In practice very few of those MIT/Caltech graduates go back and work for institutions like ISRO in India (yes a few of them go back to teach in schools like IITs in India). From my experience, most of the people who work for Indian space and related programes had their education in India.

There quite a few publishers with "DRM free only" e-books. For example:

http://www.manning.com/
http://oreilly.com/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/

Encourage them if you do not like DRMed books.

The probability that one will need stem cells from cord blood is very low. Most of the treatment methods are highly experimental and applicable only to a handful of groups. Most of these conditions are identifiable during genetic tests and screening during pregnancy.

At least some of the public blood banks which collect cord blood promise that if you donate cord blood and in future a need arises they will try to locate cord blood which will match the donor (or try to give the donated blood if it is still available). Try to locate a public blood bank which operates like that.

Published in 1984 The UNIX Programming Environment by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environment . The book remains interesting, useful and relevant even now after more than 27 years. It remains a 'must read' for anyone who uses UNIX like systems. Compare this with most of the 'Programming Books' now, which goes out of date within a few months after publishing.

This is incorrect. I KNOW that AA is not

- at least for the routes I take. In fact even the actual paid ticket price is comparable (if you compare the maintenance, service, food, checked in charges it may turn out to be cheaper than AA).

That must be a really poorly designed system. I have experience using IFES of a number of non-US carriers - I found them to be really sophisticated and reliable applications (approaching the level of complexity of an operating system). At least in the case of ICE (Emirates) it is Linux (Redhat).

Childhood's End is by Arthur C. Clarke

I use one of the older motherboards from VIA (VIA PC-1 PC2500 uses C7 CPU - FlexATX - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_pc-1_Initiative ) with a minibox M3ATX ( http://www.mini-box.com/M3-ATX-DC-DC-ATX-Automotive-Computer-car-PC-Power-Supply ) powersupply to run the whole system from battery (13.8V DC). The system uses a microdrive/SSD for booting with a standard Debian X86 install.

With 2G RAM power consumption is approximately 25W. It handles remote desktop, webserver, live multiple VOIP audio streams, ... with a lot of reserve power left. This is a remote unattended system (no physical access) - It has been running almost continuously for the past more than 2 years.

I thought it was disappointing for a pilot episode. I know it is too early (may be it will improve). A combination of the bad elements from SGA and BSG ! Stereotyping of people who work in technology and science. Looks like they plan to stretch it like BSG.

The attitude of the (US) airport security personnel also depends on the locality I guess (I am assuming that most of them are recruited locally).

For example in a tiny airport like Providence (PVD) one will often find unbelievably arrogant security personnel. Security personnel in larger (attached to larger cities) airports - for example like Detroit (DTW) - are often more polite and reasonable.

I am referring to US domestic air travel.

This should be moderated as "funny" or "Troll" - I hope someone will do that :)

Not correct - during the past 2 years INR (Indian Rupee) has fluctuated between around 37 to 52 to a USD (right now it is around 48 - exchange rate changes almost daily).

I am quoting from a local language news paper ( http://www.keralakaumudi.com/ ) from India:

Preliminary analysis shows that Chandrayan likely failed due to inadequate heat shielding (problem was radiated heat from the Moon) causing some of the instruments to fail (like Star Sensor). They raised the orbit to around 200km (from the initial 100km) to save the mission and it did not help much.

According to the report Chandrayan was successful in completing 95 percent of the mission objectives. The reports also said that they (ISRO) are going ahead with the next moon mission.

I remember an online vendor of technical documents which went from no DRM document distribution to highly restrictive DRMed document distribution. This eventually antagonized most of their user base and they actually lost a major portion of their users.

DRM initially gives (especially to the managers) an impression of being an effective way to get more revenue by squeezing the users. Within a short period of time users will find ways to get the same information through other means (irrespective of the sophistication of technology used to implement DRM).

Probably because PICAXE Microcontrollers can be programmed in a simple subset of BASIC.

It is very easy to write code, program and debug (they don't require a special programming interface). They are **really simple** to use, very powerful and versatile.