One thing I learned from Wikipedia that I hadn't heard anywhere else is that, a few years earlier, Swartz first downloaded the Library of Congress's "complete bibliographic data set" (whatever that is), then a bit later downloaded millions of public domain court documents from a paywalled system called PACER. The Library of Congress normally charged fees to access the former, and the latter charged users 8 cents per page back then (now it is 10 cents per page up to $3 per document). Despite gaining the attention of the FBI, he didn't get so much as a slap on the wrist for either one.

So we have a couple aspects potentially contributing to what happened. First, Swartz probably felt reassured by his past experiences that, even if caught, he wouldn't get in trouble. Second, he didn't make any friends in the government by pulling his first two stunts, so when federal prosecutors realized they could get him, they went overboard. This is just conjecture, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.

That's not bad in small doses, but rarely posting an original thought is pretty annoying. At this point, it seems like some of my Facebook friends can only convey thoughts by sharing somebody else's someecards.

I believe that conclusion comes from the idea that the collision was between two proto-planets - that is, for all intents and purposes, the Earth and the Moon only came into being after the collision. Wikipedia calls them "the proto-Earth" and "the impactor" which supposedly was the size of Mars. An impact like that would have changed everything so dramatically that even if we had some age-measurable material that survived the impact, we wouldn't know whether it came from the proto-Earth or the impactor. So it makes some sense to use that event as the "birth" of our planet.

And of course you can't just use the absolute age of some atoms, if we could measure such a thing. Maybe some of the heavier atoms fused in that impact, but some material came the supernova(e) that seeded our solar nebula with heavier atoms and induced the rotation that eventually became the Sun's accretion disk, some came from other, smaller impacts of bodies probably formed at the beginning of the Solar System, etc.

Of course he doesn't believe that, but those bills are sponsored by a bunch of Democrats. Don't be fooled by how the political process worked in the past; these days, the only item of importance in any given bill is the letter between the sponsor's name and home state.

It's implied from his background - he is a Christian - and his use of religious terms like "sanctity of life." The main logical fallacy in his theological position is that his god is a god of the gaps. He is using gaps in evidence for the prevailing theory to "prove" that it's wrong. I don't know personally, but I wouldn't be surprised or dismayed if there is still a "missing link" in the fossil record that tells us how single-celled organisms evolved certain relatively complex things like flagella. The lack of evidence is not evidence to the contrary, so I am content to wait until further science sheds light on the matter. But the fact that we aren't sure how life got started doesn't throw the rest of Evolutionary Theory away. The fact that the Piltdown Man was a hoax doesn't either. Wikipedia has a fascinating series of articles on evolutionary biology, but here's a good place to start.

Also, as GP implied, jumping from "intelligent designer" to the benevolent and omnipotent Christian god just does not follow from "there are issues with Evolutionary Theory." There is no logical connection between the two, and his use of Occam's Razor only makes sense to those who take it as a given that there are extradimensional beings of unimaginable power. A biologist using Occam's Razor would instead extrapolate from observed processes like natural selection, and then look for evidence (which is exactly what we've done with Evolutionary Theory, and it has worked out pretty well so far).

It is illegal to expose illegalities performed by US officials, so Kim Dotcom performing a corrupt action in hopes that someone involved in the process is corrupt enough to expose the corruption.

He's going about bribery all wrong though; it's not illegal if you call it "campaign donations."

Quoted for emphasis. Even if the only thing we could extract was water, we could potentially use it for potable water, breathable air, rocket fuel, radiation shielding, hydroponics, cleaning... Basically, it would be difficult to have too much water on any extraterrestrial habitat.

Second to water would be just oxygen itself, which supposedly we can bake out of various oxides if we get it hot enough.

After those two items, it's a toss up, at least until we can do much fancier things. The article suggests extracting and purifying silicon and making simple solar cells out of that, as an example. But water and oxygen will be, by far, the two most important and relatively simple things to extract and use.

We haven't put a lot of thought into it because it doesn't require much. Any corporation's HR department is already well-equipped to draft requirements for that kind of position: 15-20 years of experience building and maintaining extraterrestrial habitats, and able to make solid decisions and perform under intense pressure (or an increasing lack thereof).

