Yeah, I settled on "big-ol' Carolina" for years before figuring that one out.

I remember hearing "Please Molly Dodd" when I was a kid, partially explained by some show with the title character Molly Dodd being on the air that my mom used to watch.

I always thought it was a Thunder Chief.

At 4 I wanted to be an artist, because art was the most fun thing I'd ever done. I didn't have access to a television, let alone a computer, and knew very little about science. I eventually got a degree in physics and now do IT related things. There's lots of time to come around.

One of my favorite pictures is of my 3-year-old daughter, dressed in a Cinderella dress and a tiara, holding up and squinting through a tubes-and-gears assembly that she put together and declared to be a telescope. It seemed like a good mix to me.

Well, based on testing, at least 98% of people don't do that. Also, how likely are you, seriously, to stare at a picture of sardines when you don't like them? And even if you do it the first time, what are the odds you're going to keep that revulsion and outrage for subsequent viewings? Outside of the "pickles ruined my life"-style mental illness, I just don't see it happening.

I just realized my town has a Pizza Hut the other day. I've lived here for 7 years and drive by it occasionally, but I must have blocked it out. Never even been tempted to go inside.

Once upon a time I meant to build a web site that compared pictures of the food you ordered to pictures of the food you got.

  I think I was partly inspired by some McBurger that had less than 50% overlap between layers of ingredients, and a pile of ketchup blasted onto the side of the container rather than into the sandwich.

Later I concluded I didn't have the time or energy for something that pointless.

Except that in this case you're just looking at everything, rather than trying to specifically select N toppings. So if you just relax and stop trying to count to N, they'll do that part for you, and you don't have to think so hard about what your Nth-most-favorite item is on the menu. In other words, I think this technique precisely solves the thing you're objecting to.

While also being a little creepy.

And probably offering me the bacon-ham-sausage-canadian bacon-pepperoni pizza I'd *like* to order but don't, rather than the pepperoni-olive-green pepper pizza I'll actually order as a compromise to a more balanced pizza.

I don't know about that. Does anybody do pay-per-view ads anymore? I was under the impression it was mostly pay-per-click. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I clicked an ad, and if I did it was entirely an accident. Unless you're going to go so far as to argue that readers are obligated to click ads on sites they surf to generate money for the site, there isn't a whole lot of functional difference between browsing with ads blocked and ads visible for users who don't click.

Functional difference for the site, that is. From the user perspective there's potentially a big difference, in terms of bandwidth, clutter, and possibly security.

Thank you, anonymous coward. The most pithy thing I've seen from an AC today.

I didn't realize this had come out yet. Frankly, I don't care about graphics (or at least, as long as they're not worse than DA1, which I'm sure they're not). I'm also already wedded to my game-playing system of choice, and one game's output isn't going to change that one whit.

What I'm interested in is the game itself, and I haven't seen any headlines for that. Did I just miss the article for the release of a sequel to an AAA game, or did we skip that and go right to the graphics analysis? How is the game? Is it more like the first one, which I loved, or is it more like the second one, which I avoided because of all the crazy changes they made to it. Basically, am I gonna want to buy it?

Proposal for a slashdot poll: does anyone really actually care about the graphics on a game? Especially at the level we're talking about here? If the answer is more than 10% I'd be shocked, and if it's closer to 3%, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Asimov died something like 30 years after 1965. His works are nowhere near public domain yet.

I'm just about to turn 40, and I can't say physically I feel that off yet. No way would I say I'm better than 20, but I'm not that much worse.

Now mentally, that's a whole different ballgame. Other than the fact I felt a little smarter back then and I feel less smart now, nearly every other single thing is better mentally. There's emotional stability, the comfort of years of experience, a much broader view, and I know how to get things done. There's a little distraction/forgetfulness, but I'm blaming two toddlers for that, and don't think it's got anything to do with mental decline setting in.

That's at 40. I'm not especially worried about 50, but I am concerned about 60. Actually, I think I would have said the same thing at 20 - even then I wasn't so worried about anything around 40, only later.

For the record, I'd be all over anti-aging technology, but currently I don't see much that's actually going to be applicable to me as I age. I hope it develops, but I suspect it might be a few generations (at least) before that stuff makes it big.

I've tried occasionally, with only rare luck. The thing is, between the often iffy late fall weather and the cold, this isn't my favorite shower to try to watch, anyway. I've had better luck camping out in the open air on a non-shower night when it was comfortable, and just watching the sky for a while. Maybe my impressions are skewed by anecdotal evidence, but it often seems like meteor watching is more a function of time and comfort than catching the peak of a recognized shower.

I would also like to thank the scientists involved for, just once, admitting that a show probably won't be that exciting. I'm pretty sure this is one of the first articles I've ever seen that didn't use hype or "could be one of the best ever" lines.