There are three ways to do 3D. In each case you give up something in order to add a second picture on top of the first. The most basic is the red-blue version, where you give up color and wear glasses with red and blue lenses. The version currently popular in theaters is polarization, where you give up the polarization of light (which you don't notice in any case) and wear glasses with lenses polarized in two different directions. The third version is one in which you flip back and forth between two different pictures, giving up half your refresh rate and wearing glasses with shutters that block light to one eye at a time, at your refresh rate.

You seem to be conflating options two and three. Theaters can use cheap polarized glasses that indeed cost a couple of dollars at most. But the type of 3D where refresh rate matters requires glasses that can switch between black and clear perfectly in sync with your television, which as you say must be 120hz or more. THAT hardware isn't going to be cheap. (And to use the polarization-type 3D at home you'd need a special screen that I don't think you can buy at this point.)

Start off with the easy ones. Forget "kill grandad" (what do I care about the timeline's error handling? And of course if it actually works I don't exist anymore). Forget "blatant anahronism" because I don't really care to be a vandal. Forget "firefly being cancelled" because that's trivial and probably fits into "right what once went wrong". That leaves us with the five serious votes.

Next up I should discuss where I actually start overthinking, which is the whole "hitler" thing. Lets ignore the fact that nobody's done it yet for some reason, and the unforseen consequences in general. If I get to use a time machine once, that means someone invented the time machine. Let *them* deal with hitler, or give a ride to the CIA or something. I'll spend my ride on something that wouldn't get done in the first week of time travel anyway. Lets throw "right what once went wrong" in here for most wrongs, and everything that someone might disagree was wrong (i.e. the bush/gore election. If I fix it so gore wins, someone will just go back and 'fix' it so bush wins again.)

On that same track, investment sounds a bit shaky to me. If time machines have been invented, the idea that money over time is worth money is going to go away *real* quick. Meeting a long-dead hero seems unlikely, as I can't exactly meet a living hero at will. Historical event is more promising, but most of them are either easily captured on film or really dangerous.

This leaves, among the cononical choices, "right what once went wrong" as long as I pick something at least reasonably obscure and non-controversial. But the only thing that pops into my head is the destruction of the Temple of Artemis, and as one of the 7 wonders of the Ancient world that hardly qualifies as obscure.

Perhaps more interesting would be a sort of referse "go back a few years and invest in something". How about take out a huge loan now, convert it to gold bullion, and escape back in time? Obviously one would also be taking certain extremely valuable knowledge, from electricity to flight, but if I'm to remain hidden I can hardly go disseminating it too widely. In fact I'd probably have to kill some famous rich person that nobody has a good picture of and take their place, to avoid suddenly appearing in the history books.

Assuming it's small enough to only cause local devastation, and so close that we have to pick part of the earth for it to hit... I'd assume we'd sink it in the middle of the largest ocean on the correct side of the planet.

Yea! But sometimes you lose count, especially with several people on the same plan. If only there were some kind of notification when you reach your monthly limit...

I know most of these are supposed to be funny, but...
It will not pick up hitchhikers.
Since it is based on the driving of people with impeccable records, I suspect it will stop to let people pull out when appropriate.
I don't think it has fingers.
I doubt it will warn of speed traps.
It will certainly pull over for emergency vehicles.
I would bet that it does draft, though at a careful distance.
It will bring you
to hookers and blackjack, if you want.

And I'd bet that new laws have to be passed to decide who gets the ticket. My guess at the final outcome is that the AI gets certified and as long as you follow the instructions nobody gets a ticket (though stack up enough and the AI's certification gets revoked, or something). Without new laws the person in control of the vehicle gets the ticket (and there are plenty of laws about what qualifies as "in control", mostly because of DUI laws).

The offenses for drink-related offenses are often far too lenient. But the laws deciding what counts as a drink-related offense? In just about every state, sleeping in the drivers seat of your car while you have a .08 BAC is a DUI. In some, sleeping in the back seat of your car with a .05 BAC is a DUI.

Bullshit like that dilutes the meaning of actual DUI's, and MADD fully supports it.

Well the obvious way to implement it unobtrusively would be to show the "instant" results where it currently shows the pages from history and guesses at what you're typing. Possibly formatted more like google search results or something.

But at the very least it should be easy to turn off. I mean, I currently use the search bar as a calculator occasionally, and I'm going to be pretty pissed if chrome decides to overwrite my current webpage with a search for a calculation.

The real story is that we had a solar minimum that was much longer then expected, so this is the first sun-related news we've had in years that wasn't "absolutely nothing is happening".

It's also about time to lay the groundwork for the "is the world going to end? Find out at 11!" stories that will run throughout 2012. At least one of the theories has the solar maximum playing some part and that doesn't work if people aren't aware that the sun shoots crap at us from time to time.

Well, that or "sometimes lie (including this time)".

Thing 1: We don't know what lies behind the event horizon, since nothing (no light, no radio waves, no physical objects, no information) can come out. It's a one-way gate. Theory is all well and good, but the only way to find out for sure what is on the other side would be to remove or disrupt the event horizon. Scientists by their very nature aren't the kind of people who can fail to see what's inside a black hole, given the opportunity.

Thing 2: "When are they planning to do this?" Well, for starters there aren't any black holes that it would be even possible to reach by 2012, and the kind of mass/energy manipulation we'd have to do to impart significant angular momentum on something a dozen times as massive as the sun... well, it's not in the near future. In short, they aren't planning to do this, just thinking about how they *could* do it if they had a convenient black hole and near-enough limitless energy.

Oh yea, likely story. Just because there was something that looks like the UFO in the same place at the same time doesn't mean that it was the same thing.

Far more likely is that the Falcon 9 second stage hit an alien spacecraft, causing it (the alien spacecraft) to spin and spew gas!

Should we be concerned that only 30% of scientists adopt a position of agnosticism towards matters of leprechauns? Surely in the absence of reproducible evidence either way, the scientific position is to be non-committal?

In short, no.

Okay, now imagine they send you a notice saying that you have a choice of paying $1,500 or being sued for $10,000. You didn't pirate the movie in question.

There is a persistent and perplexing belief in our culture that there is such a thing as a "magic word". It goes back to the times when people thought magic was real, or perhaps even further. We *force* people to say "sorry" as if just saying it made it true. The same with "please" and "thank you". And the same with curse words. "Damn" is bad, but "darn" is okay, even when you mean exactly the same thing. Why? Because it's the words that are bad, not the meaning (well, sometimes the meaning as well as in the case of "fuck"). They're magic.

Hell, I personally knew someone who seriously banned the use of "ridiculous" at her house on the basis that it had a syllable that sounded the same as "dick". The same person banned Harry Potter books to her kids because of the whole "witchcraft" thing, which nicely brings us back to my first point.

There are performance issues. This is especially true on mobile phones and the like that support hardware acceleration for H.264 but not Theora (though obviously this would change if everyone adopted Theora instead of H.264).

But there's more to Theora then "open source". The H.264 specifications are open. The problem is the patents. Namely that there is a "free period" for implementations of H.264, and once that ends it will suddenly start costing money to support. Microsoft, Apple, and others own some of these patents and so won't have to pay. Just about everyone else *will* have to pay, and so opposes H.264 even if the alternatives are inferior. (And google recently announced an alternative that might be more palatable to the "performance at any cost" crowd who support H.264 despite its non-free nature, as I understand it.)