I worked in a bank where everything ran over IPX. Our massive (expensive) upgrade simply tunneled IPX over TCP. I suspect people will want exactly the same upgrade path. Same old apps on the same old system, only sitting on top of a new one.

So.. nick a buran spaceplane. Wonderful though the shuttle was, given the technology at the time, a shuttle/spaceplane was the logical design for any spacefaring nation. I'd have loved to see Buran make more than test flights. Even then it had advantages over the shuttle as it could make automatic landings, something which wasn't added to the shuttle for decades. Buran was sadly brought to its knees due to Russian political in-fighting; crippled due to the economy dropping into the toilet and finally killed due to such poor funding its own shelter fell on; it crushing it. Flag-wave all you want, but I'm saddened by such technological beauty being neglected due to political "them -vs - us"squabbles. I've one of Buran's thermal tiles on a shelf and was really shocked by just how light they were, given the heat they could manage. RIP buran.

An ever increasing number.. this bug cropped up because on a dual-boot machine sophos broke grub2 os_prober and so the machine couldn't detect windows anymore. Admittedly grub2 doesn't assistance with with being broken, but I'm sure this didn't help. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbugs.launchpad.net%2Fubuntu%2F%2Bsource%2Flinux%2F%2Bbug%2F1027110

The Bodleian library in Oxford was once like you. They thought nobody but the commoners would like this Shakespeare nonsense so didn't bother to collect any of his works when they were first published. The same was thought of the Victorian novel. As time progressed these were considered great works of literature and the library (or really, anyone else) had copies of the first editions. These days (about 600 years later) they've learned from experience and the Bod keeps copies of damn near everything published in the UK from PhD thesis to books to knitting patterns and cartoons. You don't know if 100s of years in the future that these will be considered priceless and treated with near-reverence.

My grandfather was a librarian for one of the libraries in Belfast; he came home to regale his family with a book that was returned. For reasons which were never explained, It had a slice of raw bacon in it.

APT-X lossless does what it says on the tin (http://www.csr.com/products/61/aptx-lossless)

The codecs being compared don't include APT-X which (in various flavours) is lossless, as close to realtime as makes no difference and has been used for everything from high-end rack mounted kit in TV studios down to being embedded in wireless microphones and bluetooth headsets.

Don't forget that there are multiple nucleic acid triplets which code for a single amino acid and that these triplets can overlap. So if the output doesn't make sense on the first attempt there are other means of encoding and it'll also change depending on if there's a start codon (AUG) or not.

In The Fog of War, Robert S McNamara (the eighth Secretary of Defense for the USA) commented: "Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning." "If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning." Given this lawyer has suddenly discovered a giant groundswell of opposition to a war he unilaterally started and which presumably has few people rushing to his cause, perhaps it's time to reevaluate his reasoning and perhaps discover that what he's decided is the right course of action is no longer appropriate for a world which has moved on.

For me the nvidia-supplied drivers "just work". The ATI ones on the other hand have just been a cause of constant chaos. I've always had better luck with the drivers supplied by the hardware manufacturer than those written by someone who whilst very clever often doesn't actually know how the hardware in fact works and is therefore trying to work backwards (or in the rare cases of having a decent data sheet, reinvent the wheel). In work I've gone back to the intel supplied e1000e drivers as after a few days of being an MPI node the system would lock solid. I couldn't even tell if it was a panic as the screen wouldn't even display anything.

A real programmer can write COBOL in any language.

The disappearing spoon should be easy, there's a classic prank of making a teaspoon out of gallium (or a gallium-tin or gallium-indium-tin alloy) where if you put the offered spoon (which is solid at room temperature) into your tea, it melts.

In case anyone's interested, the chamber referred to is fairly similar to this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethicsgradient/sets/72157606434322104/ which is the EM anechoic chamber at my old job. No cthulhu antenna but all the spikes you can eat.

I'd be curious to see how these figures compare against the earnings of the companies against which they directly compete and more importantly, the non-portable equivalents of their products. As far as most people are concerned, apple are mainly selling nicely boxed PC laptop components at a knock-down price. I do not care to start a flame war as to the quality (or lack thereof) of said components, however apple appear to have abandoned the the innovation in their previous market and designs and are now (to me) are pandering solely to (and dominating) to the youth market consisting of people with a large degree disposable income who care mainly about appearance. For devices which are going to be maintained and upgraded over a period of time (desktop PCs for example) apple seem to have fallen way behind the curve and thus, I would like to see direct comparisons between (say) apple vs lenovo for laptops or apple vs dell (or fill in the blank for cheap) desktops.