When it came on the air (over 36 years ago) there was nothing else like it on television. Nothing.

Space:1999 had gone off the air a couple of years before. Not the best writing ever (especially the second season), and there were some interesting issues with the science on the show, but the effects were quite good for the time.

Knock them out, apply suitable stimulus - say, a moderately painful electric shock plus a distinctive scent in the water.

Probably better to put the scent in before the shock. The conditioned animals will freak when they smell the shock coming, where the sedated ones will merely say, "cool scent".

Several years ago I had three procedures done back-to-back over about a week, and had the good fortune to have the same anesthesiologist for all of them. After the first one, I'd felt sick as a dog, so I told him about that when he visited me prior to the second one. He said, "Good to know, thanks for telling me - we'll try something different this time." After the second and third procedure I felt great (well, as great as could be expected). +1 for talking to your doctor when you're having issues.

And why do we need games for Google Glass?

Well gee, what else do you expect people to do when they're driving?

"Join our open (your wallet) beta and help shape the future of Glass."

Competitive overbuilders can sometimes build their own fiber network at a lower cost than Comcast's bureaucracy can replace the Comcast cable network with fiber.

This is true, but even at half the cost it still takes a *lot* of capital.

I am pretty sure all they do for a Secret clearance is check your credit, criminal record, and citizenship. If nothing comes up you get a rubber stamp. It only gets complicated if they dig up Iranian relatives, or some other red flag.

That's how it was when I got mine many years ago - a cursory background check and a half hour interview with the DISCO guy, and when I left the company and came back, it was still within the two-year window so they just reinstated it without any fuss. Secret clearances are a dime a dozen and practically a necessity for a lot of civilian contracting work. TS/CSI is a whole other ballgame, but even then they're sometimes granted without a polygraph.

In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

I know this is is meant as a jokey comment, but it's worth noting that VS2015 has native Git support as well so Github etc. works without any plugins.

VS 2013 (including Community) has Git support out of the box and works just fine with GitHub as well.

Taxing consumers as opposed to commercial vehicles is a terrible idea; it would have the effect of subsidizing heavy vehicular traffic. If we're going to subsidize freight, we should invest in rail infrastructure.

Consumers will subsidize commercial traffic no matter what - either directly by higher fuel taxes, or indirectly through higher prices for goods. Agree 100% on expanding our rail options though.

The thing to do in that case is rather preversely set up your own website with the information on then cite that.

I had thought of that then, and I'm sure plenty of people do just that. It just wasn't a big enough deal for me to go to the effort.

Unfortunately the internet is FULL of nutters who think they know stuff but don't. Sadly the nuttiness makes them all the louder.

Big time, and the guy that decided to go full-on edit war with me was one of those. It really reinforced my understanding that Wikipedia shouldn't be relied on as an authoritative source of information in itself, but rather a jumping-off point to evaluate the given references. I've often had spelling/grammatical corrections reverted by people that clearly failed English 101. [shrug]

I'm not saying you're one of those. In fact I'm prefectly prepared to take your word for it that you're not. The problem is wikipedia is inundated with those people and it's really hard to tell the difference.

I appreciate the vote of confidence, but like I said, it's just not worth my time to worry about it. I do think about it every time Jimmy comes begging for money though.

I knew I couldn't be the only one.

Count me in as a charter member of the "Weird Kids Club" as well. It's sad that more kids didn't then and don't now have more of a passion for learning just for its own sake.

Of course, many people who bitch about Wikipedia and how it doesn't work complain that their edits were undone, often because they added information without a reliable source for verification.

The issue I've run into is that sometimes there simply isn't a "reliable source" other than people that are intimately familiar with the topic at hand because the written information is under an NDA or otherwise inaccessible. In my particular case, it dealt with the monorail system at Disney World - I worked there for years, was a trainer on the system, and know a fair bit about the internals of the trains and control/signalling system, as does any other driver with any experience. However, Disney and Bombardier are pretty strict about controlling the availability of any official detailed printed/electronic documentation, so in the end I ended up just giving up and letting the incorrect information that was in the article and the half-assed "citations" stay there because the only authoritative citations were in documentation that was unavailable to the public, and I got to the point where I just didn't care anymore whether Jimmy presented bogus info while claiming it was accurate.

Big time. When a lot of the spam you get is from compromised machines, a valid DKIM signature means absolutely nothing. I have both SPF and DKIM implemented on my mail server, and I honestly can't say it's made much of a difference except I almost never get bounces from outgoing mail.

Wow. Looks like he was just like us, driving our cars in ignorant dreams ofsafety, while we are carrying that gasoline. And some times, awful things happen.

He's a frigging *astronaut* for crying out loud. Bolden flew on the damned thing four times and commanded two missions. Yet even I knew the RCC panels weren't six inches thick back in 1981 when I studied the shuttle program for a school project. If a 13-year old kid can find this out with a minimum of effort and no Internet, what's his excuse? At any time he could have walked over to one of the OMFs and held an RCC panel in his own hands. A more apt automotive analogy would be to compare Bolden's knowledge of his vehicle to that of a race car driver. I challenge you to show me such a driver that doesn't know his car intimately, inside and out.

The shedding foam was seen as a low mass substance that would bounce off the shuttle, especially given that the differential speeds between it and the still accelerating rocket were not as large as if it was not moving at all.

During the last launch of Atlantis four months prior to Columbia's last flight, a piece of shed bipod foam put a three-inch deep dent into one of the SRB attach rings, which are half an inch thick and made of steel, so there was documented evidence that shed foam could cause substantial damage prior to Columbia's flight. And yes, this was brought to management's attention as something to be concerned about.

And while it's quite easy to sit back and declare the shuttle designers assholes because no one in their right mind would ever design a leading edge tile so thin - do you know the physical aspects of creating those ceramic tiles? The aspects of attaching them to the vehicle? Or do you figure that they purposely designed them so thin so as to create a failure mode? That my friend, would merit criminal prosecution.

I'm not criticizing the designers. I'm criticizing the management that decided it was safe to fly in the face of documented issues that suggested otherwise without even looking into them.