if thunderbolt becomes mainstream and economies of scale kick in. It's also a reason why thunderbolt probably won't become mainstream.

I also find the idea that there was something unique about Einstein's brain that made him a genius. IMHO what set him apart wasn't his academic brilliance, which was nothing special going by his school performance, it was his ability to think up daft questions like "if I were riding a light beam and shone a torch in front of me, how fast would the light from the torch travel?".

Our brains are around 30% larger in relation to other primates, hence we need additional nutrients for ours to develop fully.

Nonsense. The fossil record shows that human brain sizes shrunk after the agricultural revolution. We developed large brains through eating large amounts of fat and protein from meat.

While that's technically true, it misses the problem completely because you ignore why people eat more than they need. People eat because they are hungry. Why would someone with enough body fat to power their sedentary lifestyle for weeks still feel hungry? That's the problem, and there's a ton of evidence that it's screwed up hormonal signalling from a poor diet and lifestyle which makes people hungry when they shouldn't be. Poor sleep patterns is part of the problem, even if an unhealthy diet and lack of exercise comprises the bulk of it.

Moreover, by providing links to infringing material, they are also helping the content owners. They could quite happily download all the torrents, identify the IP addresses of seeders, have the courts issue warrants to identify the seeders from their IP addresses and pursue copyright claims against the individuals. Of course that would be more costly, so lets break the internet so they can increase their profit margins.

If Apple paid Foxconn more do you really think the factory workers would earn more?

To be fair, in this case their prison sentences seem to be somewhat proportional to the money they made from the site.

Only if you think it's reasonable that copyright infringement should be a criminal act. Remember that copyright is an artificail monopoly granted to provide a profit motive, and the only harm infringement does is to profit margins. In a fair legal system, the only reasonable punishment would be a claim for monetary loss settled in a civil suit. Copyright infringement should be treated much like breach of contract, but due to lobbying and corruption, big media have managed to convince government that copyright infringement is theft, which it isn't.

I'm more surprised that there are currently 68 people berthed on the ISS who read slashdot. It must be cosy up there.

This comes from the electromagnetic nature of light. When considered as a wave, light is composed of an oscillating electric field. As the electric field changes it induces an oscillating magnetic field. As the magentic field changes it induces an electric field again, and so on, such that the electric and magnetic fields regenerate each other. According to Maxwells laws, such a wave can only sustain itself at a specific speed: the speed of light. This speed is determined by the permeability and permitivity of the medium it travels in, hence the speed of light varies in different materials.

(I also am not a physicist, but I remember this from school ;)

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Just an educated guess, but I expect the vasty majority of game designers are men and it's not so much that they're trying to aim their games at men as that they're designing games that they would like to play.

This pretty much sums up my experiences with voice recognition technology.

As I understand it, it would take an eternity from our point of view for the star to fall in the black hole completely due to the time dilation in the vicinity of the black hole. However, I believe what they're seeing is just the start of the event. A star is effectively a huge nuclear explosion kept in equilibrium by a massive gravitational field. As the star approached the black hole, the gravitational field from the black hole would gradually reduce that of the star on the near side until at some point it would no longer be enough to contain the nuclear reaction. At this point the matter in the star would be explode in the direction of the black hole. This would probably accelerate as the star itself lost mass and hence gravitational field strength. It's the rapidity of this reaction which causes the gamma ray burst, not the process of the matter actually falling into the black hole, which would probably look like a regular accretion disc. I'd guess the whole process would be over fairly quickly.

I'm not an astrophysicist, but this is my hand-wavey explanation of what happened. Hopefully someone better qualified will elaborate, or tell me I'm writing bollocks :)