The 34th street office is right across Empire State Building and is next to an Amazon bookstore.

Drag your eyes to the right and note that there is a separate product/service and award date. The nature of gov contracting means there is likely a base contract, and when a new job comes up (e.g. healthcare.gov) they mod the contract and issue a new award. These are 114 separate scopes of work, separate projects. ~113 of which have nothing to do with healthcare.gov.

I did see the right-hand-size description. Those different scopes of work can still be parts of the same big project. In most projects in government or/and private sector you bill for telecom services separately from software development and from system configuration and so on. Pardon for being somewhat cynical, but I am not surprised at all that they can milk the GOV for over 500 M$.

That figure covers 114 separate contracts (see http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_year=all&idvpiid=HHSM500200700015I&typeofview=transactions )

All these contracts are with the same "HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, DEPARTMENT". It seems like they itemized the whole work as a serious of smaller contracts. With the general governmental corruption and inefficiency it is quite believable that they could waste half a G$ on a single IT system.

Citibank offers "Virtual Credit Cards" that are generated for you on demand. Each card is valid for one merchant only (the first transaction locks the merchant), has configurable expiration date and maximum amount limit. Even if stolen such virtual cards are of little use to the bad guys.

From now on, your options are KDE if you want a qt-based setup or Xfce/LXDE if you want gtk.
Surprise, surprise. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXDE#Qt_port/ LXDE slowly but surely moves into Qt camp.

Shorter range is a significant advantage today because it reduces interference. Interference is probably the main reason for lack of speed and reliability in modern city apartment WiFi.
RF propagation (and, thus, interference) is in no way dependent on the QAM modulation scheme and is the same for QPSK, QAM-16, QAM-64, QAM-256. Moreover, going to higher modulation constellations could force you to increase transmit power generating even more interference. Just my two cents from real world RF engineering.

Without the Soviet Union, they're hovering around the 10th largest economy in the world (about even with Canada, depending on what source you look at), and the 8th largest by population.

Not quite correct. According to the Purchasing-Power-Parity GDP measure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) Russia is #6 right ahead of the United Kingdom.

Basically, the device is converting high-entropy thermal energy into even higher entropy incoherent electromagnetic radiation (light output). So, the second law of thermodynamics is not violated.

Nonsense. Imagine, that your higher entropy incoherent electromagnetic radiation is absorbed back by matter and becomes heat again. In your model entropy will go down. Besides, black body radiation is the EM incoherent light of maximum entropy which is in thermal equilibrium with matter. LED light spectrum is almost monochromatic and has lower entropy than black-body radiation at the same temperature.

... Tweets sent by bloggers and activists this week who are protesting the disputed presidential elections in Russia.

It was Russian parliament elections. Presidential elections are in March 2012.

I am sick and tired of this kind of "research" that late Richard Feynman used to call "cargo cult science". Surviving in the North generally required more cognitive processing due to variety of factors like cold temperatures (one needs to invent cloth), scarcity of food (better hunting techniques, advanced social skills). Less light might affect eye sight but I think it is a minor factor when it comes to brain size. To summarize, living in the North did affect brain size and cognitive development but it is all but impossible to attribute that to the amount of light. There are other more important factors at play here.

Common sense would suggest a moratorium on the old nuclear reactors of the type used in Fukushima and rapid construction of new safer alternatives which exist. But again, asking for common sense is demanding too much:-)

The processor family is called Loongson and not "LongSoon" as summary says. But the typo is funny in its own way.

NYC department of education found an ultimate solution. All electronic gadgets sans HP calculators are banned in the public schools.

Can three turkeys make and eagle?
I will not be surprised that in few months from now a triumvirate of Microsoft, Intel and Nokia emerge as a consortium to push Nokia made mobile devices with Intel mobile chips running MS software. Entirely possible...

When MeeGo comes in, say, in a year (and I'm being optimistic here), why would mobile developers care to divert resources from existing well-entrenched platforms?

I guess because of a cross-platform nature of the Qt-based MeeGo development tools. You develop for MeeGo and without much fuss cross compile to MS/Apple/Linux Desktops. Hopefully, Intel will port Qt to Android, then you can compile for it too.