Who says they have to have previously developed it? They can just coerce the scientists into giving them ther data...

My school (and the school I graduated from before this) use Blackboard Vista for posting grades, assignments, and so on. It relies on Java for its function.

When you want to live on the other side of the world, should you consider that east or west?

A lot of my friends are Chinese and they post in Chinese more often than they do in English. I have been using a firefox plugin to translate, which does a passable job most of the time, but I'm interested in seeing how well facebook could do it. Google's translator for Chinese is not very good in my opinion...

That would be some interesting circular logic, if the original alternative-language versions of the websites were machine-translated

Here in Illinois we definitely have all four seasons, in the extremes I've seen it range from somewhere around 0 F and -20 wind chills in the winter to 95-100/100% humidity in the summer... but falls and springs are, in my opinion, well worth the trouble of both. August was very nice (typical of a Fall) until this week, which was a horrible hot, sticky mess. However, since it was only a 4 day stretch I would say the Fall started a couple weeks ago.

When we started measuring in Kelvin

I pretty much ONLY swear when I'm in front of a computer, and I know I've heard a fair few swears from the guys sitting next to me too. When you can't swear in meetings or conversations with people, where else would you do it?

"The advantage is that it will not grow outside the very limited environment that provides the necessary arsenic. So if you accidentally spill the toxic tank the bug is not going to propagate and contaminate the rest of the world."

Unfortunately this is not necessarily true, as the organism also could incorporate phosphorus if it was given some in the media (and not given arsenic). However, it is certainly most likely to survive in the environment it has adapted to (i.e. a high-arsenic environment).

However, I still agree that this could be useful for mediation, since arsenic-laiden DNA, proteins, lipids, etc. may be less toxic than arsenic itself.

Not necessarily, the original source (doi:10.1038/nature09250) mentions two different possible sources of the error, either the Rydberg constant is off or the theory gives an incorrect prediction. Though they mention both possibilities in the abstract, the authors only mention the former in their conclusions (maybe an oversight, maybe they think that is the actual cause).

Disclaimer: I am not a physicist

How about ImageJ ? It's a light weight, free, fairly powerful, extensible java-based image editor. I don't know exactly how well it compares to Paint.net in terms of usability and features, but it's worth checking out.

For those who are interested, the original article is published in Human Mutation journal, and can be found here: DOI It requires access to the journal to read beyond the abstract.

Yes, just like hitting the top of my TV makes it stop buzzing or throwing my phone against the wall makes it stop ringing.

AFAIK (IANAL), that is not true because companies are allowed to keep things as trade secrets as long as they want before they patent them (if ever). However, once they patent something, it takes 20 years or however long before anyone can do the same thing. And if someone else invents the same thing (not knowing your trade secret) and patents it before the first company to have it does, I think the other company gets to own the rights.

I say it's more likely that the rubber duckies get taken away by a bird / hit by a sharp edge of the glacier and pops / it arrives at the wrong country and people don't know what's going on than that this will work. How long do they expect it will take to travel 30 miles?