I disagree, people who want to ban depictions of Muhammad are pretty big boobs. (Though they're also still people, so it would offend exactly the same number of both, by definition.)

> "They'll kill people, animals, cause accidents, destroy property"
Yes, they probably will. But the question is, will they kill fewer people and animals, cause fewer accidents, and destroy less property than the absolutely enormous number of people and animals killed, accidents caused, and property destroyed by *humans* driving cars? I expect by the time self-driving cars go mainstream, the answer will be a monumental yes, in which case, that's still a win for humans and the planet.

"The impact on the pharmaceutical^Hrecreational drug industry could be staggering."

Yes, I would like to 3d print some lsd, please? :D

(Note to any snoopy snitches who might happen to see that I posted this non-anonymously: I don't mean I *personally* have any intention of wanting to 3d print any currently-illegal recreational compounds... not at all. Nope.)

Thanks! I'm probably going to be way too lazy to actually do that, but still, that is useful information, I thought it would have been a way more chemistry-magic-ful process than that, given how hush-hush they've been. :p

Hopefully they won't ban it - I think the concept is pretty darn cool, and had been looking forward to trying it since I heard about the company like a year ago. I really don't see what all the fuss is about - safety-wise it doesn't really do anything you can't already do with regular booze.

I am academically curious whether you could get drunk by consuming it in capsule form, or if it *has* to be dissolved to work.

I was sick like all the time as a small child (constant sinus infections, often also in my ears and throat and lungs, it was awful). First stop was all kinds of doctors that put me on all kinds of medication, at the end of which I was even worse. Finally my mom tried taking me to an alternative place that turned out to be a homeopathic clinic, not that she actually believed in it, but she was about ready to try just about anything. She actually called the pills they gave her to give me "placebo pills", which being like 5 or 6 at the time, I didn't get why that was so funny until a couple years later, I just thought that's what the medicine was called.

Anyway, I got better! Not all the way better, but better than I'd been before, just because they told her the first step was to *stop* drowning my immune system in all kinds of antibiotics, which is what had been happening before.

Of course, I could've gotten the same effect, and saved my mom some money, by just not going *anywhere*, but still. ;)

If it's not stated, it certainly doesn't sound required. If I tell you, "you must not murder any children", does that mean you're required to murder all (or indeed, any) adults? No, it just means don't murder any children. Telling them they're required to not block any legal content, doesn't mean they're required to block content if it isn't "legal", it just means they're allowed if they decide they would like to.

A Canticle for Leibowitz was originally three novellas as well.

Interestingly, though this is fantasy rather than sci-fi, but Brandon Sanderson's recent epic, "Words of Radiance", was written as a trilogy with interstitial short stories - but meant from the beginning to have been published as a single book. (As per this interview.)

The point isn't to mine material and send it to earth. The point is to mine material and then *keep it in space*, to do things with that would be astronomically (heh) expensive to do if we had to lift all the material up from earth first.

Huh. That's actually sort of a clever idea, even if I wish it wasn't necessary - I'd much rather actually have it built in, both for purposes of guaranteed compatibility and for purposes of not having to futz around with bluetooth, if at some time in the future my current phone breaks and it becomes impossible to find a decent replacement, I'll keep that in mind as a workaround (except for Android still That is not even remotely the only reason I go for Android phones over Apple.)

Another Android upgrade I'll never actually see on my own phone, because they're only available on new phones, nobody makes phones with slide-out keyboards anymore, and I'm not going to accept a phone that doesn't have a slide-out keybard, so I'm left just not buying any recent phone. Which I'm fine with anyway, they're cheaper and I don't really *need* any of the new fanciness, but still.

> "When a burglary occurs, a bike is stolen or a phone is taken, many victims will report the theft to the police, but often it is solely as a way of getting a crime number to give to their insurance company. There is too often a resignation that nothing can be done"

Which makes sense - it's not a high-priority crime like a murder, and it would take quite a lot of effort to track the thief down, if in fact that would even be possible, with little evidence to go on. Which is precisely *why* this is a good idea - I could be being optimistic, but it seems to me like police would be much happier going after someone if you said "I have strong video evidence that a person who looks exactly like this just broke into my house and stole a tv; you can see his face and that he's walking out of my house carrying the tv", yes?

Presumably whatever a "registered partnership" is, doesn't count as what I said, that presumably they would have to go to America and get a proper American America-recognized court document stating that they were married? (In America! [insert flag on head])

Know who would really have loved this - darkeyes: http://coppermind.net/wiki/Nah...

Probably a good thing they don't have technology like this, or they'd go crazy. (But in our world, where your caste is *not* determined by the color of your eyes, I'm not sure why anyone would pay for something like this.)

It does not. You can get married in a civil "ceremony" that is required by law to conform to a rather broad definition of a "ceremony", which doesn't preclude it from taking place in an office and only involving the two people getting married and a person (of not necessarily any particular religion) who has been suitably vested with the power to grant marriages. You can also get married at a courthouse, but the way we did it was way more convenient (a couple hundred dollars more expensive, but didn't require us to take off work.)