I reread the 1-3 plot summaries at Wikipedia. It will be interesting to see where things go now that Trinity is dead, Neo has had his ‘real’-world eyes gouged before apparently dying(?) from his final sacrificial encounter with Smith in the matrix. And apparently the 3rd movie ended with the machines and humans at peace and with the Matrix intact (although all humans who want to be free were to be unplugged).

My guess is the next Matrix plot will revolve around the ‘real world’ being yet another Matrix and perhaps Neo and Trinity are still alive in the ‘next layer up’. After a bunch of intense special effects, it’ll end with the philosophical implication that reality is simply an infinite regression of higher states – i.e., every state of being is nested by yet another ‘higher reality’.

In that vein, a cool alternate ending to the movie Inception would have been for Mal (Leonardo DiCaprio’s wife), upon jumping off the building in her attempt to ‘wake up’ from the real world, indeed wakes up in a higher reality. She then continues to keep killing herself and increasingly progressing herself out of nested dream states. After a few hundred deaths, she goes crazy and takes up drinking.

Or maybe that will be the sequel. Inception 2 and Matrix 4-5 will need to have a race to get released first.

I wouldn't get too excited. Only a C3.2 flare (ratings in order of severity are A,B,C,M,X) and not even a blip of high energy proton flux. Maybe we'll get some minor geomagnetic storming with the plasma cloud arrival and some auroral activity at least...

Or, just cultivate your mind and make lots of money...

They keep losing money at it, which is why Boeing and Lockheed merged their launch divisions into a joint venture several years ago (United Launch Alliance ). Even the joint venture is still laying people off. It will be interesting to see if can SpaceX maintain a low cost profile (i.e. how much money is Elon pumping in behind the scenes??) while obtaining successful outcomes. "Faster, better, cheaper" seems to have a poor track record when it comes to space. The Atlas program has completed some 80+ successful launches in a row. High reliability comes at a cost.

This bit flip may also be linked to an increase in galactic cosmic ray flux due to Voyager passing through the protective heliosheath.

My advice is to stop paying the subscription fees and switch over to the free-to-play Runes of Magic.

I haven't tried Runescape, but I've found Runes of Magic to be quite enjoyable. It's been called a free "clone" of WoW.

This is great news. Starcraft 2. Civilization 5. All we need yet is Age of Mythology 2, and I'll be set for the next few years.

"Under cost-plus contracts, there is absolutely no necessity to lower the cost of getting into space."

Financial performance on cost-plus contracts becomes the basis for future proposals. Failure to execute efficiently means that other competitors will win the follow-on projects. Government-funded projects are fiercely contested for between the major contractors.

I did make a mistake, Lockheed Martin is # 57 on the list (not # 98). Beyond that, my point was that defense contractor companies are relatively small in comparison to the titans of industry. I was not making any arguments about military spending as a whole.

Yeah, defense contractors are bloated monsters. That's why the biggest one (in terms of government contracts), Lockheed Martin, is a whopping #98 on the Fortune 500 list. And yeah, developing technologies to defend populations against the destructive missile technology that already exists is "destructive tech". I love the idiocy that gets modded up on Slashdot.