Romney manages to stay sober most of the day.

Ted Kennedy was one of the biggest racists I ever saw. Insisted all of orderlies be black and then treated them like house niggers. I know a few black Marines that wanted to fillet the fat drunk.

I would recommend the Beggars in Spain series by Nancy Kress. She's pretty talented and has won some awards. It's an interesting take on the whole 'good for society' debate. I haven't read Rand, but know some who have. I don't see what the big deal is. But then I'm a Heinleiner.

Top 5 all time. Easily as funny as Wodehouse and he set the bar. I'm half-way through the Disc World series and have enjoyed every single one.

Unfortunately his humor does not translate well into movies.

To me, Alastair Reynolds is the Robert Jordan of sci-fi. Very long, very tropish, not worth the effort. My Brother adores him, so does my ex-boss who has read everything. My wife didn't care for it, boring and over explanatory.

I think Iain Banks ruined me for Reynolds, which is funny because it was my ex-boss who turned me on to both authors. I don't know if Iain Banks is under appreciated, but I was the first to mention him in the depressing sci-fi thread. The Culture is this super enlightened, biological/AI civilization, but most of the stories focus on the fringes and they are dark. It would be simpler to list his non-depressing books.

For Nolan, Gotham City looks like one of those maps of LA or NY that shows the rest of the World as being about the same size. Some dude is in Hong Kong that has information you need, that's like a day trip for Batman. If you were to squeeze the events going on globally into a city, and scale down the wars being fought, it would be just like a Batman movie.

I have lived in 5 countries and visited even more. In every single placed I've lived and visited, there were bad parts of town you knew were not safe and even the good parts of town were not always safe. My Dad missed an IRA pub bombing by about an hour, when he caught an earlier train to get home. When we lived in Greece, there was a coup. In Belgium, 5 of my friends lost their Dads and it seemed suspicious to the rest of us. I don't have any illusions of safety anywhere.

What I don't understand is how this guy was able to walk out and back into an emergency exit. I don't understand how he was able to go to his car and retrieve everything without someone seeing him. If someone had closed the door behind him, this might be a totally different story.

Like the TSA fiasco, we will do the stupidest thing possible in response.

Mitigating warming could be done very cheaply, however, we are not even close to the point of needing to do anything. Another model comes out and the gloom and doomers start soiling their pants. Models, predictions and wags from the past are forgotten or explained with a wave of the hand. Hurricanes, tornadoes and weather continue to happen with some frequency, which is now proof when it is hotter or colder. CO2 turned out to be pretty good plant food and not much of a green house gas, 20% as some have stated. Artic still not ice free, greenland still not green. The sun is expected to enter a prolonged silent period, no evidence to support that will have any affect. What was the hottest year again or maybe I should ask how many years ago was that? Maybe warming means something different, maybe this year will be the new hottest, any takers?

If you really believe that this is going to happen, you have to think radically. How about some solar powered siphons to fill up Death Valley and the Salton Sea. We could setup a network of pipelines and fill up all of the dry lakes throughout the southwest. It might not do squat for sea level, but it would open up a huge area for all them poor beach loving people whose houses are gonna be under water. There are other regions of the world that could benefit from something similar and that aren't in California.

Don't like that idea? Okay, how about we start dredging the Gulf of Mexico and start raising the land. They did it with swampland and bayous. All it would take is the Government allowing it to happen. Let people buy the land that they create and you'd have tiny islands popping up all over the place in a couple of years.

But you don't like that idea either, do you?

So, limiting the discussion to dark matter and dark energy, which are still open to debate, it would be nice to have a score card of what is in and out.

WIMPs are out.
Mirror matter in and out, apparently.
String theory, in then out then in but not nearly as cool as it was the first time.

My theory is that fundamentally the big bang theory is mis-understood. The universe, as we know it, is currently under construction and subject to change. Not on human time scales, but if we wind back the clock and play it forward, the universe has been getting weirder. Look at the growth of the periodic table since the beginning of the Universe, the birth of protostars and galaxies, etc. I don't see why it isn't capable of continuing to increase in weirdness.

