I want a flying segway for my sister-in-law.

Russian humour, which overlaps a lot with Brazilian humour, was a glory to me when I learned Russian. This joke is my favourite, I've updated it a little but not too much.

Hey Sergei! Long time no see! Is that a wedding ring?
Yes my old friend, it is a wedding ring.
I never thought that you of all people get married.
Well, I got tired of eating at McDonalds.
And now..?
And now I like eating at McDonalds.


By the bye, I learned Russian to read Tolstoi in the original and I discovered that the transalation is better.

Just imagine one of these beauties with Cyanogen! I want one of those for sure!

It was a glottal stop and not an exclamation mark. He had the hiccups when he wrote the summary.

Just imagine writing a job listing for someone to replace a retiring remployee!

Clearly they'd have to train someone suitable on the job, and for the right person it wouldn't be too hard, but when that person moves on it would look very strange on their resume.

Ah yes. Once computers used to run at 12MHz but had a Turbo button that let them run at 16MHz when you needed extra speed.

The story is called "The Planck Drive" and the author is Greg Egan (the man without a photo ). The story can be found in the book "Luminous" among other places and I highly recommend it.

Yeah. Derren pulled out all the stops and actually got one man to believe that he was in the middle of a zombie apocalypse for days on end. It was a masterpiece, Derren's best work in my opinion.

A zombie apocalypse happened in Britain and was shown in a BBC documentary by Derren Brown.

You do know that hawkinspeter was the one who mentioned April Fool, right?

LOL! I actually felll for this until you mentioned April Fool. I guess I'm low hanging fruit.

Who cares anymore? Gnome 3 could have special in a good way but instead it was special in an OMG way. They had a chance and blew it. If they had eaten their crow warm the situation could have been salvaged but now half their user base has abandoned them and the other half has become divided. It's going to be hard for them to maintain a critical mass in the long term.

Ubuntu has a similar problem but not so pronounced. I'm typing this on a Kubuntu computer and I have no complaints with it. I've tried Unity twice and rejected it both times, once because it was ugly and once because it was unusable. Ubuntu is bigger than Unity though while Gnome can't be bigger than Gnome.

Thank you. Everything is clear now and I've also learned why Youtube hasn't been closed down which is something I've often wondered about.

What does that even mean?

I am so glad I never became a lawyer like my mother wanted me to.

So any planets outside the goldilocks zone are unbearable?

There's no way to know for sure but I've often wondered if Earth being a binary plant and the warmer Earth core from the tidal force of the Moon affects where the goldilocks zone is. It'll certainly have made a difference on the volcanoes that broke snowball earth and the resultant explosion of complex life, and also on the intertidal zone that must have been so important when life later moved from water to land.

There are two binary planets in our solar system out of perhaps twenty in total so very roughly that hopefully indicates that 10% of these exoplanets might have suitable moons. That's a very promising percentage when looking for complex life in other systems.