This is probably mostly true if you're only speaking of behavior. Obviously my wife and I are the main influence since my kids have never been in day care, but they do soak up habits of other people they trust, especially older kids they look up to. My kids are all well-behaved, even on the three- to four-hour flights we take a few times a year, but my oldest (6) has picked up various bad or annoying habits in the past from his friends. One of his old playdate friends had a very annoying tantrum cry that my son tried once or twice. I had to break out the very rare Dad Voice on that one, and he never did it again. A worse example was his friend in kindergarten...my son would do stupid things on his worksheets (scribble instead of drawing or coloring, just guessing when it came to math and reading), just because that's what his friend would do. We asked the teacher to move him, and it got better, then we happened to move across the country, and now he's doing pretty awesome.

Also, my middle child has always been more difficult in other ways. Only recently have we started to make progress on that front by starting a chore chart, where she can earn stars for things we normally have to fight to get her to do, like picking up her room and eating well.

The novelty of that is falling away, though, when it comes to eating. My wife and I love all kinds of food, and my oldest almost always eats whatever we put in front of him. My youngest (1) eats literally everything we put in front of her, edible or not. The middle one, though... We do try to make what she likes but that changes all the time. She won't touch pizza anymore. As of Monday, she apparently no longer likes ribs. In fact it's probably easier to list what she does like: cereal, white rice, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, and any kind of noodles as long as there isn't too much "stuff" on them (like soup, she won't touch any kind of soup).

Hopefully our one-year-old continues to take after her brother.

Ctrl-Z my friend. Undo works perfectly fine in many web forms (including Gmail) when you accidentally select a bunch of text and overwrite it. My wife almost cried when she thought she lost the text from a huge email to a relative she hadn't seen in a while, but luckily I was there when it happened or else she would have given up.

I just tested it and undo works on Slashdot comment fields on IE, FF, and Chrome on Windows 7, and I know it works in Linux because I use it all the time at home.

Did you see the name they picked? You might as well just skip the middle man and mail Ford Motor Company a few hundred dollars as prepayment for their impending trademark lawsuit.

Thinking requires energy in the form of glucose in the blood, derived from food that we eat. So sustaining critical thinking processes require the consumption of more food, which generally comes from a grocer. They have to truck tons of it in every week, which inevitably belches many tons of CO2 in the air.

Therefore, they only oppose thinking for the purposes of saving the environment for our children. Won't you just think of the children? The best thing you can do is not think about them.

You know, for the children.

Yep, I use vim all the time for scripting tasks and FocusWriter for writing. At first I also used it for the rich text formatting, but I was using hacky scripts to convert it to other formats, e.g. starting OpenOffice in headless mode and converting to HTML...it was hideous. On top of that, changing text to bold and italic was easy enough, but I was doing things like changing three hyphens to em dashes and a specific character sequence to horizontal rules in those scripts because those things weren't easy to put in while I was trying to write.

These days I just write in Markdown and convert it with pandoc, and the HTML and EPUB output is infinitely better. All those special cases like em dashes and horizontal rules are handled correctly by pandoc with the -S (smart) option. Since it's just plain text now I could probably do it in vim, but I'm too lazy to come up with settings to do that since it's all there for free in Focuswriter. It looks just as good in Linux as it does in Windows, too.

This is not to mention that working on the stuff that fascinates you doesn't mean it's all joy. I've found this even in my hobbies: I want to make video games, but there is a lot of tedium involved. At my day job, I've spent days hunting down intermittent software bugs, and just because I do it for rockets and missiles and satellites doesn't make it any more fun than doing it for industrial wastewater management systems.

No no no, you (and another guy just a little ways down) haven't made the most interesting connection yet. This is a fancy gravity assist on steroids, but it would still take millions if not billions of years to get to even one of Milky Way's satellite galaxies, let alone Andromeda. So forget about intergalactic travel for now. Where this becomes more immediately interesting is finding pairs of very close, very large gravity wells within the same galaxy. That makes them into something rather like Mass Effect relays. Just wait for the proper alignment and launch toward the opposite pair at very high speeds, which can only be canceled by a similar gravity well. Alpha Centauri is a binary star system but the stars are quite far away, so I doubt it would work there, which is too bad since something relatively close like that would have been nice for us. Gliese 667 is a triple star system where the two larger ones are 12.6 AU apart, so that's a much better but still might not be close enough (I don't know, haven't done any math).