So what if he wants to thank God for his abilities? What is it to you? Are you offended by this? If God is as useless as you claim to be, then of what harm is his belief? Presumably, he is a competent scientist and would produce the same output regardless whether you agree to his beliefs or not. We who believe in God (I'm a muslim microbiologist) thank God for allowing us the opportunity to become what we are, to achieve what we have set out in life. In Islam, a core belief is the belief of predestination (qada' and qadar) meaning what has happened, is happening and will happen is already written. As humans we are given the gift of "free will", but this free will is limited by events out of our control. A child may inherit genes that confer him the abilities of a mathematical genius for example, but if he was born say in the Gaza Strip, then such potential will probably never be reached. As such, when good things happens to us, we thank God, when bad things happens, we ask for his protection and we say "insyallah" (God Willing) when we plan for the future.

Did you just said the US tortured the soldier who leaked this information? Amazing! First Americans let the US torture some brown "people" because, hey, they're brown and wear funny towels on their heads. Then, you let the US government torture this American soldier because hey, Benedict Arnold and all that. What's next? I am also amazed that Americans appears to be mostly nonchalant about the human right abuses that your government commits openly. Maybe because you think that it will not happen to you. Guess again. I have put the US on my no fly-there list, the same way people before had put South American or African tin pot dictatorship countries on their never go there list. You never now when you could end tied-up naked with water dripping on your face.

Then, the solution is to have a Missile Switch Cover-type http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9278 thing over the Delete key. Makes my Nuclear General fantasy more believable too.

The US government is the Corporation, or rather, the other way around. Look closely to your foreign policy blunders and chances are, you will find some corporation lobbying or profiting from it. With regards to Wikileaks "targeting" the US, you will have to accept that the US government, on the whole had stopped being a force of good on the world stage, probably right after the fall of the Soviet Union. Hence, it is the "best" target for this sort of thing. Not to say other countries don't deserve to be targeted as well.

This poll is irrelevant to me. Why would I need to save Data and his daughter Lal (beloved in Hindi). Surely with his superhuman strength and abilities, he can take care of himself and his daughter is dead anyway.

And your point being? If you didn't know, the US and Soviets carried out "rescue" operations at the end of WWII to catch as many German scientists as possible, especially those who worked with rockets and jets. Werner Von Braun is one of the most famous example of this. The US called it, Operation Paperclip. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip. Do you even have any proof that the Chinese copied Western designs other than the usual "the Chinese are inferior and primitive peoples, therefore they must have copied everything our superior Western World produced, durr!" racist shtick? I am getting really sick of the Sinophobia on Slashdot. I hope you guys don't buy into it and repeat the same things that you did after 9/11.

Chineeese! It's ALIVE! It's coming for YOU and your family! Hide in your bomb shelters! Wrap wet towels on your heads! Cover your bedrooms in tin foils. The Chineeese Terror is coming!!!

Seriously, what is wrong with you Americans? Can't you and your government live through life without manufacturing an enemy to hate? What is it in your national psyche that requires an opponent? Is it because you actually bought into your own "we're the Good Guys(TM)" propaganda that the only way to validate this absurd world view is to manufacture "bad guys". My theory is that you are so hung up on WWII, the last "good war" that you fought in, that you and your leaders are subconsciously trying to recreate it so that you can feel good about yourselves again. Hence, the Axis of evil, war on terror, and now a more traditional enemy, the Red Peril. Get over it.

Or Antarctica, which is practically uninhabited, save for a couple hundred transient scientists. Or the bottom of the ocean, or underground. All of which are still much easier to colonise than another planet. Let's face it. For many people, space is the equivalent of the promised land/heaven/nirvana/valhalla, which is fine by me since I think everyone should have a belief system, traditional or not. Just don't spend taxpayer's money on it. Also, most of the people I know who spouts the "for the future of mankind" shtick wouldn't give the time of day to the homeless man down the street. Make of that what you will.

(my bolding) My guess is someone with an axe to grind complained to Google and with what the ultra-litigious society that is America now, Google decided to cover their ass.

NIMP = Not In My Profession. A cousin of NIMBY. I love it how everyone is for "Free Trade" except when it is disadvantageous to themselves. Also, "Democracy" except when the they don't like the people elected. Also "Free Speech" except when the find they speech offensive or politically inconvenient (Wikileaks). You Westerners reap what you sow. Good luck with turning protectionist and see the prices of your goods go up while other countries would no longer buy your goods when China and India makes them cheaper.

