A real head-scratching conundrum about the universe is explaining why it's not already overrun with self-replicating robots.

Because the need/urge to reproduce and expand your territory is a biological imperative which would have to be taught to robots?

Because an biological lifeform smart enough to make immortal intelligent robots might just be smart enough not to also make them infinitely self-replicating?

Because the universe is big enough and hostile enough to make unbounded expansion less than a sure thing?

Hasn't this been common knowledge among SF readers for years?

My question is whether a Hollywood B movie is a cause worth anyone -- our military and diplomatic people, civilians movie goers -- risking their lives?

I hate to quote celebrities, but George Clooney makes a good point:

"With the First Amendment, you're never protecting Jefferson; it's usually protecting some guy who's burning a flag or doing something stupid."

Actually, what they need to do is mandate all substances at a federal level, rather than state level, because any difference in policies between adjoining states will always carry this problem, so there's nothing special about marijuana in this regard... unless, of course, they want to institute state border checks similar to what they already have in place between the US and Canada.

Yeah straw men "only" on the "deniers" side.

Try proposing nuclear power as a solution to climate change and bask in the light of all the burning strawmen.

My stance in AGW is that you can bitch all you want about climate change, but if you're not willing to build a bunch of nuclear power plants and shut down a bunch of coal plants, then yes you ARE arguing global warming to advance a political agenda and nothing more.

If you don't back real solutions that can yield real results then I am going to call bullshit on your advocacy.

Why is this any different than counties that don't allow the sale of alcohol adjacent to counties that do?

Applying logic to the War On Drugs is a lot like bringing spaghetti to the beach.

Trapped in a walled garden, are we?

You wanna confine it to a handy though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case

Well, it it makes any difference, I graduated from high school over 8 years before Georgia became independent of the USSR, so in retrospect, I don't think it's surprising that I wasn't taught about the country in school.

Anyways, I learned that it was a country upon hearing the aforementioned news of the athlete who died in the Olympics that year, and honestly, I was only able to tell it was a country from the context. Only the logical incongruity of mentioning a specific US state for an athlete was sufficient to make me recognize they must have been referring to a country that happened to have the same name as a US state that I *had* heard of.. My point being that I hadn't heard of it before then, I can empathize completely with someone else who might not have heard of it until some news article shows up which mentions it, and depending on the context in which the name is used, it may not be obvious what is being talked about. It is, of course, fairly clear here... and even if a person had not heard of the country before seeing this article, explicitly adding a clarification between it and the US state of the same name in the article is unnecessarily speaking down to the readers of the article, and does not belong there. At the most, it should be only a footnote.

The smart phone not only offers functionality not found in a regular cell phone, but it also offered capabilities not found anywhere else, while also still being in a pocket-sized form factor. The smart watch does nothing a smart phone cannot already do and with its battery life, unless you consider "it stays on your wrist" to be a significant advantage, and has a rather significant disadvantage over a modern digital watch when it comes to power consumption.

Why create new technologies that can replace old ones when all of the advantages of the new ones over the old are already offered by other existing technologies and the new technology offers a significant *DIS*advantage over what it would replace?