Luke: "TEN THOUSAND??? We could almost buy our own ship for that!"

Ben: It's all right, Luke. I have a cousin who can get us a ship for $3,500.

Ray Kurzweil loves to talk about the Future of Mankind and Technology. Ask him about something else... anything else, please!!!

Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out

I'm pretty liberal when it comes to bioengineering and research, but it seems like the height of hubris to me to bring a human life into existence just to satisfy scientific curiosity.

What is this, the Truman Show? Will they send this kid to regular school, or stick him in a zoo?

The source of the gravitational field. What else would be relevant when tallking about gravitational potential energy?

Ah, but the stationary object is also a "source of a gravitational field" from the POV of the ground. Relativity, y'see.

The earth isn't round. It's shaped like a burrito!

http://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/1982/02/06

Their desktop client app is also not free software. I got an account and then they dropped support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) in their client app - now it's Lion or Mountain Lion -only. They refuse to distribute any older versions.

Now, if the client were F/OSS, I could get the latest version and make it work on 10.6, leaving out the Lion-only features if necessary. Instead, I'm stuck with the command-line interface.

GitHub says they did this because they want to provide "the best experience for their users." Well, what about those of us who can't upgrade their OS or don't want to just to use an online service? How many of those 3 million users are still using Snow Leopard? Our user experience sucks now. Thanks for nothing, GitHub.

If you consider palette swaps to be variety...

No, I meant the map designs. There were wide-open grassy valleys, tight underground passages, caves, towers, bridges, ship corridors, snow-covered canyons. A hell of a lot of work went into designing that world.

It was mostly the repetition, the constant stuff jumping at you. It's a very fatiguing game

Yeah, I felt that way too. I was surprised that after the success of Halo, ID came up with such a mind-numbingly linear game in terms of settings and gameplay.

Halo also suffers from the "repeat-this-level-until-you-get-it-right-and-advance" problem, but the settings were fantastic (if repetitious) and had a lot of variety. You also had much more freedom to play around in the space, drive different vehicles, etc.

I still play Battlefield 1942 regularly just because it offers almost total freedom of action on the game field and the battles play out differently every single time!

Then you can catch him in a dot-net (but only if you see sharp).

Someone else did too... but it also didn't catch on (maybe because it didn't ship as a standard feature).

Why, that's the Russian New Year! We'll have a big parade, and serve hot hors d'oeuvres...

I'm not sure anyone has come up with the optimal keyboard layout for typing English, which I interpret to be the least amount of effort to type the most common words.

I did a quick comparison of QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak on the finger movements required to type the most common trigraphs in English, which are: THE, AND, THA, ENT, ION, TIO, FOR, NDE, HAS, NCE, TIS, OFT, MEN, ING, EDT, STH. I threw in STR since that one is a very common consonant cluster.

The result: on QWERTY, you have to reach off the home keys 39 times and use the same finger more than once in typing 7 of the trigraphs.

For Dvorak, it was 13 reaches off the home keys, and no repeat finger usage.

For Colemak, it was 12 reaches off the home row, and 2 trigraphs that required using a finger repeatedly.

I see the value in increasing alternating hand usage to increase speed, but there is also something to be gained from having common trigraphs clustered so you can hit them in a rolling motion with your index, middle, and ring fingers.

For example, S-D-F and F-D-S, J-K-L and L-K-J are quick to type on QWERTY but rarely appear in English. Those prime key locations should probably belong to S-T-R and I-O-N.

I always thought it would be funny to do a parody where Khan is thawed out and discovers he's not on Botany Bay at all, but the Golgafrinchan 'B' ark, and his genetically enhanced crew have all been replaced by telephone sanitizers and hairdressers...

I'll see your Wells and raise you a Watts:

"Let me tell you what happens if this thing gets out," she said quietly. "First off, nothing. We outnumber it, you see. At first we swamp it through sheer numbers, the models predict all sorts of skirmishes and false starts. But eventually it gets a foothold. Then it outcompetes conventional decomposers and monopolizes our inorganic nutrient base. That cuts the whole trophic pyramid off at the ankles. You, and me, and the viruses and the giant sequoias all just fade away for want of nitrates or some stupid thing. And welcome to the Age of Behemoth."