I would cheerfully ride the business end of a NERVA in a return trajectory around Luna. Others have spent longer in the Van Allen belts and beyond with no ill effects, and good radiation shielding is a simple matter of math.

I would not volunteer for an explicit suicide mission to well, up.

There is a difference between pioneers and suicide bombers. Neither has a great life expectancy, but it's worth considering the relative merits of the two professions.

Old men who won't die of cancer, but will die with cancer. Actuaries would probably suggest that you haven't really made their situation significantly worse.

Actually, bullets (wrapped in duct tape) would be about the right size and consistency to patch a micrometeoroid strike.

Mars One is planning a colony drop, not a suicide mission. Colonies have a history of failing, but they also have a history of succeeding.

If we're talking about a mission with no hope of surviving to go on speaking tours, or build the foundation for a society elsewhere, I can't really see any good reason for it.

On the other hand, throw a NERVA, Orion, or a (FSM help you!) NSWR at the problem, and suddenly it's a shorter trip than most jaunts to the space station. If Bussard was 1/10th right, deep space missions won't be suicide missions.

Everyone has a different role. The tech-heads, hackers and code monkeys turn out the lights on everything, and the community organizers, rabble-rousers and the politically inclined makes trouble and pisses people off with rallies, publicity campaigns, grassroots social media campaigns, and crowdfunding primary challengers to anyone who doesn't wash their hands of this like yesterday.

And while I discourage actual violence, I feel the need to point out that so do the gun-nuts and paranoid survivalists - by raising the cost of a brute-force approach beyond the point of impracticality, they serve as a backstop to the morals of anyone who might actually be tempted to attempt a coup.

I briefly considered that, but it's too in-character and unfunny.

I drive a convertible. I never back up with my seat belt on. These are related facts - the view out my window is adequate for driving in a straight line, but visibility while backing up is so bad that I have to move my head like a meter to see if someone's going to be in the path of my car as I back out, and if something's behind my other wheel. And since nobody really respects back-up lights in parking lots here - they'll walk behind you, then give you the stink-eye if you so much as twitch in their direction, whether or not you can see them, I simply continue risking my spinal column to avoid squishing idiots.

inb4 "drop the top, dummy" - rain.

How about this:

"In Soviet Russia, telescreen protects you!"

Protip: Go look up ZigBee, Z-Wave, and Insteon.

The technology is out there, but it's a lot uglier than X-10 for DIYing. This was the first control system I found that offers your sort of power management, and claimed universal, vendor-agnostic compatibility.

I just loaded a half dozen /. stories in tabs, and now as many computer voices are reading submission summaries to me in some godawful cacophony.

What the hell?

Worse than beta, since there's no off switch.

Someone's missed the point.

Can I take a small, short-acting dose of this in the form of a nasal spray, and finish reading the entire encyclopedia while I wait for my coffee pot to finish brewing? If implanted in reservoir form, in something like an insulin pump, (along, probably, with a quick-acting antidote) could I actually gain the benefit of "bullet time" when trying to avoid a car wreck when some texting-while-driving type cuts across three lanes of traffic? I believe this was touched upon in the Honor Harrington series, and it seemed like a good ideaand now somebody's gone and figured out that it's actually feasible.

And we go and waste it on this?

*sigh*

Goddammit people.

Sayeth the inhabitant of that world-famous abattoir of haute-cuisine---Mississippi.

"But", you say, "there's lots of fine food in Mississippi". Agreed, but Brit food is pretty damn good.

The number of Michelin starred restaurants in Mississippi is...zero? Even Glasgow, that city mocked for deep fried everything, has a Michelin starred restaurant.

Yeah, I get the joke, but it's a stereotype that isn't actually remotely true any more,

Fixed that for you.

Actually, specifically pertaining to chess, systems of expert plus computer advisor consistently outperform either the best computers or the best human grandmasters. For those who enjoy watching competitive chess, the games are decidedly not boring.

Grandma is not "no longer Grandma" at any point in this exercise, though at some point she should consider replacing everything but that mostly-nanotech brain; she's still going to have worn-out disks and arthritis, even now that her Alzheimer's is cured; she might want to move back out of that nursing home at some point.

Since Safari for Windows was deprecated, I've found myself missing it. I keep the ultimate version installed, but I've been forced onto Firefox, as even iCloud has dropped support for Safari.

It had a better memory footprint than Chrome or Safari, and didn't choke under a heavy tab load (hundreds). Apple's 64-bit-first philosophy probably had something to do with that, even on Windows. And it was snappier. Chrome pulled me off it for a while, but then it got slow and bloated and now I only ever use Chrome for interacting with Google products, since it can now lag an Ivy Bridge black with an SSD and far too much RAM.

I'm leaning toward Pale Moon or Waterfox now to maintain extension compatibility (adblock, flashblock, noscript, iCloud) without giving up that raw third-half-of-my-brain responsiveness I crave.

PS: Has /. started using heavier scripting lately? It doesn't work right with NoScript enabled any more.