I'm a grad student, you insensitive clod!

I think you should imagine walking uphill, say up a mountain. Which takes less time:
walking up a winding trail or scaling the rock's face directly?

For an even more pronounced difference, try biking uphill.

I highly recommend a leather pouch for keys (mine has a ring for keys attached to it). I'm not sure if it'd fit a million keys, but it should be fine for ~8 of them. It's very convenient: neither the pants nor the hands get cut/rubbed on by the keys.

I use the tablet to take down mathematical lectures on it. It's very nice for lectures which use tons of math symbols and diagrams, especially because it doesn't clutter up my desk as much. I find it nicer to have tons of files that I almost never look at, than when I had tons of papers I almost never look at, then lost and couldn't find when I did need one.

However, I can't invent any other use for a tablet PC. If math lectures didn't have diagrams, I'd use Word or LaTeX. Typing is faster than writing on a tablet. Maybe art students have a use for it? Anybody know other uses?

I'm almost sure you'll enjoy C-Evo.

Sure, the shuttle went to fix the Hubble, and it was great. But remember for how long before then NASA was waffling on whether to allow this mission, or cancel it because it's too dangerous to go someplace where you can't bail out to the space station? Even though this kind of missions are exactly what the Shuttle was designed to do?

I think it's pretty clear that even if the Shuttle stayed in service, it would only be going to the ISS from now on. Which would be as much a shame as them canceling it, if not more (tons of money would be spent on something pretty useless, and cheaper to do with expendable rockets).

I'd worry more about their Chinese employees. Although, with them having nowhere to go,
there seems to be little to hope for.

I had the same problem. However, I found it not too hard to teach myself to focus your sight where the director wants you to focus (i.e. on the sharpest objects). I felt a bit like a trained monkey doing this, but it quickly became automatic.

I think it's an interesting dilemma for the director. It is possible to make everything sharp (by making the aperture small, and the focal depth huge. Since most of the movie is computer-generated anyway, it'd be even easier). However, this will not look realistic in dimly-lit rooms, as there your eyes cannot naturally see everything sharply. Also, the 2D version of the movie will then look terrible, as in 2D the lack of sharpness is the main tool they can use to indicate distance to object.

Still, I'd be interested in seeing what a perfectly sharp 3D movie would look like. After all, with CG, they can make two versions: sharp 3D and normal 2D.

Just to throw this out there: there are already some known reasonably Earth-like planets out there. Here's the best one. Of course, so far there aren't that many...

I just want to point out that the movie has more merits than just the visuals. The design of everything is pitch perfect: every little detail of every little machine of the humans (or the giant spaceship they came in), every little creature of the alien jungle, even details of the culture of the natives are very well thought out, even the physics works better than in almost any other sci-fy movie I've seen. The whole enviroment of the alien world feels entirely believable, you truly feel immersed in it.

On the other hand, you are right that the plot is terrible. The charaters are bad, they don't even act like live people, and you can
predict what will happen 20 minutes into the movie. However, this does not change the fact that the movie is amazing - just think of it as a safari into an alien jungle.

This does, however, surprise me. Everything else in the movie is darn near perfect, why couldn't they put a tiny bit of effort into the scriptwriting? The same setting could house an amazing plot. If the authors thought that the plot is not the point, as I think they did, why couldn't they at least have a sense of humor about this? After all, they do poke fun at the one piece of physics that doesn't work, the "unobtanium"...

Try zooming in - you see a swamp. So, if something is hidden there,
it must have been very temporary...

Well, I think they agree with you about the routes. Look at the map
at the bottom of this:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/04/16/A-Vision-for-High-Speed-Rail/

In my opinion, if you didn't get addicted to them, you probably don't need them.
My only suggestion is that whenever "the alternative" repeatedly feels uncomfortable for some task, give the tried and tested tools a try. You'll either get addicted in no time, or go back without wasting much time and having learned something.