Depends where you draw the positive/negative lines on the crappy poll answers. I'm reading it as "Keep it away from me"/"Not terribly interested"/"I'll evaluate it when they're out" as being negative (the last one because it's essentially "not enthusiastic yet"), and that equals 50%. Positive answers are "Looks amazing"/"I'm interested", which are only 30%. The remainder are "Vaporware"/"What year is this"- which are more negative than positive, although for different reasons.

If you put the "I'll evaluate it" one in the positive camp, that still only brings positive and negative to level pegging. And I'm of the opposite opinion to you in terms of what being pre-release does to these things. Your view is that people are positive about it without having seen the product, and their enthusiasm will go up when they've got something in front of them. I see it the other way around- that getting excited by hype is easy, and a lot of people's enthusiasm will wane when they see it in action- not to imply that it won't be good, but that it won't be good enough in reality to justify the expense and hassle. Just like 3D.

But you're right, I am jaded by novelty toys- they never live up to expectations. But I've got no control over anything- I'm just a guy writing things on the internet. We can wait and see what happens when it happens.

I used to have relatives who owned a pig farm. Boiling the slops was a standard part of their routine.

They actually used to have arrangements with all of the local pubs and restaurants, which every day would collect all of the plate scrapings, left overs and kitchen offcuts into slop buckets. Every morning my uncle would go around collecting the slop buckets and take them back to the farm, where they would all be emptied into a big vat and boiled for a number of hours. The end result would be a mushy stuff with the texture and smell of vomit, but which would be sterile of any nasties that could harm the pigs. The pigs loved the stuff. Filthy buggers.

Chucking a few jars of peanut putter into the mix every day would have been easy enough.

Of course that wouldn't even be strictly necessary, seeing as the manufacturer of the peanut butter seems to be swearing blind that the product is uncontaminated and fit for human consumption. If the farmer were happy with this, they could go nuts and just feed it straight to the pigs.

Then sell it as livestock feed. Pigs eat far worse than peanut butter. Boil it up along with the rest of the slops to kill off any salmonella, and it'll be perfectly safe (if disgusting, from a human point of view).

Still a waste of perfectly good human food, but at least it's better than burying it with the trash.

Seems like it would have been easy enough for their lawyers to draw up a contract to fix this. One which says "Costco is returning full ownership of this product to the manufacturer and is absolved of all responsibility for it's future uses". Then the manufacturer would have been free to resell it (or donate it), and would be fully liable for any risks. It sounds like the supplier is in some financial difficulty, so would have welcomed the chance to relabel and sell it on to a different retailer. Seeing as Costco weren't willing to pay for it, I don't see what objection they should have to that- and it's not like that decision would have any impact on their competition (i.e., it's not like their competitors would have to do without peanut butter if this shipment gets destroyed).

Sounds like corporate apathy to me. It's simply easiest for Costco to destroy a batch that they aren't willing to sell, and they have no motivation to do anything else.

There were people like you last time 3D started it's resurgence. You don't hear many 3D cheerleaders these days- the fad is now on its way back out again.

VR just doesn't interest me, in the same way as3D didn't- it's not that I actively hate the idea of it, it just doesn't excite me at all while at the same time it has all sorts of drawbacks (i.e., VR means having to buy and wear an expensive and cumbersome headset). Some people obviously are enthusiastic about it, but it will be interesting to see how the numbers pan out. This survey (unscientific as it is) seems to confirm that the majority of people are take-it-or-leave-it. Maybe we'll all be wowed when we actually have one of these things strapped to our face, but I doubt it.

"Travelling fast" is one thing, "travelling fast in such a way as to successfully arrive in orbit of a planet light-years away without missing and getting lost in space" is another, and "travelling fast in such a way as to rendezvous with an impossibly tiny ship halfway into the interstellar void launched centuries ago, slow down enough to dock with it, drastically reconfigure it mid-flight, then speed back up again and still arrive in orbit of a planet light-years away" is still yet a third thing.

Basically- doing that would be REALLY hard.

You've sort of hit on the problem and solution. What we need is something that is not called a "taxi" for this. Rather than taking the existing taxi system and adding ride sharing, we should supplement taxis with a new form of public transport based on this system. The new system would be somewhere between a bus and a taxi- a medium sized public vehicle (perhaps "minibus" size), but which would be summoned on demand and travel to your chosen destination like a taxi rather than travelling a fixed schedule like a bus.

This would solve both of the obvious problems- the first being that people who order taxis expect a private vehicle taking the shortest trip possiblem and the second being that existing taxi drivers and firms don't have a pricing system that could cope with this sort of change.

