Just changing ages would make marriages inconveniant. River Song (40ish) married to David Tennent (late 30s) was believable. The marriage to Matt Smith (20s) wasn't. I've even heard a theory where Susan (introduced to viewers as the Doctor's granddaughter) was really the elderly grey haired wife of the Doctor who regenerated into a teenager. Their relationship went sour after they got chaperoned by her school teachers for two years. When Susan fell in love with someone else the Doctor locked her out of the Tardis and left without her.

Won't CPU branch prediction make the if based version as fast as the pointer to pointer version? If you have a thousand element list, then there's a only 1 in a thousand chance that you're deleting the first element all the other times you head down the other side of the conditional.

Shouldn't forums just need a digital signature?

Singularity. Isn't that the next stage of evolution where nanotech and AI give us perfection and eternal life? Who would have thought the PHP community was at the forefront of machine intelligence?

My friend who goes by the alias of paperhorse has had a universal lossless compression algorithm up on Stackoverflow for over two years and it hasn't even received an up vote. They're incredibly easy to make and understand. Just make sure you write down how many times you compress your file, otherwise you won't be able to reinflate all your zero byte avi's back up to their normal size.

I'd like a button which gives 5 minutes of self drive or remote drive. You don't have to trust the computer (or teledriver) with the most complicated parts of your journey but you get enough time to fix your phone/music/gps/coffee. Pulling over and stopping always seems to add a huge amount of time to long trips.

Don't we technically have world peace every day that we're not having a world war?

Even if you lived in an infinite universe, you'd only provably achieve immortality after an infinite amount of time. I kind of think all the other impossibilities will happen way before that.

I think he's suppose to blow up the asteroid before it hits us and before the asteroid-people send their Bruce Willis to blow up a 14000km wide rock which is on a collision course with them.

You're not taking Earthlight into consideration. Midnight (moon time) on the near side always has a full Earth brightening things up. Midnight on the far side is extremely Dark.

Here's a study by the Virginia Tech Transport Institute which says talking on the phone isn't at all dangerous for truck drivers and is only has a tiny risk for car drivers. Based on real life (cameras logging near misses in actual cars and trucks), so it might be a little more accurate than the video games other researchers use.

Isn't it the other way round? 5 million years ago intelligent parrots genetically engineered some apes with smart bird characteristics : they walked on 2 legs (like birds), they vocally talked (no other ape species can), feathers were too hard so they settled on a molted appearance. Naturally our ancestors revolted and destroyed their entire civilisation.

The thing is they're right : shift has lower precedence than adding so what you're really doing is
account.balance += (account.balance + account.balance ) << 3;
which actually multiplies your balance by 17.

The Universal translator is the most absolutely needed tech here and in Star Trek's future. Who wants to go visit hundreds of new civilisations and not understand any of them.

Imagine you're a french captain on where all the other gadgets only understand English. You could yell "Je voudrais un vin rouge, s'il vous plaît" at the replicator all day and it would never ever give you that cup of earl gray tea hot.

The universal translator would translate your battle speech "Retraite! Retraite! Retraite!" into something your English crew could understand like "The line must be drawn here! This far and no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done! Attack!"

You could actually explain terms rather being an elitist know it all. I asked a couple of people I know about peak speed and got two different answers, so I still don't know

Keitha said that Peak Speed is like Peak OIl. That network speeds will increase for a few years before reaching a peak and continue to decline after that. We can push back the date of peak speed further into the future by conserving network speeds with 200MB download limits. This will allow future generations of Aussies an internet so fast that all their slashdot posts will be first posts.

Bruce said that Peak Speed is like Peak hour traffic, its when everyone gets on the internet at the same time and the data packets crawl along at on tenth of their normal speed. You can get your downloads to speed up by beeping (pinging) your horn and swearing at the data packet in front of you.