Well, since the PCB is black I'd suggest Nominal Altitude Orbital Motor Igniter.

I cannot shake the thought that such a backronym is best reserved for a future major project, though...

Next they'll open a second farm for the rearing of irate avians. How they'll train them to use slings is anybody's guess...

A bomb on wheels

I'd like to see a crash test at full speed. A vehicle of this mass at 250 km/h must be able to do some serious damage, the amount of kinetic energy it carries is staggering.

RAID misgivings

Quote: "Configured in Raid 10 [...] two drives can fail and still no data loss."

Caveat: but not just ANY two drives; in case of failure of both HDs in the same set, your data is toast.

Body heat energy

How can they obtain energy from body heat while being _inside_ the body?

To get useful work from thermal energy one would need a temperature differential, surely?

RE: Tocco is.....

Yes, but it also means "silly bordering on crazy", so it's no wonder the handset is nowhere to be found here in Italy.

@ Who does she *think* she is ..

More like Rukia Kuchiki from the Bleach anime, I think...

Mine's the black one with the sword, thanks.

3D is the way to go...

... everybody says that, but there are two problems to solve before: how to build the things in the first place (as it is now with only 7-8 layers, you already get enough duds ) and how to cool transistors in the centre of that structure.

@auser: silicon dioxide is on the way out, high-k dielectrics based on hafnium are all the rage these days.

Do people in those countries know of "bookmarks" ?

Methinks the ones pushing for this change do not actually use browsers; otherwise they would realize the only address people have to type - once - is that of their favorite search engine.

They're just bitching about the last two letters of a URL; for all the other elements it's already possible to use non-roman alphabets. To gauge the level of success it's met with webmasters, just run a search on baidu.cn, the most widely used Chinese search engine, for 中国 (=China) and see how many hits you get without a roman URL (hint: the number is between -0.5 and +0.5).

Unless those governments make it mandatory, I don't see many sites will be appearing under those domains; apart from malicious ones that is: with all likelihood, the actual implementation will be through punycode, so that a "http://evilsite.ru" will become an instantly recognizable "http://xn--vilsit-2ofg.xn--p1ag".

Well, at least it will cause a surge in click on dodgy links... Just what the doctor ordered for the Internet.

@Noah Monsey

Regarding why everyone is so cynical about fuel cells, it's because it's so hard to store hydrogen in meaningful quantities. Its weight/volume ratio at standard pressure is abysmal, when liquefied it will boil off in a few days even in the more heavily insulated container (thus preventing you from keeping your expensive car in an enclosed space), the alternative forms of storage - metal hydrides - at the moment do not compare well with high pressure tanks (that give ~200 km of range and are to all effects a bomb behind your seat)...

For more details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy#Storage .

There was a good coverage of the technical/economical issues of hydrogen in a 2005 issue of Scientific American, and to my knowledge there haven't been any breakthrough in the meantime.