Surely you need not wait until your imminent untimely death to give your trusted wife said password. Is there really a problem with her being to manage your mutual finances now?

Having two lines on escalators, people standing on the right and walking on the left, has been the de facto standard everywhere I have been (so most of Europe), and I'd assume most of the civilised world does similarly.
In the UK and central/western Europe where I've dealt with them most often, this courtesy is often pointed out by signs, and people standing in the way will be asked (politely or not) to move across, or sometimes if not just shoved out the way.

As for lack of escalators on England railways, it's simply not possible to put escalators everywhere, due to both cost and spacial issues (particularly as most of the rail infrastructure in the UK was built by the Victorians, who didn't really do escalators, and liked stairs).
That said newly built lines/stations tend to be quite accessible.

Am I the only one whose first thought at this headline was the flying party building from the Hitchhiker's Guide?

I can't imagine that this new venture will be significantly more productive...

Sorry, but "let's" is correct, "lets" is not.
It is an abbreviation of "let us".

I think concluding that this ruling will cause prices to fall due to increased competitiveness is being a bit optimistic. It simply isn't in their best interest to be competitive or seek to outprice each other, seeing as they are essentially all selling the same thing and profit margins need to be maintained.

Office 97 had a few bugs to do with table layout, amongst other things (I forget exactly what, but it annoyed me at the time). This was especially noticeable when loading files created with newer versions of office (ie. your document now looks like something out of geocities rendered in IE 5).
Nested tables behaved especially badly, some of the defaults were a bit silly and when things went wrong they tended to do so rather gracelessly.
Also there were a fair few text layout mechanisms it didn't or only half-heartedly supported, which subsequent versions dealt with nicely (once again, they annoyed me back in the day, but damned if I can remember exactly which they were...)

If you changed that to say Office 2000, I'd be more inclined to agree.

(Personally I use Office 2003, and see no reason whatsoever to upgrade to 2010...)

I hate to disappoint you but solar output isn't measured in degrees Celsius.
Trying to argue that 2.5 times solar output means 40C x 2.5 = enough to produce steam, just makes you look like you haven't a clue what you are talking about.
The output is generally measured in Wm^-2 (1000 on a sunny equatorial day more or less), and as frankly the vast majority of microwave radiation would go straight through a human obstacle and out the other side anyway, if you are worried about being being caught in the beam being boiled alive or whatever, you've missed the point a little.
If they were just using a solar collector and focusing device (ie. a big mirror) in orbit à la shitty films like Die Another Die then yes, it would be an issue (the temperature to output power per area ratio would still be in absolutely no way linear though).

Mostly, you seem to have forgotten in general that the Celsius temperature scale has an arbitrary zero point, so doing any kind of multiplication on it will almost always give you a rubbish answer.

As for using other kinds of liquids/thermal solar collection, people do that already in deserts (on a medium scale) and there's absolutely no need for having orbiting mechanisms to increase throughput. Just use focusing mirrors on the ground.

Frankly the idea is a bit of a waste of time in my eyes. There's plenty of empty sunny desert where solar collection systems can be set up. Cheaper to create a 10km^2 grid on the ground that produces much more, than to try and put a 0.1km^2 array in orbit and try to beam power down somehow...

I'm seriously not convinced that plants turn carbon dioxide and water into methanal (formaldehyde) and oxygen...

A more typical overall reaction is:
6CO2 + 6H20 --> C6H12O6 (glucose) + 6O2
(which is endothermic)

And plants do use oxygen, when the sun isn't shining...

Slow news day alert!

The topic in question is blindingly obvious to anyone who has heard of this newfangled "Internet" thing, and frankly is not worth an article in the first place.
Furthermore, such a blatant error in the headline and summary is simply ridiculous. Do the submitters or editors not reread text prior to submission? This is sloppy /. reporting at it's finest... For shame.

While I support the course of action which BluWiki have taken, it is not at all surprising that apple will act in their usual reprehensible manner.

Reverse engineering/cracking/technical discussion/anything-your-corporate-overlords-raise-their-eyebrows-at groups, would do better to simply speak outside of the legal reach of such entities. Either by not having discussions in public, using channels not often trawled by our overlords (IRC, etc.) or locating the server/parent corporation in safer waters, so to speak.

If no-one could read their discussion without registering or without being added to the group/whatever, apple probably would not have found it or bothered to cause a fuss. This is by no means ideal though.
Probably more practical, if they had just bought some web space in South Korea or something, instead of using unsafe webspace based in the US, they'd be home free and probably get better service to boot...

All we need now is a big parade of furries, kin, "recreational livestock farmers" and medical researchers to protest against such an evil bill.... *cough*, yeah...

I frankly don't see that what's so bad about hybrids, it's not like animals in the US have any rights whatsoever anyway, and any hybrid actually formed would likely get a better deal in life than most animals...

If it can be used to save/improve/whatever human (or other) life, then, surely that's a good thing...

Probably done by the same bunch of narrow-minded old religious interfering asshats who think abortion, stem cells and the teaching of science are the scourge of the earth.

"Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated", that basically means putting it on a different piece of silicon/on something else entirely, which kind of defeats the object as I see it.

While I haven't looked at this in great detail, it strikes me that achieving anything near useful density is going to very difficult due to entropy, and the simple fact that putting very small volumes at slightly different temperatures right next to each others quickly leads to a relatively uniform temperature distribution.

This sounds somewhat improbable/unfeasible to me...

On the contrary, the birth date you supplied quite definitively indicates that Google is a young company.
It's only been around for 3 weeks after all... ;)