So could you do this in a cafetière?

You included "Gotham" in your list: there was a trailer for that last night on Channel 5, where it's due to start sometime in October. HTH HAND ;-)

Absolutely: when will people learn that annoying someone who can bone a chicken, skin a rabbit or peel a bucket of potatoes with a twirl of her wand is a really, really bad idea?

It always make me wonder, seeing stories like this set in the future, why none of the characters ever seem to have heard of movies like Aliens or Event Horizon or bother to take even token precautions…

Wait. what? In what possible way is that anything to do with what I posted?

Copy/pasting the same reply to multiple people doesn't make it more correct.

So how come you get to tell everybody else what they can or cannot do?

I still have trouble getting my head around the mindset of somebody who thinks it's safe to harm another person when that person is highly likely to be in a position to kill you: if I have somebody watching my back, I think I'd prefer it to be somebody who would not want me dead. You hear about unpopular officers…

This reminds me of the worm things from Deep Rising…

Trapping them and moving them elsewhere isn't going to help: they need to sterilise the resident cats and put them back to defend the territory. Otherwise, what you end up with is an endless stream of cats flooding into a desirable area with nobody claiming it.

Please tell me that all the names are being recorded: in the event we ever have a proper revolution with a wall and everything, these guys are pretty much nominating themselves to be put up against it and shot, amirite?

Remind me how we flag spam with this new system?

My understanding is that this works because Gmail caches images attached to emails so that when you open your mail it can't be sneakily tracked by the sender detecting when you access the images. I guess that they have some kind of list of hash values and if a matching image enters the cache an alarm goes off. So this…

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As I understand it, no: you have to keep supplying energy to sustain the thrust.

The issue is that the microwaves are being bounced around inside a sealed container. According to "classical" rules this should not produce any net thrust in any given direction because the forces exerted will balance out.

I was watching the Special Features on the first Hobbit movie, when they were filming the Goblin Cavern sequence and all the actors were wearing the little motion-capture balls so that their heads could be converted into goblins, and I wondered: what if they could each be wearing something like an Oculus Rift and be…

I saw it on this Numberphile video too:

"We also have to make sure that we learn as much as we can about elements of provocation."

I recall visiting my uncle who was stationed in Northwestern Germany with the RAF in the mid-80s, and the "squadron vehicle" was an old-style Mini stripped right down to the basics to reduce weight, and the silencing removed to "improve performance".