We spent as much on LHC as we spend on 1/5 of a submarine. In other words, the LHC costs about 2.5 attack submarines; or half an aircraft carrier. Wouldn't you really rather have another one of those than then next Tevatron?

That's how society will change. The self-driving ANFO delivery service will be born.

The Linux market is only small for desktop/laptop hardware. You screw up server hardware that badly and you lose market share quick.

Defending one's view presupposes that the view has come under attack. Expressing one's view does not.

Nope. I have no need to. And certainly not in public, on the internet, with a stranger. That sort of activity is, like sex, best done in private and with people I know and trust.

There is a subtle difference between expressing ones views and defending them that you (and others) may have missed.

I feel sorry for the creditors. Really, who the hell cares about this web site? Tag this story "slownewsday".

Why exactly? They are your views. Why do you need to defend them? Either they hold up on their own, or they don't.

In fact, I would argue that the exact opposite is true. The only views worth having are those that need no defense. They are well-supported by established evidence. All views should be treated with a commensurate level of skepticism based on the evidence available to support them.

Uh... you know *why* Iran wants nukes, right? It is precisely because a nearby military rival has them. Israel is right to be scared by that prospect, but they will only have themselves to blame in the end. I don't see things working out well for that area of the world long term.

The Aurora Borealis are not "are an electromagnetic phenomena that can adversely affect power grids and communications and navigation systems." They are but an effect of the solar wind, intensified by a solar flare pointed in our direction, interacting with the Earth's magnetic field.

I read most everything online (fiction and non-fiction), so "book" reading these days is dwindling down to next to nothing. There is a book on my nightstand. It is written by an economist. Calling it "non-fiction" is a stretch.

Add my cynical prediction to the list:

• Driverless cars will put suicide bombers out of work.

You're an idiot. G+ is one of the tools people who actually make stuff use to communicate with their peers. It is very relevant to its users. Besides being relatively easy to use, it has one very important characteristic: a decent S/N ratio.

I was pretty young when I first read THGTTG and my vocabulary was still developing. Being an American, I had no idea what a "biro" was at the time. The gist of that section went completely over my head. It wasn't until re-reading that book later in life, with a suitably expanded vocabulary, that the true humor came through. Re-reading those books at that point was like reading them anew.

Why? What do you use? The facebook? (snicker)

One of the tell-tale signs of the quality of a country's democracy in the internet age is the difference in upload versus download bandwidth allocated to the average internet user. Do the people get a voice, or is the internet a receive-only medium?