Probably because it had excellent writing and a thoughtful take on the material.

That, and William Ware Theiss's awesome costumes for the female guest stars.

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.