Free speech has limits. Your free speech does not include the right to make terroristic threats. If you threaten to kill someone, then I have absolutely no idea any place where that would not be considered a threat to harm a person. Good manners or not, I recall early on, my parents told me "Never never ever threaten to kill someone." Must have made an impression on me, because I gave my son the exact same advice.

Which is all to say, if you threaten harm to a person, and harm comes to that person, guess who's going be knocking on your door to chat with you? Better have a good alabi.

That is certainly not in the mix here, that's way overstating what I've said. Normal discourse is protected.free speech. We can call each other names all day.

Yes you could. You could threaten violence upon someone, disclose company or state secrets, admit infidelity or write something ridiculously stupid about your employer. On there and other services, people have bragged about or shown items they have stolen or about mistreating others. Yes, a stupid single tweet could be a life altering experience. And people have altered their lives.

Which by the way, is why I always strongly advise against using Twitter. The format simply encourages ill thought out texting and responses.

Or your wife, or employer, or Government as the case may be. Or you.

Regardless, that isn't even involved in what I'm talking about. I'm talking about matters that would get you in legal trouble if you said it in someone's presence. I don't know if you are married or not, but if someone threatened to kill you or whoever you loved, you would just not care or do anything about it? Or not do anything about it?

I cannot imagine anyone not having astrong visceral response to someone threatening non-consensual violent forced sex upon their daughter, and if you can say you'd meet with that person - well good for you. Perhaps not so good for your loved ones if the person threateing the violence carries through on the threat.

You and I have quite a different idea of what entails "not being excellent" I think. I love a good discussion with different ideas, even where people might call each other silly or stupid or petty, or ofter such comments.

But threats are indicative of a person losing control. And people losing control sometimes carry through on those threats.

... with some food for thought.

The ending '-eous' or '-ious' is added to a noun to produce an adjective that means producing whatever that noun is. Something that is 'advantageous' produces advantage for example. Something which is ignominious produce ignominy (shame, embarrassment). Something that is piteous arouses pity in the onlooker.

I think you see where I'm going with this. The word the headline writer should have used is 'nauseated', although making users nauseous in the pedantic sense would certainly be a concern for the developers of any product.

Christ. Who writes this rubbish?

I read some of the book using Amazon's 'look inside' feature. It's deeply un-engaging, and highly unlikely to hold a child's attention for very long at all. Compare the writing in it to something that's actually good, and you'll hopefully understand what I mean.

Let's assume the inner ear thing is a real problem, and it's the only problem.

There's two sides to that:

1) Sure, if you can desensitize yourself, that's certainly easier than changing people's ears, or finding hardware to do it.
2) Most people won't try new technology that also makes them sick. People don't like to work for entertainment. Astronauts are heroes going into space. Grandma would already rather read a book. So until they solve that issue, they'll need a hugely disproportionate amount of PR/cultural draw to get people involved. They'll have to target kids who don't mind puking to learn something new. Even then, they won't get everyone on-board because puking is a line most people won't cross for anything. Think of how many people never ride roller-coasters. That's untappable money. So solving that issue is extremely important for the future of their business.

What do they do when they're training for those trips? Does the vomit comet last 30 days in a single dive?

>Would you like me to start up Starfox 3d pre-alpha?"

Don't you dare joke about that!

I'm rocking multiple new mac minis

Are you "rocking" them? Really?

Right, the way that this should work is like the british version of the 5th - that is you have the right to keep silent, and not tell the police/court something, but if you do keep silent and don't tell the police, then you can't use that in your defense later.

That's not how it works. You can, but the jury is allowed to be suspicious of your motives if you do.

That's the most deceitful count of Chernobyl deaths I've ever heard. The lowest reasonable estimate is 9000 deaths, The extreme estimate is nearly a million deaths.

Except the UN estimated 4,000 deaths using a (nearly debunked and overly pessimistic) zero threshold model.

60 people is how many died on the day due to the accident.

More will have died later due to other things. But comparing like with like, hundreds die in mining and spoil heap accidents. Thousands die per year due to blacklung and other ailments.

I suspect a bigger issue is protection from sea spray and the lateral stresses of crossing hundreds of miles of open ocean, neither of which can be healthy for a rocket. Either they have to secure the 13-storey rocket on the landing barge (or a cargo vessel) to get to land, then transfer it to a vehicle capable of carrying it overland to the refurbishing site (the largest military cargo helicopters could *just* carry it, but only have a range of a few hundred miles), or they fly it home under it's own power. It might eventually make more sense to build dedicated equipment to transport it, but if you're only getting a few launches a year...

So much for orders of magnitude.

You can't just dismiss numbers because you don't like them. Or, if you prefer, (in your best crocadile dundee accent) That's not a mine, this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... is a mine.

Either way so what? That's one large uranium mine. There are more large coal mines, because Uranium has 4*10^6 higher energy density. Even if uranium was evenly distributed through the Earth's crust (at 2.6ppm), then you'd still need to mine 1/10 of the volume to get the equivalent energy of coal.

And it's not uniformly distributed, it's much more concentrated than that.

OK, so let's try again.

From wikipedia: The worldwide production of uranium in 2012 amounted to 58,394

For coal, it was 7,000,000,000 tonnes.

Even given low concentrations that's a lot of zeros to play with.

Seriously though you're arguing against the wildly insanely huge energy density of nuclear fuels, which is frankly silly.

Fine even if I accept your points, the rest of mine still stand, and I still addressed the case where it caused thousands of deaths. Well done for picking the single least relevant point.

Welcome back from the Iowa Freedom Summit, Mrs. Palin.

You know - I didn't think of that. People would actually commit crimes so they could beat up telemarketers.

Well, that would be a crime committed by whoever was selling the software someplace where it was illegal, not the guy who wrote it someplace where it as legal.