pfffffffttt---Larry Niven did it better about 30 years earlier.

You seem to be confusing "axis" with "orbital plane", near as I can tell.

You're pretty sharp for an immature Pak Protector.

You think we have a pretty good understanding of physics.

ZQ ended up doing depressives, women, and herself a big disservice. Not entirely her fault, perhaps, though it seems she'd be better off getting lots more help for herself before thinking she's anywhere near ready to help anyone else.

No link to obamasweapon.com? You're obviously one of THEM, trying to misdirect us.

China. <<---

..............

BTW, I've just found out the hard way that G-Translate's handwriting recognition for Chinese characters is network dependent. Downloading the Chinese dictionary allows you to translate between English and Pinyin or characters well enough offline, but too bad for you if you don't already know how the character is pronounced. (Sometimes you can make an educated guess, but not always.) I suppose it would be a bit much to expect them to tell you "The functionality that really makes us useful can't be accessed in the country where you'd be most likely to need it", though.

Thanks heaps for that teeny tiny omission.

I can still visit my neighbourhood McDonald's and get reasonably good coffee, free wifi, and my daily dose of S1E.

Chunjie kuaile! Happy Chinese New Year!

Because he runs a business not a hippy commune.

But he has pretensions towards being a respected visionary scientist. It's not impossible to have it both ways, but it's really, really difficult. (Especially when you've taken the work you did as a student at a public university and commercialized it without giving a penny to the university.)

Saudi Arabia also requires exit visas to leave the country - which can only be obtained with permission from your employer. For many foreign nationals in the country, a large fraction of whom are domestic servants, it is essentially impossible to leave as a result. It's made even worse by the fact that work visas are also specific to the employer, so they can't switch jobs either. This is a country that didn't even officially outlaw slavery until after Castro's revolution, but even so they've kept slavery in all but name. (Not even going to start on their sponsorship of Salafi Islamist nutters across the globe.)

Besides, Cuba did finally allow foreign travel starting in 2013 (of course, most of its citizens are probably too poor to afford it, but the embargo certainly doesn't help). And we kept diplomatic relations and some commerce open with the Warsaw Pact at a time when they also restricted travel, which didn't stop their system from collapsing under its own weight.

You should be ashamed of yourself. No, really.

I've been running Linux on laptops without much trouble for about 10 years. Mostly Acers. I didn't realise that made me an outlier.

I really don't see what all the fuss is about--Poettering has merely done for Linux what Monty Widenius did for relational databases. And we all agree that was a good thing, right?

Sweatshop? Dante had the right idea. Ultima Thule, baby--that's the genuine article.

Those are things that I do already with a couple of 3-dollar timers from my local hardware store.