"NASA is performing an inhumane act by needlessly killing living organisms on Moon mission, wasting taxpayer money on a cheap publicity stunt", says animal rights group that became notorious a few posts ago for trying to grant chimps person status. "Plants are living things too, and one cannot simply destroy them for entertainment", said group spokesperson in an exclusive interview.

Yes.
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Ever since the 1960s we've been told: * we'd have flying cars in 20 years * we'd have affordable space travel for everyone in 30 years * we'd have permanent Moon/Mars bases in N years * we'd have fusion power in 50 years (and we're still being told that) and so on. Star Trek-like medical technology, human-like AI, self-driving cars... Just a fad. 50 years would be too soon I guess. Sorry for being so pessimistic (realistic?)

Plastic money deteriorates from current use as well, especially the lower denominations. In practice plastic notes are being replaced all the time.

I don't think you understand correctly how a superscalar processor works. Maybe you're confusing parallel instruction execution with pipelining? Even single-core, non-hyperthreading processors have been able to execute multiple instructions *simultaneously, in a single cycle* since the first Pentiums or earlier. See, they can fetch two instructions at once from the cache because it has a wide internal bus, decode them simultaneously, and execute them simultaneously (if they are independent) because each core has multiple execution units. Modern processors can easily execute 3 or 4 instructions at once on a single core, in a single cycle. As I understand it, hyperthreading comes in when part of those execution units are sitting idle because there are not enough instructions in the main thread that can be executed in parallel - they're not independent, some depend on the results of others - and so those idle units are used to process another thread. Of course it's slower than having two full cores, but the point is that a single core CAN execute a lot of stuff in parallel.

That chip actually consists of 4 dice (Xilinx calls them Super Logic Regions) bound over a special silicon interconnect layer. Source: http://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds180_7Series_Overview.pdf The reason they do this rather than use a larger die is exactly to get a higher yield (defect density is constant, defect probability increases with surface). Therefore I highly doubt they're only getting one good chip per wafer. Cost is based on supply and demand, and these chips are very, very specialized. They're used in applications where costs are huge anyway, such as high-performance IC prototyping - things like CPUs, ASICs for multi-hundred Gb/s switches/routers et cetera.

Yes, I would. Are you suggesting we ban all TX-capable SDRs because they can be misused by kids? While we're at it, let's also stop any research and abandon all technology because, you know, it can be misused. Law enforcement is paid to enforce the law: if someone is transmitting illegally, triangulate them out and make them stop. Do this a few times and I'm sure kids will quickly get the idea that it's not OK to use their WiFi in undocumented modes to transmit in ambulance bands or whatever. Keep your hands off my equipment!

I'm sorry, but the link to NASA's page currently points to just a generic text, sprinkled with big words and phrases, that really doesn't say anything. Details please?

I don't trust anyone, that's why I use encryption when transferring data over the Internet that I don't want others to look at. The ISPs only know that there's been a connection from A to B at time T and nothing more. And that's why I don't have any sensitive data on third party servers, Google-owned or otherwise. Chill out.

There is no Games button at the top of my Stream yet.

Some might say they're mining data off of hard drives sent for recycling. Be sure to wipe them clean.

They don't need to be created at rest and accelerated, they're already propagating when created. Photons of light are not like tennis balls that you have to hit to get moving, they're always propagating. In fact they can't have any other speed than c because they have no rest mass. If you're not satisfied with this and must have a 'mechanical' mental picture of the process, imagine an antenna transmitting radio waves. There's a so-called near-field zone around the antenna where the field is not yet freely propagating as waves, but is interacting with the antenna that generates it. As you move away from the antenna this field "detaches" and becomes propagating waves. Quantum mechanics models this near-field as virtual photons, which have rest mass because of the interaction and don't propagate at c. These virtual photons are not light yet, just electromagnetic fields.

There are so many things wrong with your comment I don't event know where to start. Everything has mass, but light has no REST mass, meaning if it were to stop then it would have no mass, which would be impossible. Electrons and protons for example, and airplanes, do have rest mass so they can stand still. If you take electrons and pump energy into them they start moving faster and faster. If you pump more energy their speed increases, but the closer they get to the speed of light the smaller this increase becomes. There is no limit to the energy they can have, the more you pump the faster they go. If you want to push them from 0.999999c to 0.99999999c, then fine. Also, the mass of any particle is its energy divided by the speed of light squared. That's mass, not rest mass. It increases with speed. For photons which always travel at the speed of light, if you give them more energy they stay at the same speed, but they get heavier. You can also give them as much energy as you want. Finally, if photons had rest mass their speed would vary with their energy just as it happens with electrons. Experiments confirmed with great accuracy that this doesn't happen, i.e. red light from distant stars arrives at the same time as blue light. Please read the Wikipedia article on special relativity, and study the friendly equations, they're not *that* complicated and everything I said is actually very clearly explained by said equations. There's nothing that's unexplained, except maybe why are the equations like that. Answer: because all experiments to date, including this one, fit them. We don't know fundamentally why, that's just how we see the world work when we look closely enough. We keep looking to see if the current equations are possibly slightly wrong and enhance them to fit what we see.

Actually you would experience "local time" at the exact same rate you usually experience it, but you would notice things you fly by go at a different rate, look distorted and maybe happen in a different order. If you go on a fast space trip you actually "time-travel" in the future, as when you come back you'd have the normal age you expect but the Earth would have aged more. That is because your clock does indeed slow down due to acceleration (not speed), but you don't feel that. Special relativity as-is doesn't really deal with speeds greater that c, as that leads to square roots of negatives in the equations.