I am a graduate research student at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Two years into my Ph.D, some little Napoleon at the Facilities Management Division, (glorified janitors) decided to centralise the AC thermostat control for the whole school, with no way of overriding it. Supposedly this is to save money on electricity bill. They spent tens of thousands of dollars connecting all of the individual ACs to a central controller but the whole system is buggy and it seems every few months, it needs to be tweaked and repaired, costing more money. Worse, it is now hot during summer and cold during winter and you could do nothing about it. The -80C freezer rooms also frequently overheats because the room AC is set to high. To give my middle finger at them, I purposely brought an energy intensive fan heater and left it on for 12 hours a day in the student room during winter. Fuck the FMD.

Churchill tanks are descended from "infantry" tanks, heavily armoured (for an Allied tank), slow moving and usually with a relatively small main cannon. Their primary function is to assist the infantry, not fight tanks and as such are next to useless against German heavy tanks such as the Panthers and Tigers. In fact, to the Germans, the Panther is a medium tank while the Western allies incorrectly classified it as a heavy tank and assumed that it was only present in small numbers, like the Tiger tanks. They paid dearly for this false assumption when Allied tanks were torn apart after the Normandy landings, like the in the battle of Villers-Bocage. You can read about it here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Villers-Bocage/. It was by using their superior numbers and a combined arms approach, especially fighter bombers that the threat of German tanks was beaten back. It was only until near the end of the European war that the Western allies fielded a tank that was on near equal terms with the Panthers and Tigers. Also, let's not forget that it was the Soviets who annihilated entire German field armies on the Eastern Front. If Hitler didn't fight a war on two fronts, the outcome of the Normandy landings, might have been different.

Lets not forget about Antarctica too. The next great War is going to be there. An entire continent ripe for colonisation. An entire continent of untouched resources. It will be like the Americas before Columbus, and even more so, since there are no native peoples there to agonise about. I think it is time that we accept the Earth is not static. This statist view of geography and climate is a by-product of our short attention span. The Earth changes and had always been. Entire ecosystems have many times went through great extinction events. What were once sea bed, are now mountain tops and vice versa. Rivers, lakes, even entire oceans had dried out. We humans will adapt or we will be replaced by other more successful species.

I have been looking back at my posting history on Slashdot and noticed a trend. I have been more and more "defending" if you can call it that, China here. I then realized that, China is now the fashionable country to hate by many Westerners, mainly Americans, usurping Arabs and Muslims and possibly even the Iranians (who are not Arabs, despite what many bigots here like to say). Being a Muslim myself and weathering through horrible post-September 11 outright bigotry and hatred has made me more alert. All the classic signs are here in this thread. You know, the "they're stealing our jobs/innovations/money/women", "their culture is a debased/derivative of our own superior culture", "they have {insert negative racial trait} while we don't. I am also surprised to see about half of Slashdot suddenly turning into RIAA spokespersons about piracy in China when usually it's fuck the RIAA!. I guess it's "their piracy is inferior to our piracy" thing. More disturbingly, further down the thread someone tried to find the purported original article and couldn't find it, possibly making this story a racist smear campaign as well. There is even the "White man's burden" argument where China's human rights record had something to do with pirating the latest movies (the irony here is that Chinese citizens can freely copy any movie they like while you couldn't). Guess, even among geeks there are hypocrites, racists and bigots.

See, it's all nice to go misty eyed, chest out, with the Federation flag flapping in the wind behind you about space colonisation but think of it this way. We are living at the bottom of a deep and steep (gravitational) cliff, though generally, it is pleasant here and we (still) have what we need. The Moon/Mars/Alpha Centauri, with all its riches, gold and hot green women is on top of this cliff. Why should we have to expend money and energy to climb this cliff, to get stuff that we can easier get down here? Factor in the cost of going to the moon, mining it and transporting it back to Earth, it is probably more economical to extract gold from sea water. I'm not saying space colonisation will never happen. It could happen. But then again, I have a dim view of our chances. Also, there is no soil on the moon. In fact, moon dust is very abrasive and would be very hazardous to humans and our machinery.