What advantages does that 8-port charger have over competing chargers? The thing is incredibly enormous when compared to, say, a 6-port anker charger... and it doesn't really offer any more power per port than the Anker charger either.

5x the size for an extra 2 USB ports seems absurd.

You don't survive widespread nuclear war without some pretty drastic measures. If the options were between martial law and severe curtailing of rights, or the complete collapse of society, I know which one I would pick.

That was his entire point.

Except Lucas didn't direct or write Empire, and he didn't direct or solely write Jedi. He came up with the story, and then other people wrote the screenplay and directed it. I think George Lucas isn't too bad at coming up with plot, but he's not so great at writing or directing. We've all heard the stories about how Star Wars was originally a rather terrible film that was saved in editing, but compare the quality of the dialog between Star Wars and Empire. There's a huge improvement between the two...

Many of my problems with Into Darkness had to do with problems with the film itself, rather than as a Star Trek fan. Now, I've still got problems with it as a Star Trek film, but more on the level that they poorly copied something existing instead of coming up with something new. I think that the elements that they copied didn't work because they were trying to force many of them in for the purpose of making references rather than to make the film work. Even then, that's not really a problem because I'm a fan, it's a problem because of lack of originality, something not unique to Trek.

My main problems, though, were that they decided to fill the film with too much deus ex machina. It's like they wrote themselves into corners, and then decided to just do crazy stuff to resolve it that didn't make much sense, or that seem like they didn't think through the plot consequences. Like the whole "Did they just cure death with the magic blood? So death isn't a problem going forward?" issue.

That's not bad Trek, that's bad film-making.

Musk has stated that due to lack of geographic obstructions, there could be up to an order of magnitude less hops in space while passing the signal from satellite to satellite. Of course, that assumes that the routing latency in the satellites is similar to a traditional router.

I was referring to the mirror episodes, not the series in general.

Let me know when I can call up NASA for a ride to space that I can afford on the salary of a software developer and then I'll care about the negative implications of the private sector developing ultra-cheap spaceflight.

These are low-earth orbit satellites. Musk says he's expecting latency around 20-30ms. That's much higher than DSL or cable are capable of, but should be low enough for twitch gaming.

The satellites aren't very far away, and light travels much faster in vacuum than through fibre optic cable.

So, having never seen the original episode that they're continuing, you don't really have any basis for comparison, then, do you? You've just seen a bunch of spinoff stuff that didn't live up to the original.

I found episode 1 a bit iffy, but episode 3 (the mirror-mirror continuation) was much better. I haven't had a chance to watch episode 2 yet.

One satellite per $10 million launch (what Virgin is claiming with their network), or ten satellites per $60 million launch (what SpaceX is actually doing with Iridium NEXT). Which one is costing less per satellite?

While true, a good chunk of the PC market and all of the mobile market is going through DRM protected solutions such as Steam.

The 5% was including both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Their marketshare has tanked in the recent past, and it's likely that people were only using them because they were free. Once free alternatives like Google Docs came around that better integrated with other stuff users were doing, the free desktop office suites took a big hit.

I prefer Tassimo :P