Which manned space program are you talking about?

Odds are Elon Musk will pick the crew for the next US manned mission, based on recruitment and testing done at SpaceX. There is something to be said for sending elderly people on the first test flights, since that minimizes the loss of life-years in the event of a fatal accident... But there are probably more important criteria. The top candidates will perhaps be ex-NASA astronauts in their early 60's / late 50's.

Yes.

The worst version of this is when they leave out the detail of where the thing happened and word the headline in a way that makes you think it happened closer to you than is really the case.

"Major Terror Attack Under Way" (In Syria. Sorry Syrians. It sucks to be you.)

There is an age-old answer to the question of income and wealth differences. Income differences in a society are good to the extend that, in the big scheme of things, they lead to a situation where the poorest are better off than they would have been if the differences were lower.

The problem is that it is not easy to evaluate whether this is true in a society.

I'm planning on making rubberized case with a handle that turns you phablet into a ping-pong paddle. It'll come with an app that tracks your movements and the movements of the ball using the sensors and camera on the phone, in order to give you advice on how to improve your game.

Wait, does Kickstarter accept obviously sarcastic submissions?

Well, for starters it will protect your client side script from choking on an unreasonably large input.

I can't think of a legitimate reason why anyone would want to cut and paste a arbitrarily long texts into any form of any sort anywhere. There should always be an upper limit based on what the legitimate needs are.

They probably have a client-side script that makes it hard to submit a long password.

Those of you who think that there mustn't be a limit to the size, consider what happens when some joker opens a text editor, types a word and then does this repeatedly a few times:

Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Arrow key down, Ctrl-v

IIRC you needed a stylus to write effectively on those, no?

Microsoft may actually have made some genuine progress in signal processing and machine learning to allow you to write with your fingertips.

Wiktionary is your friend: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/...

AMD CPU:s reportedly return exactly the same values as Intel CPU:s. I'm guessing they do so for compatibility reasons, so that any workarounds that software developers have implemented work as expected.

Maybe people are catching on to the fact that a lot of what passes for advanced technology these days only amounts to the arrangement of pixels on screens.

Previous waves of technologies liberated us from hard work. The Internet wave, while impressive, has not really been able to do that.

And no, sites that help wealthier people buy services such as cooking, cleaning and driving from poorer people don't count, since the work is still done by a human. I'm talking about machines or devices that physically make work easier, or does work automatically. Like the washing machine. The washing machine is so far probably the best machine, or robot really, that we have invented in terms of how much work it saves per dollar. A 1930's invention, which predates computers. It's sad when you think about it.

I hope the breakthroughs are just around the corner and that soon we will have our self-driving cars and our household robots that do chores and what not. Until then I doubt we will see much excitement from the general public.

I oppose this idea, especially out of care for the children. I think the giant fusion reactor would have to be situated too close to schools and nature preserves and other sensitive areas and I don't think the radiation risks have been thoroughly analyzed and quantified.

Look, I'm not opposed to giant balls of hydrogen as long as you build them in suitable places. There are many examples where they have put them light-years away from Earth, where there aren't any schools or preschools, and I'm all in favor of those ones.

Oh, look, this guy just bought a new fridge. Let's show him lots of fridge ads. Oh, look he clicked one of the fridge ads! Wow, this guy is really into fridges.

Meanwhile in guy's home...

Guy: "Hmm, this fridge looks about as good as the one I bought and the price is about the same. Yeah, I feel good about my purchase. Not going to return it. See you in 15 years, fridge sellers."

The battle against overly authoritarian shitheads is not a 30-year battle. It is likely an eternal battle (for moderate values of the concepts of "battle" and "eternity").

(There is no Islamic State in the west, but there are other examples one could name. For example: despite mountains of evidence to the contrary there are still hundreds of millions of people in the western world who think that sending drug addicts to prison is a great idea.)

It is also not a battle that can be successfully fought by anyone who does not picture themselves having their great grandchildren live in the region, because only those who do will have the stamina to keep fighting forever. Americans or Europeans can't be responsible for fighting the battle for a Middle east free of The Islamic State, or whatever other pretentious banner these guys will be fighting under next year.

"Why ten? Why not nine, or eleven? I'll tell you why: cause ten sounds official!"

"So having ten commandments was really a marketing decision."

Multiple uteri at any rate. Our ability to grow organs and have them live outside of the human body is improving rapidly. I don't think it is too far out to imagine that we might one day grow babies inside artificial uteri outside of the human body.

If science keeps progressing there may come a day when only the poor make their children the old fashioned way.