I'm happy with the streaming service, too. It's way too convenient to complain about for $8/month.

Indeed - they don't need to expand through warfare. Just buy up a country's companies and natural resources.

they compete simply by price

By simple, do you mean saving money by slave wages, no human rights, and abhorrent environmental policies and passing the savings on to the buyer?

We should have heavy tariffs on everything from China until they clean up their act.

Adam Sandler? Depends on which voice he does. :)
- lunch lady
- goat
- etc..

First of all, scarcity of a resource- in this case, shelters- is just how things operate in nature. It's not a sign that something is necessarily wrong, because in a healthy ecosystem, there's never enough to go around for everyone.

Sure, if humans weren't around to muck everything up, nature's balance would be fine. I've talked to a real marine biologist who said people take enough shells from the beach that there is a real shortage in certain areas. I would not call that a healthy ecosystem.

Basically, you could scale your character to take a lesser percentage of damage, but in return you would get benefits like experience/honor points, and could affect drop rates, too.

Should say:

Basically, you could scale your character to take a lesser percentage of damage, but in return you would get lower than usual benefits like experience/honor points, and could affect drop rates, too.

To deal with the huge range of ability (or patience for grinding) of different WoW players, one feature idea I had was what I would call Difficulty Scaling.

Basically, you could scale your character to take a lesser percentage of damage, but in return you would get benefits like experience/honor points, and could affect drop rates, too.

So you'd be slower to level, but wouldn't die all the time, allowing you to participate in activities you normally wouldn't be geared for.

On the flip side, experience players could scale in the opposite way and take more damage but in return would get higher than usual benefits. That would provide faster leveling and more of a challenge to those who are already skilled at the game.

Sounds like the state of Louisiana is devaluing American currency by limiting its usefulness. Brilliant.

Funny enough, when the TSA started up I said to myself airports are the best place for them to start: people tight for time, with lots of money on the line, tired, just want to get from point A to point B. What better subjects to test new "security" devices/protocols on. Airports are the test bed. It'll spread if left unchecked.

I've been logging in as little as possible for awhile now, just responding to direct messages and giving people my email address if they want to have a deeper conversation. I figure if enough people stop adding content to Facebook, the rest will get tired of talking to themselves.

The Boards of Canada song you linked is one of my favourites, too. Never thought to look up the video, though. :)

When trying to read or concentrate on a task, I usually opt for instrumental music, usually soft/ambient/downtempo. Vocals are distracting. Though I seem to have a higher tolerance of non-instrumental music when it's played through low-fi speakers (eg. an iPod's speakers).

Don't forget your pajama jeans and a flock of cuddly puppies!

It also mentions in the article:

But there's much more that Manterola and co have deduced. They point out that nobody else on the planet seems to have seen this comet passing in front of the Sun, even though the nearest observatories in those days were just a few hundred kilometres away.

That can be explained using parallax. If the fragments were close to Earth, parallax would have ensured that they would not have been in line with the Sun even for observers nearby. And since Mexico is at the same latitude as the Sahara, northern India and south-east Asia, it's not hard to imagine that nobody else was looking.

It is certain that as your own intelligence increases to where you find yourself smarter than all but a fraction of a percent of the population, the ideas you have will be mostly correct but most other people won't be able to understand you. This can be incredibly frustrating.

I don't consider myself exceptionally smart, but I feel like this somewhat regularly. It can take people months or years for a situation to evolve to a point where others understand and/or agree with what I proposed long ago. It is very frustrating. I partially blame inadequate communication skills to explain some of the ideas I have... that's one skill I'd recommend for a prodigy to focus on (applicable, of course, to anyone).