First season TNG stunk so bad; we only watched because it was so good to have Star Trek back on the air. I could not blame Crosby leaving. It was the middle of the second season before the writing noticeably improved.

Heh, our 1970's TV shows. Go watch The Shield. And that's not the only example. The days of CHiPs and Adam-12 are long gone.

The human brain needs all that parallelism because it's switching rate is abysmal, something like 200Hz. We ought to be able to beat that by a factor of million without setting anything on fire, so adjust your numbers accordingly.

It depends on how much THC you absorb at once. Maureen Dowd reported a bad paranoid experience in a recent column from too much THC.

I was half-joking, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to wire yeast to produce mind-altering drugs. Anything that can spread through the air via spores ought not be programmed to produce chemicals that screw with people's heads.

Yeast is better. Imagine THC-producing yeast spores in the wild. Imagine people and animals tripping out with fungal infections. Imagine the end of the world.

There are lots of IT people on Slashdot and we all carry laptops because a phone just doesn't cut it to get any real work done. But there are many other people who would glady stop carrying a laptop if they could. That's who phones like this are aimed at. I'm like that myself sometimes; I just get tired of carrying a bunch of crap around. I watched a whole season of a TV on a video iPod once just because it was more convenient than a laptop.

That's never bothered Apple before. Jobs touted how great the PPC architecture was right up until they switched to Intel. They also touted how great the ergonomics of the desklamp iMacs were until suddenly cramming all the computer components behind the screen was more perfect in the new iMacs. Tablet computers were a joke until Apple decided they weren't. (Well, OK, they were right about that.)

If he'd lost Yakuza money presumably he'd already be dead. On the other hand if he is Yakuza...

The first statement is a tautology and the second is unconfirmed and could just be FUD-mongering to discourage us from using a product the TLAs haven't cracked. If you give up a privacy tool every time someone merely claims to have subverted it, soon you will have no tools left. By the way, your home is not secure; I've subverted it. Good luck.

As far as we know so far, Truecrypt hasn't been compromised. So ending use of it might be a victory for the NSA and their kind. And all they had to do was sow some seeds of doubt.

What I wonder is why does it matter. Ever since the first decent search engine came into being, guessing domain names stopped being a necessity. london.uk or london.org.uk or london.frog matters not a whit to me if it's the site I'm looking for. And any decent search engine will distinguish them quite easily. A proliferation of TLDs makes it easier to get the name you want and still have it be short enough to be easy to type. It will eventually make a shambles of the hierarchical structure of DNS but there are ways to fix that too.

Be careful relying on DVD's for archival. I ripped all our discs a couple years ago to ease access and found that for a few I'd waited too long. Disks do de-laminate and sometimes moisture and fungus gets in. (The Pirate Bay was very handy to recover the few discs that went bad. Was able to recover not only the movies but the DVD extras as well. Thanks Pirate Bay.)

... out of hand, consider that for every other species extant on this planet the singularity already happened: It was us, humans. To think that it can't happen to us is simple hubris.

... when GNU Emacs had auto-saving and backup versioning at any keystroke granularity you liked thirty years ago. Next we celebrate the boon of split screen editing.

In the face of hard radiation life gets smaller, not larger. Expect really hardy bacteria, not giant reptiles.