When they say the fuel is "exhausted", what they really mean is that there is no longer enough to maintain an equilibrium with gravity. There is still a lot left. As gravity sucks down the remaining fuel it increases the pressure, heating it up enough for a big fusion reaction.

All the more reason why we need to get autonomous cars on the road.

Ender's Game is a fanciful allegory, a forced, fictional situation someone would come up with in a classroom in order to made some sort of philosophical point about ethics. I personally wasn't in the military, but a good friend of mine was in Special Forces, and everyone in his unit read Starship Troopers and would quote from it and even use its terminology in the performance of their profession. Ender's Game is as much about war as Swordfish is about hacking.

Ender's Game is the quintessential classic military sci-fi book.

I have to disagree with that quote. Ender's Game is an anti-war book. If you want the quintessential classic military sci-fi book, read Starship Troopers.

You're technically correct. We've detected something or some phenomenon, and there are theories that can explain that something without dark matter, but like you said, they're not likely. Perhaps I was a little too dismissive of the fringe theories. Without direct evidence of what it is, all we really have is Occam's razor.

It's there. We've detected it from its gravity. They were just hoping that it wasn't completely dark. It's starting to look like it is. The trouble with it being completely dark is that would make it difficult to prove any theories about it. What they're doing is searching for their keys under the streetlight when they've probably fallen down the sewer.

Is the "strong desire" for particular things genetic? For instance, programming is fun for me, and was fun the first time I tried it. But I know many people who consider it some kind of punishment.

It is easier to detect planets with tight orbits because you don't have to look at it very long to see that there is a planet. For an alien to detect Earth, they would have to observe Sol for a year. For them to detect Jupiter, they would have to observe Sol for 12 years.

That's real horrorshow, droog.

No, 24% of kids want to run the cyber-police state they know is coming.

Too bad the Millenials didn't get a cool label, like Generation X.

My rule is, honestly try to figure out how much time you think it will take to write the code--and then double it.

I don't think Gravity falls under the category science fiction. If I was to make a movie about a fictional accident in a fictional submarine, would that be science fiction? People can make movies about space now and it doesn't have to be considered science fiction if all of the technology is contemporary.

Apollo 13

Human's made a couple of big mistakes when it comes to math. We should have a base 12 system and we should use Tau instead of Pi. Math would be so much easier.