This begs the question of how is the Universe getting weirder. This is where the big bang theory draws dragons and warns of impending doom. I like to think of it as if two water droplets were coming together. One is red, one is blue. When they mix, they create a Purple center. Our Universe is the purple part. From inside the purple part, you can't see the red and blue Universes and it would appear, if you wound back the clock, as if the Purple Universe appeared out of nowhere and it would also appear as if the Purple Universe was not only growing, but the growth would be accelerating. This doesn't break the big bang theory and doesn't break any other known theories. It does remove the need to explain expansion and other observations.

Is that any stranger than mirror matter or string theory?

Exactly. Put a series of these on the west coast and we might even be able to seed the desert that occupies half of the US. I'm sure the central valley farmers would like to see the rivers return to normal. Australia could do the same thing on one of it's coasts. Sounds like a plan.

I also like the idea of putting a couple of siphons on the coast and refilling the Salton Sea and making some lakes in the lowest parts of Death Valley. We might have to relocate some tortoises but there's lots of desert.

I think the bump we got from reducing particulates in the atmosphere has stalled out. There's one or two studies on that. Time will tell and I don't really see an alternative plan that makes any kind of sense on the table.

They will go for profit. It is already profitable, which is why Branson, Allen, etc are all trying to get in on the ground floor. The cost of shipping a 'thing' to orbit is astronomically high. Lower the costs and you have a guaranteed profit.

IMO, this project is a waste of time and money. We have space around our own star that we have not figured out how to exploit. I would much rather see us try to build automatic mining/extraction probes for asteroids or recyclers to clean up some of the junk in orbit. I'd like to see a 100 year plan to get us to the asteroid belt. There are enough resources in our own system to sustain us for practically ever.

By the time we reach the edge of our own system, we won't need a 100 year plan to go to the next star. We'll already be there.

Yes, and Harry Potter and Avatar are the greatest book and movie, cause $$$ is the only way to determine success.

Mod parent +1 funny

Being a parent is a lot like being Obi-Wan when Luke asks him "So, you knew my father...". Obi-Wan straight up lied to Luke about what happened to his father. Under the circumstances, who could blame him.

It is not that much different then the idea of Santa Claus and a young child. Yes, you are lying to them. But, they are going to find out the truth eventually anyways. Did Obi-Wan stutter and looked surprised when Luke called him out? No, he looked him straight in the eye and owned up to it. I think there was a twinkle of pride in Obi-Wan's eye when that moment happened. It's hard to see with all the other sparkles, but it is there.

Why make the same "fake" post announcing how un-innovative this is, then quickly reply to the post announcing how wrong and how cool this tech is? You did it twice in the same article. Are you an Apple Marketeer or just an idiot?

I usually avoid stories about Apple on slashdot, it brings out the culties.

Biden looks intelligent. He's tall and has executive style hair, probably inherited from his Daddy, much like his political career.

"Crazy" Joe should be selling used cars, not a heartbeat away from the oval office. It's one thing to be deluded that Obama is The One, but to think Joe Biden displays intelligence is to disregard virtually everything he says and the fact that he doesn't even realize what or why the things he says might be regarded as pathological.

I haven't seen any Kinect APIs or support in Visual Studio. I do see some very early libraries by some 3rd parties.

For Steve "Developers^3" Balmer to not have the resources in place is pretty ludicrous and tantamount to negligence. They obviously have all the pieces, I just don't see them in play. If they were smart, they would start rolling this out the SDK and OS integration before Christmas. Unfortunately, I have about as much faith in MS handling this right as I do the Dallas Cowboys making the Super Bowl this year.

I am much more excited by gesture and voice controls then touch interfaces. I have a cold this week and just trying to keep my monitor clean without touching it is a challenge.