I use google reader (though take your pick of rss readers) and set it up to receive feeds from New Scientist, Scientific American, Not Exactly Rocket Science (Ed Yong's excellent science writing blog), ... (I also have some some things you won't have access to unless you are at a university: science, nature, and some more specialized bio stuff on my feed), these give access to a bunch of good articles even without paying anything. If you are on Google+, I also suggest following Ed Yong, he posts a lot of cool and interesting stuff.
(Disclaimer: I am in the middle of a Ph.D. in physics, so while I have tried to pick out the more approachable stuff, I make no guarantees that some of it may go over your head)

I wonder if a future step will be to mix the GPUish vector op logic in with the logic for the regular CPU. It could further shorten interconnects (though at the cost of lengthening some others) and I would think it might have head dissipation advantages, if you are doing a graphics heavy task, the heat is spread over the whole chip instead of all being generated at the one GPU sector. I am sure there is an "oh god the complexity" here as far as actually doing that mixing, and it might make selectivly shutting down the GPU when not in use harder. Anyone who has actual chip design experience want to comment?

People haven't been talking about what the X-Ray dosage from this device is. Quick googling didn't turn up a number, but it has to be nontrivial. You don't even wear a lead shield over your genitals like you do in a medical x ray.

Methinks unless the number is pretty low I might just tell them to do the actual strip search if it is so important to security. That or stay away from those airports. I hope they don't put it in place in all of the English airports before I get a chance to visit.

I personally prefer to know that I have a copy of my own emails stored on a computer that I control. Sure google is good at what they do and all and they are not evil, but server foul ups happen. It is also nice for when my laptop is not connected to the internet.

Web apps also have some usability issues: no right click, usually less good keyboard shortcuts and/or clashes with browser. They loose screen real estate that the browser takes up. A tab within can't be easily alt tabbed to. There are not as many good options for say notification about new mail.

Gmail and the like are nice for when I am not on one of my computers, but there are still many advantages to having an actual local client, some can probably be mitigated by browser interface improvements, but some are going to be a lot harder.

So I for one am glad to see thunderbird is still being developed

Actually, a well written CSI episode on this could be rather valuable for public education. If they made the important ramifications clear: DNA evidence can still exonerate, DNA evidence is still useful but you should consider that it has been planted, especially if it conflicts with other evidence, and therefore take it with a grain of a salt, and there are probably other ones, IANAFS (I Am Not A Forensic Scientist).

I like your point here, and substantially agree. However in the interest of sparking a lively discussion on this topic (which I think is an interesting topic and worth discussing), I am going to play devil's advocate for a minute her.

In a way he is standing up for his freedoms/exercising them, at least in a weak easy way. He is voting with his feet (kind of like Amazon just did in North Carolina). Nominally if England (or any country) suffers severe brain drain among its highly educated (and hopefully highly productive, though he is posting on slashdot, so no guarantee's on that :) ) taxpayers, I mean citizens, I mean subjects, ah, call it whatever you want, that should sent a message to someone that their policies are disapproved of. It will probably go unheard, but it does at least hit send.

On the flip side, if all the people who cared enough about freedom to move to another country to secure it moved to a small list of countries that would, or at least should, give those countries a substantial population of people who care about freedom, and hopefully would be willing to protect it.

So while I agree with you that it is kind of the cop out answer to this problem, it is an answer of sorts, and is not completely invalid. I can see where he is coming from, the interests that fight against our freedoms are very entrenched and powerful, so it can feel futile. Don't let that stop you from trying though.

I realize you are joking, but in all seriousness, I don't think there would be any trouble finding volunteers if things were done properly.

I know if such an option existed when I was still young enough I would seriously consider it. I would want to make sure there were solid plans in place for supporting the colony until it was self sufficient and that it actually had a good chance of succeeding, but for the adventure of a lifetime and the chance to start humanity's expansion into space, I would be more than willing to commit myself to living on another planet for as long as I could manage. I don't think there are any shortage of other people who would have this opinion, certainly not in the numbers that would be able to be sent in the near future.