Not to mention for some reason Intel won't release 64 bit Windows drivers for a lot of the graphics chipsets that come with the Atoms. So you have to run 32 bit Windows. Or Linux.

Pros:
+ Players and creatures (such as horses) don't look like blocky
+ Have sloped roofs -- 45 degree #3039, 25 degree #3298 and 73 degree #98560
+ Have "smooth" flat tiles #3068
+ Initial support for airplanes, and mining vehicles
* Misc. decorations

Cons:
- Single player only
- Windows only (MineCraft runs on OSX, Linux, Android, consoles)
- Cost $15 while MineTest, Terasology, etc. are free.

Anyone have an idea of what the world height and size is limited to?

Not forever, as black holes don't last forever. They evaporate due to Hawking radiation.

Actually, the Streisand Effect is where something becomes known to people specifically because of the efforts to suppress it. Or in other words, the efforts to suppress something bring attention to something that likely would have otherwise been overlooked and ignored.

The system is broken, and effectively guarantees a two-party system. Ross Perot got nearly 20% of the popular vote in 92, which resulted in precisely zero representation in government. If 1 in 5 people voting for a 3rd party gains that party no traction, what hope is there?

And you suggest it's the "idiot voters" fault? The game is rigged.

Let's take Star Wars, today we relate more with the empire then with the rebels.

Um... what?? Star Wars is pretty plainly about good vs evil. The empire is evil. They blow up entire (peaceful!) planets to control the population through fear. That's not exactly a bunch of subtle shades of grey, is it? In fact it's the very definition of terrorism (an act of violence, against non-combatants, explicitly intended to create fear for political purposes).

I identify more with the fight against "the evil empire" now more than ever.

So please, speak for yourself, and not how everyone else "relates". If you relate more to a totalitarian dictatorship that murders billions of innocents, you have some serious fucking issues, and please don't speak for the rest of us.

This also isn't a win for him, yet... It's getting remanded back to the appeals court (and possibly, eventually back to the trial court), and so his fight isn't over. On retrial, a jury could still convict him by finding that he actually did intend to threaten his ex when he sent her a facebook post saying that her restraining order wouldn't protect her from a bullet, rather than just that a reasonable person would interpret it to be a threat.

Are these the same robots that seem to be spamming my inbox with UberEATS and other crap? I've already dumped Uber for Lyft because they've decided they have the right to spam everyone in my contact list in my name, but that hasn't slowed them down any.

Have you never seen anything about the twin paradox? Even at the most superficial level introduction of relativity, you get that time slows down when something is moving relative to the observer.

This is ridiculous. Even "at the most superficial level introduction of relativity "you should know that if a person departs earth moving at "nearly C" and comes back, far less time will have past for them than someone who stayed on Earth the whole time.

From the perspective of the people on the ship, the journey is no longer a distance of 4.3 light years. If the spaceship is going 90% of c relative to Earth, then in the spaceship's frame it will take them 2.08 years to make that trip, and also in their frame they will observe it takes light 1.87 years to go from Earth to Alpha-Centari.

First off, apart from trying to add confusion, why did you change the velocity from the one I gave? Secondly, from a trip travel time perspective, it doesn't matter whether you view it as time dilation or length contraction. The trip at 0.999c takes 70 days from the perspective of the crew. That's the beginning and end of it right there. From their perspective, it's as if they got there moving far faster than the speed of light, as if there were no limits on how fast they could keep accelerating. With an infinite supply of energy, they could travel the 4,3 light years in what they perceive to be 7 days, 7 hours, 7 minutes, or 7 seconds (let's ignore G-forces here, or how to have such vast quantities of energy at their disposal). The crew of a spacecraft experiences no "upper limit" to how fast the universe will allow them to traverse a distance.

What are you talking about? I just did "echo 1,2 > test.csv" then opened test.csv in OpenOffice Calc, then saved it as test2.csv from the save dialog. No complaints. Then I clicked to close it. No complaints about unsaved changes. Did you actually try that out before you commented? I don't have any of the other programs you mention on this computer, so I'll pick another - let's try OpenOffice Writer. Made a text file, opened it, saved it as a .txt file, it asked me for the encoding, I confirmed it, I clicked closed, and it closed without trying to force me to save as an .odt.

I'm sorry, but GIMP's change is totally broken behavior. The most common workflow for GIMP (as you can see from all of the rage on the forums when these changes occurred) is not long complex workflows, but simple changes to jpegs or pngs. Open, change it, save it, close it. What sort of moron do you take people for to think that you have to "protect" them from choosing a format of file that doesn't save layers, and instead try to make them always save whatever they do in a format that no other programs support? As if a dialog warning them that it doesn't save layers and asking them if they want to flatten it, like Gimp used to do, isn't enough? What on earth is the point of *banning* people from typing in a file with the suffix that they want to use in the save menu, and instead making them choose an entirely different menu? Actually two different menus, depending on context, only one of which has a keyboard shortcut. It's just ridiculous. We're not preschoolers, we don't need the hand-holding.

If they did that, the provisional application would never be published or open to public inspection, so it would be useless to prevent a troll from getting a patent on the same technology.

Looking at the people here calling for blood, do you think such an announcement would be taken without a grain of salt? There's nothing binding in an announcement.

They did file in the name of the actual inventors. If you click the links, they're by John Resig and Joel Burget.

That's not true at all. The only thing that "first to file" changes from "first to invent" is interference practices: previously, if Alice and Bob both filed patent applications for the same exact invention, they would go onto an interference, which is like a mini-litigation, to determine which of them actually conceived of the invention first. They cost between $20-50k for each party, and there were on average about 20 per year... out of over half a million patent applications filed each year. Under the new system, it's just a question of who filed their application first.

First to file has literally nothing to do with prior art. And prior art that was never patented absolutely matters - white papers, scientific journals, product literature, etc. can be and are all used as prior art, even under the first to file system.

An interesting side effect of this would be that it would actually be theoretically possible to send a probe into a black hole and get a signal back from it. If you're REALLY, REALLY, REALLY patient, that is ;)

(more realistically, one would likely try to probe the insides by making mciro black holes inside colliders and trying to get them to consume particles before they collapse, then looking for traces of information in the aftermath of the collapse)