China has a police force. My country has a police force. ZOMG!!!! fascist communistic dictatorship prepares to seize power and enslave us in their siberian lard mines!!!

And anyway, when climate change kicks in and the world descends into every-nation-for-itself anarchy, we're gonna need some form of authoritarian state power to enforce conscription into the armies needed to fight off the starving hordes massing on various national borders.

...demonstrably.

You have a collection of Star Trek movies. Minus 50 points.
You have everyStar Trek movie. Minus 500 points.
You make a reference to some sort of alien race (I guess, from the context) as if they were real, and expect people to find that funny. Minus 10,000 points!

Oh, right, I see; that's a relief! If I thought that IBM might be about to corner the market in stabbing hard-working employees in the back before pitching them over the side, I'd be concerned about the future of western civilisation. Now I can sleep easy, secure in the knowledge that they will cross-license it to all comers. Hoorah! for the market.

It's the guys with hats you should really be watching out for.

...don't forget Kepler!

Well, it's infra-red, but that's pretty close to the spectra of visible light, so the images it produces will be closer to the visual appearance than they do in, say, X-rays. You might also be thinking of the Compton, Chandra or Spitzer space telescopes, which are part of the same programme that gave us Hubble, but are all sensitive to different wavelengths.

Look at the size of that thing. (Seriously, it's absolutely bloody enormous; that's a scale engineering model, with handy nearby humans for scale. Yes, those little black dots on the ground around it are humans... ;) )

Yep, that's kinda-sorta the Dennett school's concept of the mind's eye; there is no "theatre of ego" where your "self" sits and watches stuff that comes out of the senses, and decides how to respond to them. Our sense of self is a side effect of a useful cognitive strategy to enable abstract reasoning and suchlike. All you are is very very complicated chemistry at the end of the day, although possibly another couple of "very"s are merited in that statement.

Or they're idiots. There's definitely a point where the best, most rational decision to make is to give up fighting and let death get on with it's thing. What's the marginal utility of another hour of utter misery for someone with very low quality of life?

BRAINS!!

So, IDC confirms it?

Ah, so when feminists talk about 'equality' what they really mean is, "we want special treatment so that we get equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity based on the same starting point". Silly me, and to think that I thought feminism was all about equality with males in regards to the same starting point and a meritocratic system where skills and knowledge are the basis of advancement forward rather than the old boys network.

Don't be so hard on yourself. You're not silly, necessarily, just ignorant of the subject. (Unless you mean that you assumed that your view of how reality should be must necessarily be the consensus view, in which case file under S for Solipsism.

This is the first scrub of STS-119 since the T-44 countdown start. Colour me pedantic and all but... *shrug*

It sounds to me like they're expecting to have to pull down the stack to fix this, though the clock's theoretically only reset to T+24 in case they decide it's OK to fly with this issue, in which case we'll see the next launch attempt at 01:20 UTC plus a bit tomorrow night, when the ISS orbit's next sync'd with Florida.

Exactly (or more precisely, I know that I'm not free. However as Skinner pointed out fifty years ago, it's the /feeling/ of freedom that matters to humans.