Special forces MREs have had these items for years, I remember trying to buy some Zapplesauce online a while back to give it a try but couldn't find a worthwhile price. Also, I've eaten a number of modern MREs and some of the are very tasty. Most packs now contain candy or Tobasco or other incentives to get you calories down. I wouldn't want it every day, but for a field ration it's pretty good.

In today's news, Slashdot has obtained a patent for misleading article summaries and intentionally overblown headlines.

Has anyone here actually bothered looking at all or is everyone just assuming? xbla provides a list of top rated and most downloaded games, Indie rpgs are all over those lists, including cthulu. And the marketplace has a new games section too, so cthulu got advertising. I'm not really sure what to make of this. Unless people are just so lazy or uninformed that nobody bothers to check out the Indie games on Xbox. Or if steam's level of purchasing is just that high.

Random ideas off the top of my head: Rogue stars of any sort might carry clouds of hydrogen and/or other elements, possibly even rocky asteroids and protoplanets, with them. It might be possible to refuel in one of these systems. Gravitational slingshots become an interesting idea, possibly allowing for some really interesting maneuvers. A gravity source also makes orbiting possible, so we could send ahead robotic probes to orbit some big external fuel tanks to await a manned mission that will carry less mass on-board and pick up supplies along the way- the probes can use gravitational assist to cut down on fuel use when stopping and rejoining the manned mission. There's just all sorts of potential, although again I'm mostly talking about any rogue star and not just brown dwarves.

Newsflash, and I can't believe I have to say this on slashdot: Best Buy doesn't train people to inform customers, period. Best Buy trains salesmen (as in, lots of males) to increase profits. You, as a tech junkie, are a reliable source of income with no variables, you come in and get what you want, goodbye. What they care about is the mother of five who knows nothing at all about technology and gets upsold $1,500 worth of accessories on a $500 TV. On the release of the Xbox 360, Best Buy was "expecting" to upsell the average Rewards customer (and new people they could sell on the Rewards junk) over $600 worth of accessories- separate from the purchse of the system. That's an AVERAGE of double the system price, IN ADDITION TO selling the system. This has nothing to do with utility, or quality of product, or need of the customer- the only statistic is how much money was gotten from the customer, and if possible, how can we fleece them for more (Geek Squad). If you consider yourself even vaguely aware of smart shopping, and you still frequent BestBuy, you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself (other than comparison shopping of course, like handling a demo unit of a laptop in person before buying it online).

I hate this comment, because nobody seems to remember that free beer is free as in free speech (freebeer.org).

Rand Paul, you mean the Medicare-seeing doctor who started voting against health care when he got to Washington? Yeah, spotless record.

Yeah, just name a country that isn't completely racist against some group, and that doesn't fearmonger its citizenry. Should be easy, right?

WE ARE AT WAR WITH (name not available). WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH (name not available).

Correlation != causation. End non-story.

I don't see how "this containment site broke" is a qualifier for a good containment site. Anyone care to explain?

Is Amazon counting porn? No, seriously. The last report before Amazon stopped admitting the numbers was that over half (54%?) of Kindle sales were Harlequin quasi-porn and the like. The increased privacy, discreet nature of the transaction and storage, make the device a natural market for adults-only material. A big part of why Kindle is dominating dead tree, is because the porn industry is once again leading the charge into the new format.

Follow the link in TFA, see that image on the right, with the band of the Milky Way being so clear? With a truly clear sky, it's like you bluescreened the entire sky and that image is showing in impossibly high resolution. Absolutely jaw-dropping. It's so hard to understand how rural people, who can look up and SEE the stars at night, aren't foremost in space exploration. When you realize what you're seeing, you have to want to go up there.

...except that big trucks are often tax-exempt. This issue is just too complicated to be dealt with simply.

But hospitals are forced by the government to eat the costs when an uninsured person shows up in the ER, and you can't choose beforehand whether you'll ever need a trip to the ER.