Tribalism much? Making a broad, sweeping generalization about millions of people is generally a good way to be wrong. While I personally believe twitter isn't much more than a noteworthy fad, and there are obviously a lot of morons using it for inane banter, there are also very intelligent people making the most of those 140 characters and you can't dismiss them with mere hand-waving.

Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan were also unable to "understand" that notion, which makes me wonder: If some of history's greatest minds have trouble with it, perhaps there's some merit to it after all? I mean, if with physics we can determine some powerful, penetrating truth of the universe, does that not have the potential to answer some "why" questions? We live in the universe, but it also lives in us. We are conscious molecules formed from stardust billions of years old. As we learn about the universe, we learn about ourselves. "Why" just might be something we learn, too.

Pretty much. At least it's not quite as bullshit as say, EULAs, right? Andrea recently bought a copy of StarCraft II to see the pretty graphics on her gaming laptop (unfortunately the game runs pretty awful on her Mac Mini), and I think the EULA takes up more pages in the manual than game lore portion. It's pretty fun though, even if it's essentially the same game. Ironically she hasn't even played it yet because the Zerg are "too scary" or something. There's a "casual" difficulty setting though, I think it would work for her, haha.

In response to your hypothetical situation there, I would imagine the answer to whether or not he's protected from liability would be "it depends on a number of obscure factors." Say the guy with the damaged property hires a lawyer that finds some obscure law on the books that can be twisted into some sort of liability claim even though the pool was perfectly licenced. Or the reverse, say the pool was unlicenced and a lawyer for that guy finds a law on the books to ague against liability; a current events example of this tactic would be BP using century old maritime laws to argue against liability for damages. And I'm sure I don't need to point it out to you, but for anyone else reading, there's such a vast number of obsolete laws on the books that can be re-interpreted and twisted to whatever lawyer's whim that it almost ends up turning into a sort of a pissing contest between lawyers with a huge incentive for both parties to settle out of court. That's not me disparaging the entire legal system in America though... it's certainly nothing like China, for example, where they make sure there are enough random laws on the books that an average person can't go a day without breaking a few. That way when the government wants to lock someone up for whatever reason, they have a perfectly legal official excuse.

They don't care if you want it or not. The studios want it because it allows them to justify an inflated ticket price. They can also tout it as a reason to actually go to a movie theater instead of waiting for the DVD/Blu-ray. An analogy would be when theaters moved to widescreen to compete with television. Did audiences back then really care about the dimensions or aspect ratio of the screen? Probably not. Myself, I think 3D has potential. For example, in Despicable Me, as the end credits role, the minions attempt to "escape" from the screen, using ladders pointed toward the audience, swinging on ropes, etc. Even though this amusing scene takes place as the credits role, it's one where the humor simply wouldn't translate well to 2D. Though it does seem obvious that 3D is an afterthought in most movies today, added only to increase revenue from ticket sales.

The nearest star to the sun is 4 light years, or 25 trillion miles away. Perhaps the nearest intelligent life is simply too far away to detect? And with no guarantee that alien civilizations will use radio, there's no reason to assume we could detect them with programs like SETI. But how else do we expect detect an intelligent civilization trillions of miles away? We're just barely able to detect Earth-sized extrasolar planets. Maybe we need to get better at looking before we complain about not being able to find anything.

And there's idea that very concept of "causality" is a property of our universe and thus not necessarily applicable before the Big Bang.

Apparently there are no lab conditions on earth that are not duplicated somewhere else in the universe.

Not the case for temperature. Scientists have cooled a piece of rhodium metal to 100 picokelvin. The coldest observed temperature in the universe is about 1K. I remember reading an article where some scientist joked that any region of space colder than what we've achieved in a laboratory would have to be in the laboratory of an alien civilization. ;)

A lot about World of Warcraft still doesn't make sense to my videogame-loving brain, but I'm not sure that the people who stick with WoW for years really love videogames to begin with.

Well, I love video games a great deal, but I've stuck with WoW for years. There's a couple reasons. One, I consume the "average" game pretty rapidly, 20 hours of gaming seems to fly by and it's hard to justify $50 for such fleeting entertainment. WoW's $15 a month provides me with hours of gameplay that would otherwise be spent on multiple games in that same month.

The other reason, I admit, has nothing to do with gaming, but friends; both in-game and in real the real world. While some come and go, there's about four or five of us that have stuck with WoW since release day. That's probably the bigger reason I've stuck with it. So even though I do love video games to begin with, I will admit my primary reason for sticking with WoW has nothing to do with video games. It's quite possible that when StarCraft 2 or Diablo III comes out, we'll all migrate and be playing that for years instead.

But speaking of WoW, I think I'll go check my auctions. I'm totally not addicted though, sometimes I don't even play for days! Gasp! Anyway, if there are noob slashdotters out there that would enjoy having a level 80 burn through a few quests for them, send a tell to Raymer on Whisperwind, Alliance side.