I received a Fire Stick in the mail before Christmas but did not order it, it wasn't in my Amazon order history, and AFAICT it wasn't a gift from a friend. I asked Amazon WTF? and they just said: "If you received the item in error you can keep it. You will not be charged for something you didn't order." Perhaps Amazon was just dumping extra stock into their delivery system so they could announce the "150M Sold!" headline. The headline, after all, is worth something to marketing and PR. The price of a guerilla stock dump could have been worth it.

Meanwhile this stick just sits in its original box which gathers dust: I've got Roku setup everywhere already.

No this is new. We've been 20 years away for 60 years. Now we're only 10 years away. The question is... "How many decades will it be until we're only 5 years away?"

BTW, there was news out of MIT about 3 or 4 years ago that said we were maybe only 5 to 10 years away. Isn't this fun?

Meanwhile, the cost of the first viable fusion power plant we could probably cover every house in the US with solar panels with a backup battery. But... fusion! It's soooo coool! And it only produces low level radioactive waste instead of the really nasty stuff from fission. I just can't wait for it to be in my back yard.

Now... if we could only find a viable way to store low level radioactive waste for 20k years...

For the past week or so I've been going onto my phone's YouTube app and intentionally loading ads from the US party I have no intention of voting for. I don't actually watch the ads, but load 'em up for playing. Just doing my little part to help drain their campaign coffers. It helps alleviate my rage and doom scrolling.

Mars is COLD and has a very thin atmosphere.

A more accurate locale would be a very high altitude cold desert. Using those criteria the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica would be a better location for a simulated Mars station.

I'm using a similar MBP, but with only 16GB of RAM, which I thought was extravagant but useful for building large C++ codebases. Dual-booted with Kubuntu-14.10 but I haven't booted to OSX for about a year.

I'm running Linux (Kubuntu) on a 2014 MacBook Pro Retina 16GB. It doesn't run well on this laptop. Things that I never did get working:

* suspend when closing the screen
* webcam
* phone-jack audio
* trackpad -- it works but I don't like how it works so I disabled it and use a laptop mouse

Things that didn't work after install but I was able to get working after some struggle:

* USB headset
* font sizes of KDE and various applications (Chromium and Firefox have their own settings)

I should note: some of the problems above may KDE's fault -- they might work fine under another desktop... dunno.

The best linux laptop I ever had was a 2012 MacBook Air. Everything worked well once Intell fixed their graphics drivers. Unfortunately it only had 2GB of ram and could not be upgraded.

I use vim for almost 100% of all editing. My main programming language is C++

Actually we know that big tech companies are evil (they are motivated by profit for shareholders and little else). What is catching everyone's eye, and fitting well with our collective understanding of India's economy and politcs, is how fast that thievery was "solved". At least in the EU or US the owed taxes would have taken a few months to work their way through the courts. In India it is solved in days. The first thing I thought, and many others did too, is that somewhere there are some Indian officials with some fresh money in their pockets, and the Indian public has been robbed once again.

It isn't just sea turtles and waterfowl. On my way to work yesterday I looked into a field and saw a cow munching on a plastic bag that had blown into its pasture. We should eliminate plastic bags. I've already stopped accepting them at stores -- I always carry a messenger bag with me where I put all of my purchases (think globally, act locally).

RTFA

This is false. Science does indeed stand in opposition to Religion. At least, to anything that Religion says is "true".

Science is the pursuit of truth using the scientific method, which relies on reason, logic, and proof by experimentation and examination of evidence. Meanwhile religion is faith in traditional "truths" that typically lack supporting evidence, or fly in the face of the evidence. Therefore the false "truths" of religion will constantly be under attack by the advancement of science and any true "truths" that religion happens to have will ultimately be supported.

Unfortunately, the history of science's triumphs over religious doctine informs us that religion is mostly myth and superstition and contains very few true "truths".

Maybe the DOE should bid on that supercomputer being liquidated by the US state of New Mexico.

The science fiction novel called Diaspora by Greg Egan had some interesting mathy sections. It wasn't rigorous, as I recall, but it certainly went into more "depth" than your average sci-fi story.

It's an international reverse psychology gambit to fool the US population into electing Romney.