I'll bite. Why can't I? What makes english literature any better than science fiction literature?

Classic literature is way overrated. Other than being able to know an answer while watching a game show it was useless. When I was little I wanted to read Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein and Bradbury, and I did. The stuff they forced me to read for english class was dreck by comparison. I hated them for making me read that crap just because somebody else thought it was good.

That is why I used "UNIVERSE" to represent the sum of all things and "universe" to represent what people commonly call the thing that started 13.5 billion years ago. It was the clearest way I could think of to represent the concepts I was trying to convey. Was my explanation not clear to you?

I thought the explanation was that the jets were from stuff that didn't manage to quite get in? See, it's a mystery.

There is no mystery of what happens if you get close to one. The mystery comes from not knowing what goes on inside of one. You know that a neutron star is just a bunch of neutrons clumped together. But a black hole is a barrier where stuff can go in, but nothing can come out. We don't know what happens to gravity or space or matter that is inside of one. So we really have no clue what is going on in there, it is all just guesses. My own theory is that inside each one is another universe. The UNIVERSE is an infinite tree of holes with holes inside them. Our universe is 13.5 billion years old because 13.5 billion years ago a black hole formed inside of the parent universe that contains it. Crap could still be falling into it from the parent and that may be what causes the readings we attribute to such things as dark matter and expansion. For example if it could be shown that the expansion rate varies that could be explained by the availability of matter in the parent universe to be sucked into this one.

I'd buy a PackBot if it would vaccum my house. Wheels on a robot? How quaint!

I am a consumer and I care. The whole thing is just meant to confuse so people don't know what they are buying. As a consumer I want a simple naming scheme that describes the function, the version, and the feature set. If an item has a higher number it should be more advanced and/or have more features, but that is not always the case. Which cat is better/newer than the other cat? "This software only works in OSX 10.2" What cat was that again? What cat am I running now? Also, words should not be usurped to a different meaning for the sake of making your product sound more exciting (such as XBox Live). Put that Jelly Bean in your pipe and smoke it.

You are giving counterexamples to "You can't get elected to national office unless you demonstrate as much religious faith as GWBush showed." That was not the original premise you are attempting to disagree with! I have heard Obama say things like "God bless America" and other such religious statements and I am not even listening to a 10th of the stuff he says. No one knows what is in a persons heart. If you need to pretend to be religious to get elected, that is the same as having to be religious to get elected.

So, you don't have to be religious, you just have to pretend to be. And since we cannot know what is truly in a politician's heart (as they are superb actors), from all outward appearances a politician must be religious. Or you haven't been watching the same presidential elections I have at the least.

Ok, give a counterexample then? All you are saying is that you believe some politicians are lying about being religious with no evidence given one way or the other. That isn't a counterexample. Instead you are actually making the case that they need to appear to be religious to get elected, enough so that some of them may be lying about it.

I stand corrected. Yeah, I looked it up myself, unfortunately after I posted that. That was not how I remembered it happening. But my memory was faulty. He actually resigned when Google started working on ChromeOS. But you see if you read that article that Jobs didn't consider Schmidt a spy. It was just that Schmidt had to dismiss himself from so much of the board meetings where there was conflict of interest that there was no point in having him on the board. Thus it seems he was not "given advanced early looks at the iPhone" since he did not participate in those meetings. So do you stand corrected on that?

So you grab random 20 people off the street. Throw out the 10 that seem most intelligent. And then then expect the 10 left over to figure out the cost of damages in a complex (and vague) economic situation. How is that working out?

I think the look you refer to is the one of astonishment over your convoluted logic. How is the existence of the 'concept of X' in any way the same as the existence of X?

Schmidt resigned from the Apple board the second Google decide to work on (actually purchased) Android. Not saying he didn't see something before then, but it wasn't like he was spying the way you are implying it happened.

If you haven't noticed, the human species is extremely impatient. This is especially true of the younger members. How many people pre-order stuff? This is nuts unless they include a bonus for doing so. But a lot of times they don't and people still pre-order. Why? Because they are fucking impatient. They want the thing the second it comes out. Doesn't matter that it is the same (or even better) game or movie a year from now. They want it now! I am sure this is why Day 1 DLC is sold, too. People don't want to wait for DLC, they want it now. "Gime gime gime, want want want, now now now!" That is the typical person. They can't think past their base animalistic desires to realize that day 1 DLC is ripping them off. Maybe later once the buzz has worn off a few brain cells may register that. But by then they are already in line for the next new thing.