I think the accident or intentional ruling has substantial ramifications for insurance purposes.

I eagerly await the day when the crypto crowd finds something that *isn't* good news for crypto. Incredibly volatile -> good for crypto! Been stable for a bit -> good for crypto! Loses half it's value -> good for crypto! Popular in China -> good for crypto! Banned in China -> good for crypto! Pushes your grandma in front of a train and kicks your dog -> good for crypto!

Titan gets to poach off the magnetosphere of a little thing called Saturn. Mars has enough gravity to hold on to some atmosphere. Without a magnetophere, much of it gets stripped away by the solar wind. It's absence also leads to really high radiation exposure. Mars is a shitty place to live, and has fundamental attributes that will continue to make it a shitty place to live. If you have self-sufficient, hermetically sealed habs for a Mars settlement, you are much better off sticking them in Barstow CA. At least then you can still get Amazon Prime.

Sure it is. How is that Austin rollout going Google? I only ask because I live there and at the rate I'm seeing, I'm gonna get it around the year 2525. If man is still alive.

In that case the residents of the other 49 states would like to talk to you about their cut.

It might be some comfort then that such products have never, ever been sold commercially. Monsanto didn't even invent it, they happened to acquire it as part of Delta Pine and Land, which they bought because they wanted to get into the cotton business.

I've always wanted to take a derelict submarine, ship it to Barstow, California and sell 1-year+ stays to these folks and see how it affects their opinion on colonization. All the "we must escape the cradle" arguments for colonization ignore the fact that it is really, REALLY hard to imagine a catastrophe that will render Earth as inhospitable as Mars or the Moon. As bad as the K-T extinction event was, Earth had plenty of flora and even megafauna that survived. Mars? Maybe can support some microbial life. Maybe. If you can build a hermetically sealed, relatively self-sustaining habitat, why not plop them all over Antarctica, the Gobi or even the continental shelves?

So this time will it be headed somewhere with an endgame in mind, or will it simply be more filler because the writers have no idea how to make all the threads pay off in the end? I'm not bitter or anything.

Ah yes. Genes that ruin reproductive success really are a serious problem when they escape into the wild populations. Can you just take five minutes from conspiracy land and think about how that would work in the context of natural selection?

No, they happened to buy the company (which just happened to be the largest provider of cotton seed around, Delta Pine and Land) which had patented the technology. A patent which expries mid-2015, so, probably not the main reason they bought DP&L.

Hell, Monsanto NEVER sold Terminator seeds. I find that people who rant about them as an example of the evils of Monsanto invariably don't know what the hell they are talking about. It is a nice bellwether.

My folks had the same car when I was a kid. It was great because we never had to beg the parents for the keys if we wanted to go wait in the car when we were somewhere, we just had the code.

I still read magazines but do so on my iPad Wired, Vanity Fair, The Economist, Field and Stream. What? I like fishing. I also read the iPad version of the NYT every morning with my coffee.

Yeah, I use those while hosteling in Europe or staying in dodgy places at conferences (Grad Student). Love them.