If you made the vehicles sufficiently sexy and space aged (rather than just using regular old minibuses), you could easily sell it as "the mass transit of the future". Since the vehicle wouldn't be expected to take huge numbers of people at a time (only really two or three small parties at once), you could make the insides suitably comfortable on a standard van frame.

Russian reactions to US and EU threats has nothing to do with NATO troop numbers, and everything to do with willingness to use it. NATO still has a military which is overwhelmingly powerful compared to Russia's- NATO accounts for something like 60% of the entire planet's military spending, while Russia would be lucky to top 5%.

All that means nothing if you're not willing to engage. And Russia has NATO by the gas pipes. The US would be far more usefully engaged directing some of that military budget to solving that economic conundrum than buying another fighter jet which might never so much as take off in anger.

Unless I'm much mistaken, helium-3 is useful only for nuclear fusion. As controllable cold fusion is *still* "40 years away", and as hot fusion (aka nuclear warheads) are still banned in space under international law (and of unproven use as a propulsion method anyway), then there's still no reason to go to the moon (yet).

IF we ever get cold fusion working, and IF the method of cold fusion we get working could usefully use helium-3, and IF mining the stuff from the moon is cheaper than making use of earth-bound sources, then it might start to look like a good idea.

The US military budget is the same as the next 10 biggest national military budgets put together. Yes, that includes China- and 9 more. Put together. And that's forgetting the fact that the US military isn't just the military of the US- it includes all of the NATO forces (which is fully 5 of the top 10 spenders, and 23 other non-top-10 members), as well as functionally close allies like Japan and South Korea (numbers 5 and 12 in the "top spending" rankings).

The US would be in no great danger if it lopped 5% off of it's military budget. You could cut the budget in half and it would still be larger than numbers 2 and 3 (China and Russia) put together. Again, not even counting NATO.

To put figures on it- the Apollo programme was estimated to have costed $109 billion in 2010 dollar (accounting for inflation). That's for the full 15 year or so programme. The US was estimated to have spent $682 billion in 2013 on the military. So to pay for the entire Apollo programme all over again, you would only need to divert roughly 1.2% of the annual military budget each year.

That would be a considerable extra step for NSA to comply with. If your data is unencrypted, they merely need to scrape the data and away they go- easy mass surveillance of any number of 100's of millions of people.

If they had to take every one of their targets to a secret court (alerting them to their presence while they're at it), mass surveillance would simply not be practical.

The same logic goes for throwing up almost any security barrier. Nothing is unbreakable in the long run, but you can make it so difficult for your opponent that it becomes unprofitable for them to get to you.

Indeed. It is spring in all the waits that actually matter here in the UK- the weather is warm and bright, the cherry blossom is out, the first bumble bees can be seen, and plants are all entering their active growth phase.

Importantly- the weather it's warm. Which from a "need for Russian gas" point of view is all that actually matters.

Crimea is 60% Russian-speakers, 25% or so Ukrainian-speakers, and 15% or so ethnic Tatars. It is fair to assume that most of the ethnic Ukrainians might prefer to be part of Ukraine rather than part of a Russian Federation with zero protection or adoption of their own culture, and Tatars are historically anti-Russian due to the atrocities committed against them during the Soviet era.

Even if you assume that 100% of the Russian-speakers voted to join Russia (which is not guaranteed- a lot of them will have family or cultural ties with the mainland outside of their language), it's extremely difficult to see 97% approval.

As others have pointed out, the last believable poll figures (pre-troubles) on Crimean nationalism had only around 50% of the population for secession. For almost fully half of the population to change their mind in the last 3 months is completely non-credible.

And we shouldn't be surprised. We all know from past experience exactly what effect gun-toting thugs have in the presence of ballot boxes. Even if you're willing to believe there was no "ballot-stuffing" fraud, there's no doubt that it will effect people's confidence to turn up and vote controversially.

Unless my calendar is lying to me, it is now spring and has been for several weeks. The weather is nice, too. If anything, the longer they stall from now the more likely it is that sanctions will spill into next winter.

I don't buy that as the reason for stalling. I think it's just genuine reluctance to go past the point of no return.

If all you wanted was a plane, there would be a lot easier ways to steal one than taking one with 239 people on board that you'd need to "disappear".

If you wanted a plane full of hostages (and it wouldn't be the first time), it doesn't make sense that the group responsible hasn't made themselves known. What's the point in taking hostages if nobody knows your demands? The same can be said of any "terrorism" arguments- what's the point if nobody knows who was responsible and why?

My pet theory (based on nothing more than speculation), is that it was a hostage taking gone wrong. Someone tried to take the plane and fly it somewhere safe before making their announcement and demands. However something goes wrong (not enough fuel to get to safe haven, perhaps) and the plane crashes. The group responsible are now laying low as there's nothing to gain from coming forward, and they're now responsible for 239 deaths.