Harvest heat from the microwave background and then push it back out at the wavelength and direction of one's choice. Might not be the most bountiful source of energy in the universe, but it's mostly everywhere ;)

Verizon's program will track your physical location, network use, and just about any other information they can get while watching what happens to/with your smartphone and share it with anyone willing to pay for it for marketing, sales, etc... reasons. Always on, only the one large opt in with no incremental no opt out, and definitely no aggregation/anonymization.

I'm generally willing to answer survey questions for a fraction of the revenue. So Google Opinion Rewards and Nielsen's TV watching logs are generally ok with me. Market research which doesn't split the value of my opinions with me will generally (but not always) get short shrift. (Note that value doesn't have to be monetary, I'll often give opinions when I think there's a chance of influencing the item in a direction beneficial to me). Passive tracking options which don't give me an option to selectively participate/abstain are DOA as far as I'm concerned (like Verizon Rewards).

I agree. Which OU had control of the space? Where's the dirt? Is even there a single decent paparazzo left in science reporting?

I give kudos to the selection of the "special projects" building though*. Nothing like a remote corner of campus with sloped earthwork embankments around all the lab windows for doing something like this. Do you realize how much of a success this indicates for NIST's culture of safety (which they've been working hard on ever since that little Pu oops in Boulder)? Even their alleged illicit activity takes safety into consideration (although the explosion indicates the potential perp. missed something in the hazard analysis - but hey, what do you expect from criminals).

*For those that don't know, that was a politically clever rename of the hazards building, similar to how they also came up with the Center for Neutron Research name.

I'm sure it wouldn't be the first time an author called a journal editor (or reviewer) nasty names based on received comments.

Hmm... I wonder if the AC would have said the same thing if shortscruffydave had called out a syntax error in C; you know, nothing code breaking, just sloppy editing.

The counter here, is the same in every other threat/hazard matrix. You define an index value - like the ANSI Z.10 relative hazard index and then use that as a quantification when you define an acceptable risk for any given task.

Stainless Steel Rat movies would be horrid. At least half their value was the way that the writing style was an extension of the protagonist's persona. You'd never get that on film. You might be able to pull each story off in a fast paced forty-five minute episode - make a mini-series out of the books, but you'd still lose a lot. If they want content for the big screen - Vorkosigan is the way to go! Much more of Bujold would translate to film.

While it's not cannon anymore (i.e. from a book), stating it as a distance was a demonstration of the ship's power such that it could fly so close to a black hole cluster that it could do the traditional smuggling run in a distance of less than twelve parsecs.

The Mos Eisley Cantina... Duh!

Yeah - but a geosynchronous orbit at 2 meters is really hard ;)

I have a dream of when my children, and my children's children, can read/listen/watch recordings of extremely important public cultural events over the internet and not be committing copyright infringement.

Sorry - knee jerk response to the dream phrase made it as far as the keyboard.

It'd be a nice feature - or even to have a work/home bubbles (you too Amazon). Bubbling is the term that duckduckgo.com uses to describe anticipated search intent. They don't bubble and tend to be decent with their results. I'll often switch to them if Google (or Amazon) seems stuck in a paradigm of what they think I want.

It's a nice system, but as I understand it - your friend will be booted out of game A from your library when you launch any other game from your library. Again, a great improvement from where Steam started, but a little "grass was greener" from my perspective. I think back about how weird it would have been if my friend would have been booted off of the Crystalis cartridge I loaned him any time I ran Zelda II on my NES. Perhaps I've interpreted the Steam library sharing erroneously though. Again - a great improvement and one of those ways Steam has leaned to leverage it's market dominance in favor of its customers.

Good move, but doesn't address useful (but subjective) claims like satisfaction guaranteed. I remember as a kid saving for most of a year to buy one of the later KQ games. I played through it fast, (but probably more than two hours, but not by much) and wasn't challenged/entertained as the past KQ games (or other Sierra titles like the QFG series) indicated I should be - in light of past experiences, I felt pretty mislead about the experience which should have been in that box. Overall, I was pretty bummed out - both about the game and the price. I was able to take it back to the store (Sears I think), explain the experience, and get my money back.

These days it's easy to find out info/reviews of a game - and experience will help you evaluate something within that two hour window, but I think fears of abuse may have curtailed the usefulness of this program. Obviously there's a line between "I'm taking my money back because I don't like the ending/plot/fact that they killed Data-but-not-really" and "I'm asking for my money back because the product was clearly broken/unfinished/incomplete," but neither can be evaluated within that two hour play window. Personally, it's still a tough call for me to buy a full price game on Steam - what with the DRM and non-transferability of the software. Steam sales are nice, but my kids will never get the chance to loan their game disks to a friend or pick through bins at a garage sale or pawn shop for interesting game titles. The grass was greener when DRM meant looking up something in Fodor's guide too. Ok, ok... I'll toddle along now, but do try to stay off the lawn.

1: In Soviet Russia,

2: supernovas command you -

3: in Vi;

4: ???

5:you insensitive profiting clod!