Funny. At first glance I thought it was actually "HCl", which is something that you would not exactly want on your head.

Interesting. Now I'd like to see someone come up with statistics like these for Westeros.
I want to know things like:
  - what the population of Westeros needed to be in order to supply enough man-power to populate and guard all of the castles along the Wall?
  - and what kind of crime-rate would that imply?
  - and why are there only "nine free cities" in Essos? shouldn't there be potentially hundreds of large cities scattered across the continent if this civilization has been around for somethign like 10,000+ years?

I've been thinking about this stuff lately and it kinda seems to me that humanity is on the verge of extinction.
Yep. I honestly don't think ANYONE in the WORLD will survive these books when he finally finishes writing them!

No serious science fiction writer in their right mind seriously thinks they can accurately predict the future

I knew someone was gonna say that.

I'm at the other end of the spectrum from you.
I wouldn't pay for a 16GB one. I'm using my 8GB Nexus7 as primarily an eBook reader plus have a bunch of MP3s loaded onto it for background music while I'm reading. (well, and also for the general sweetness of other Google/Android apps.)

The way I see it, I'm only really going to be using the network capabilities of my Nexus7 in places where I have Wifi (home, office, possibly friend's places) so I don't see a real need for a large storage capacity. It's not like I'm going to be using it while driving to/from work or going out bar-hopping in the evenings. And I don't think I would ever really want to load more than 1 movie onto it at a time [ie. for a plane trip or something].

For me, 8GB should be more than enough.
For others, 16GB might still not quite satisfy.

Personally, paying 25% more for the product isn't worth extra storage space that I would never use. I think Google did a good job at offering these 2 options to try and satisfy us both. Although I DO agree that an SD slot would have actually been the ideal solution.

Hey, if you're going to misquote things, why stop there? Why not just use the quote:

has also granted the Department the authority to seize private facilities

It's all meant to be used only "during a crisis or emergency". "to obtain, to the maximum extent practicable, the survivability of NS/EP [national security and emergency preparedness] communications under all circumstances".

I honestly don't see why this Executive Order was even necessary, considering the law can already commandeer vehicles in cases of reasonable necessity. If there is a crisis, it is your civic duty to assist if the authorities request it. How would communications equipment be any different?

In 2011, Congress considered similar provisions in cybersecurity legislation, which would have allowed the government to disconnect communications traffic in times of national security. Following public protest, congress abandoned the proposal.

Basically, it sounds like the Prez got sick of yet another issue that seemed to get stuck in congress, so he went ahead and passed it anyways.

And one model adds that 'The industry is now moving towards making models show more skin.'

Is it weird that I'm actually impressed that, not only did one of these models come to this stunning realization, but that she could also pronounce a 3-syllable word.

Girls, it's really a basic marketing strategy. For young kids, put bright colors into your product to attract their attention. For adults, sex sells. You use your gimic to draw them in to get a better look at your product.
At least, that's how I sees it.

No, not deceptive.
He's just showing off his knowledge and understanding of our human religious scriptures, as well as showing that he himself is without sin.

Sheesh. You psychologist-type people will just read ANYthing into some situations. ;-)

Oh, so you KNEW your home appliances would eventually turn on you! You just wanted Norton's "routine background scan" to trigger every 30 minutes to slow your own personal Skynet down to a crawl. You know, so you'd have time to go get a snack before the next foray.

You obviously haven't read the fine-print in their new agreement. One of the updates is that GoogleCalendar is changing. Months always start on Thursdays from now on. And there will be 14 months per year. Google's moon-base is still working on speeding up the moon's revolution, but it should be ready [out of Beta] by the end of 2012.

... I'm actually worried about OTHER people's search results. People who don't know any better than to go look for information outside of their social circles.

If I search for "origin of species", I'll see references to Charles Darwin.
If students in Kansas look it up, they'll probably see all kinds of links to creationism and how evolution is wrong/evil.

(and no, i don't mean to start a flamewar with that. it's just the first example that popped into my head where different social circles could see completely different results.)

This personalization of search results is gonna make http://lmgtfy.com/ obsolete too. And that makes me a saaaaad panda.

its relational database, SQL Server, and its platform cloud, Windows Azure, an online service for hosting and readily scaling applications

That's wonderful that the summary mentions what "SQL Server" and "Azure" are... but why no mention of wtf "Hadoop" is?
Why do I need to RTFA just to find out what we're talking about here?

Hadoop — an open source platform for crunching epic amounts of a data across an army of dirt-cheap servers

in this case, that $5 difference can also be seen as a 20% increase in cost.

I distinctly recall reading several articles (probably about 10 years ago?) saying how scientists were able to generate large quantities of spider silk ["synthetic" spider silk? call it whatever you want...] by genetically altering cows and just milking them. The silk could then be extracted from the cow milk.

After 10 years, no one has tried to improve on this extraction process? Kinda baffling that they would even start down that path if they weren't really going to follow up on it...

While I understand the general concept of how GPS locating works (your device captures timestamps from 3-or-more various global positioning satellites, then calculates where in the world you are), I've always been curious about how accurrate they can actually be.

If you are going to calculate, down to sub-centimeter distances, where your device is, wouldn't you need to know the EXACT location of these satellites, down to the sub-centimeter level of its altitude/lattitude/longitude? Like, if one of the satellites drifts slightly out of place from where they think it is, couldn't that throw off all calculations?

I always thought GPS could only determine your location down to roughly a 5-meter range because that's as good a guess that anyone could make as to where in orbit they are. No?

All I can think of is that maybe there are ground stations that the satellites use to find THEIR locations in orbit, kind of a GPS-locating that the orbiting satellites use... but I haven't really heard of any of that. Anyone know anything about this? Just curious.

So, you are one of those nerds who likes to feel superior to or at least different from most other nerds by joining a tiny subculture inside of a shitty game and sticking with it. Then you enjoy defending said shitty game, while everyone else just plays games that aren't shitty. Just like people who stuck with Everquest after WoW came out

heh, sounds like you have some issues there buddy.

But to retort:
1. "feel superior" - when did I say anything like that? I just said everyone can have their own opinion and I've only seen negative feedback on those sites, while I know plenty of people that still play the game.
2. "sticking with it" - dude, the game has been out for like 2 weeks. most wouldn't consider "sticking with it" until you at LEAST get out of your initial trial period from when you bought the game.
3. calling FFXIV and EQ "shitty games" and WoW is NOT a shitty game - yeah, you called me "one of those nerds who likes to feel superior" and then you start slinging this. mmmmkay.
4. name-calling - yeah, very mature. (sounds like flame-bait but i'll bite. also, my initial post was marked Troll, and this was marked Insightful. curious.)