Yeah, with enough hand waving, anything is plausible. You could have something in between a low energy transfer on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... and waiting lots of time, or some kind of slingshot, or just burn fuel to do simple transfers between orbits. But I guess since your propulsion is on all the time for artificial gravity, you're kinda doing a propellant-assisted slingshot. The slingshot does require the planets and the sun have to be lined up just right, so it does make sense that the company wants to depart early and use more fuel on a longer journey, because they wouldn't get as much gravitational assist if they had waited a week for Venus and the Sun to be in a better position relative to the source and destination.

I'll just leave this here:
http://www.despair.com/mistake...

Sad, though, I remember when I used to hit freshmeat.net as much as slashdot.

I am glad, though, that I got a good chunk of my life back when I learned to just rely on aptitude to keep stuff on my system updated for me.

Still, I ought to go and compile a kernel for the heck of it though, for old time's sake.

Heh, I lived on a steep hill where I usually had to parallel park and they had even/odd parking days. That was fun to keep up with, especially in the snow and ice. At least I had a front wheel drive manual.

Heh, cool :D I guess that explains why they both have better caricatures of american culture than the Americans could pull off :P

How was it that the main character had such terrible Russian voice acting, whereas all the other Russians and even the Thai prostitute had more authentic accents? That was another thing that sort of drove us up the wall about GTA4 :P

OK, I'll say something nice about GTA4... I did get a chuckle out of the achievement tracking for flying things under bridges... that was something missing from most flying games :P

Yes, the way I see it, it will be impossible to convince AGW deniers to accept the science observations, not because they are stupid, but because they don't want to be held accountable for any wrongdoing. It's like taking the 5th, or "don't talk to the police"... anything you say can and will be used against you. No one wants to admit to being stupid or making mistakes. Viewed through this lens, their policies on other things like abortions and gun control make more sense... "Well abortion is wrong, if you got pregnant you made a mistake, and we don't make mistakes"... "Well guns only shoot bad guys. Why would I accidentally shoot a good guy? I don't make mistakes".

We need to find more effective ways to communicate with these people so they can live responsibly. But trying to shove their faces in the facts just makes them belligerent and more likely to rebel and go the other way, like buying the biggest SUV they can afford, because F*(K society and their maths.

I don't know why I don't see more of this... is it not obvious that TrueCrypt is most likely made by whitehats at the NSA? And that the blackhats at the NSA probably finally strongarmed them into abandoning their hobby project?

This seems consistent with the TrueCrypt End-of-Life announcement.

Heh, I sort of wanted to get a PS3, but then I realized that the only stuff I wanted to play on it were the updated versions of PS2 games like Gran Turismo, Burnout, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. So I decided I didn't really need it.

Maybe I'll pick up a PS3 or three to build a 3-screen wraparound GT6 setup (like I had always been fantasizing about doing with multiple PS2s, but it's too expensive to get monitors equipped with component inputs nowadays, so might as well just go the PS3 route with cheap HDMI LCDs)

Yes, that makes a lot of sense! GTA3:SA was pretty brilliant... I assume that was made by the RS San Diego / Angel Studios group? If so, I might like to check out Red Dead Redemption... my favorite GTA games always had a good shot at the time capsule thing going.

While the graphics and production values of GTA4 were pretty high, the gameplay, variety, and story were pretty crap in comparison to the stuff they had you doing in GTA3:SA. From the reivews, it looks like GTA5 is more along that vein, so maybe I'll pick it up on Steam when it hits firesale status... and upgrade my CPU to better match my GPU.

Puerto Rico has these "third world" jitney services.

They're actually pretty cool, when I was there all the drivers of the vans knew each other, and had their own cellphone social network going on, so if you called one for a pickup, and they weren't close to you, they would call another driver who was available to come pick you up.

Even better, they would do their own vanpooling of passengers, kinda like the airport shuttles work here in the US, but coordinated over their social network. So you might be going from town to town, and stop somewhere briefly to pick up and drop off some other paying passengers who called in and just happened to be along the way.

So much efficiency could be achieved...
Disclaimer: I essentially wrote my master's thesis on running mass transit networks more like a jitney service, with smaller, more flexible vehicles:
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/...

Of course, Virginia still gets some points for tolerating "Slug lines"... the instant carpools where people headed in or out of DC could pick up strangers lined up at bus/train stations so they both could ride the HOV lanes in.

Well, more to the GP AC's point, even the primary stock exchange is kinda pointless. I mean, investing in a company for profit essentially means you're saying, "hey, here's a company that looks like it's being mismanaged and is not performing as well as it should, I'm going to buy some stock in it in the hopes that someday, some half-decent manager will also eventually see that this company underperforming, and buy enough of my shares to get a controlling stake in the company so they can run it better until it performs to meet or exceed Wall Street expectations."

Unless you're one of these managers, which, let's face it, you're not.