Have you found the book review yet?

Apparently in APK's world, all ACs are Zontar and all logged-in Slashdotters are also Zontar.

Whaddaya think, AC buddy? Should I feel honoured?

So you've never been outside the US.

Have you ever been outside New York State?

Have you ever even been outside the Syracuse city limits?

Not only that but, it might not be safe to try and rendez-vous: http://io9.com/5889628/warp-dr...

"Any people at the destination," the team's paper concludes, "would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles."

sure, maybe we can use this new-fangled drive to meet up with them, but, when we do, we will release a gamma ray burst that will sterilize their entire ship.

Now maybe it might be possible to aim to "miss" them by enough that little gets to them and then the last gap can be closed as subluminal speeds, but.... that ah, sure would be one hell of an entrance.

We could send radio signals that far, with the big dish at Arecibo. If they have intelligence, and radio, we can communicate with a 1000-year round trip time. Maybe we should transmit some of the proposed canned messages to other civilizations every month or so.

If there is other intelligent life out there, it looks like they're a very long way away. Too far to talk to round trip, even at light speed. None of the known extra-solar planets within a few light years look promising.

There's a difference between a legitimate concern and pure hyperbole, but that doesn't seem to have inhibited the OP.

Let's see whether you're still singing that tune when you're 40.

I used to work for a company that sold for a billion dollars less than ten years after it was founded. 90% of the workers (including me) worked from home. I now work for the firm that bought us. And still work from home most of the time.

> It will cost billions to fix for the US and the taxpayers will foot the bill.

It already cost us billions, and it was always going to cost us billions more. Any suggestion they were not going to waste that money anyway is just laughable. They will spend as much as they can justify in their crusade against whatever bogeymen they can dream up.

"Jane---HELP! Stop this crazy thing! HELP!! JAAAAAAAAAAAAAANE!!"

Right. Traditional pneumatics is rather dumb - most of the time it's on/off, with air cylinders pushed up against hard limit stops. Positional control of pneumatic cylinders works fine, but it takes proportional valves, feedback sensors, and a fast control system. Until recently, industrial systems tended not to get that fancy.

I was interested in using pneumatics for running robots back in the 1990s, but the available proportional valves back then were big and expensive. One useful model of muscles is two opposed springs, and a double-ended pneumatic cylinder can do just that. You can change both position and stiffness, separately. You can simulate a spring, and recover energy. Someone did that at CWRU a decade ago, but the mechanics were clunky. Festo does that elegantly with their new kangaroo. Very nice mechanical engineering.

Shadow Robotics has a nice pneumatic robot hand. Shadow has been doing pneumatic flexible actuators for many years, but now they have good controllability.

TFTFM. :D

I highly recommend the padded house slippers that they sell at IKEA. A pair is good for about a month of daily wear, and costs about 20 crowns.

We have such desks in our downtown office, and I am hoping to acquire one for my home office this weekend.

Bzzzzzt---Wrong.

Omniscience without power means you know everything but can't do anything about it.