I read the quantum vacuum polarization paper, and was intrigued by it. Anti-matter particles having negative gravitational charge is definitely a leap, but I wonder if this could explain more diverse phenomena. The author does mention the Pioneer anomaly in the paper.

Well, starting now, what I do is take cash advances on my credit cards in order to make purchases.

If I was the world's youngest billionaire, I'd probably feel better about sharing the details of my life too.

Not to worry - you're significantly more popular now that I stole your credit cards and used them to pay the stalkers that are now surrounding your house.

Just to provide a single obvious example, Mark Zuckerberg can look at your posts anytime he wants.

Well, having a profile at all means that you are subject to Facebook's terms of service, which is not only subject to change at any time, but currently grants them the right to the information that you do post - at mininum, that comprises a map of your associations, which could easily find itself in the hands of government or law enforcement agencies should they have use for it, since you signed away the rights to this information when you signed up. By your own admission, you post about the books that you read, which happens to be a very useful resource for establishing your psychological profile and your political leanings. Facebook also has rights to the images that you post, and your posts to the site not only establish your frequency of use (another behavioural indicator), but can establish patterns of behaviour - for example, times that you are most likely to be at your computer or away from home. The Facebook terms of service provide for indefinite preservation of anything you have posted to the site since you signed up, so even the things that you choose to delete from your profile indicate the extent of your privacy savvy, or the subjects, photos, etc. which you may find embarrassing or otherwise inappropriate for public consumption. Games and quizzes only make it easier for Facebook to share your data with third parties - they have no bearing on Facebook itself, and even the limited information presented above constitutes a valuable package. You may wish to consider whether handing over, without compensation of any kind, that sort of information to a company whos CEO famously declared that privacy is an "outdated concept", is a particularly wise decision.

I wonder if there has ever been a study correlating social networking use with narcissistic personality disorder? (I'm not narcissistic, I just have a very high level of self-efficacy.)

I'm not anti-social, I'm just misanthropic.

Sure, you can't opt out of smart metering, but you can control your consumption pattern. On your side of the meter, you are perfectly within your rights to install any combination of batteries, inverters, relays, charging circuits and so forth. Look at your consumption averaged over a month, and configure your system to draw the appropriate constant current 24/7. Sure, this may not be cheap to implement, but if anyone is going to be purchasing my data, I want to be the one selling it.

I wish someone would have told me ahead of time about the no pants thing. Fortunately, the meeting wasn't a total disaster, as my business card impressed everyone.

Why bother with all of that laborious drilling when there are huge amounts of oil just sitting there, waiting to be vacuumed off the ocean floor?...

...is that most parents kids know more about computers than they do. Once they detect the keylogger, they aren't going to be impressed, and a kid with a packet sniffer, deep packet inspection tools and access to your household router logs can potentially put you in an embarrassing position. Just sayin...

Sooo... lightsaber anyone?

What they should do is send, by snail mail, an authorization code which the copyright holder can use to access an online repository of identifications. Of course, each individual ID should require a CAPTCHA to access, after first covering the cost of the mailing by online payment.

Helium is not metabolized, so expense is a non issue if the technology for reclaim / recycling is employed. I am a diver, and have been using Helium in Heliox (He/O2) and Trimix (He/N2/O2) for years. The scarcity issue is not new - commercial diving operations have employed gas reclaim equipment for many years, because they go through tons of the stuff. The recreational and technical diving crowd were slower to respond, but the peaks in the fluctuating helium prices have helped to speed the adoption of rebreathers for this purpose, drastically reducing helium consumption. When I first started mixed-gas diving, every single one of us was blowing through hundreds of cubic feet of the stuff every dive - perfectly good helium lost to open circuit exhaust. Now, most serious divers are moving to closed circuit equipment, and as the cost of helium rises, the lifetime cost of closed circuit gear is becoming cheaper in comparison to the open circuit alternative. I most often still dive on open circuit, but feel the pain every time I purchase gas. I have six T cylinders in my basement - as I recall, I filled them for about $80 each when I first started. Now, the cost is over $200. My point being, for many uses, drastic increases in helium cost will simply drive technology development, as opposed to outright prohibiting historical uses of the gas.