And if they knew how to factor large integers efficiently they certainly would not tell us, since we'd all immediately move to ciphers unrelated to factoring integers. The NSA has no reason to tell us how great their cracking tools are. So if they are bragging, it's because they are trying to scare us off something that works and onto something that doesn't.

Me too, but honestly, this level of fanaticism is why every attempt at DRM is broken, every device is jailbroken, etc. Some people are crazy and simply will not take no for an answer. God Bless Them.

If they launch an attack on the U.S., North Korea can kiss their asses goodbye and they know it. They can threaten Sony and get away with it, because public corporations are cowardly by nature. But it is a whole other thing to kill Americans in a terrorist attack today. Iraq is still living in butthurt due to 9/11 and they weren't even involved. Sony should have released the film and called North Korea's bluff.

I can dig it. I've looked up some songs and found that I liked my misheard lyrics better. Toto's "White Sister", for instance:

How can you say you love me?
You don't even love yourself
You live your life like a dog at night
Just waiting on the step

At the time I first heard "Rock the Casbah" I didn't know the word "sharif" so there was no chance at all that I would not mishear that lyric.

You can't know its asisnine until you know what their objective is. If their objective is to get the FBI to kick in the door of everyone who Bittorrented those files or otherwise overreact, then making those threats wasn't asinine at all.

Nope, not a fan of rugby. I've watched rugby matches and the carnage is dialed back a bit, but I've still seen guys laid out cold as a mackeral from hits, and I've seen fingers inadvertently raked across faces.

I'd rather see pro football remain as it is, but also see all school sponsorship of the sport ended. Let the adults who want to make a profession of the game go into it with their eyes wide open, not indoctrinated as impressionable young people. If the sport dies from lack of participation, so be it.

The talent well will dry up as parents keep kids out of the sport--- and that's how a sport dies.

Let it die. The trend for every decade I've been alive is that more brains are needed to survive in the workplace, not less. Not only are the jobs more skilled, there are more rules to follow--- you have to have the mental wherewithal to know when you can and cannot say "fucked her right in the pussy", to use one famous example. We don't need otherwise healthy people starting at a deficit because they placed some game during their developmental years.

Helmets also prevent injuries such as fish-hooking the mouth, ears being ripped off, teeth being knocked out, and eyes being gouged, not to mention incidental facial abrasions from being tackled on artificial turf. Playing helmetless would like decrease head to head collisions, but would do nothing for other body parts smashing into the head. A man being wrestled to the ground by multiple opponents is likely to catch a knee or elbow, or get slammed on his back, bashing his head into the turf. There is nothing resembling professional football that I would like to see a human being playing without a helmet.

F-14's, and they are from a single planet's defense industry. You'd expect a whole galaxy full of designers to come up with something better in 25+ years. When a beat-up freighter is both faster and more agile than your top-of-the-line fighters, then maybe killing all the aerospace engineers in a tiff wasn't such a great idea.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons Star Trek felt so wrong. Star Wars pacing and action pasted onto a franchise with callous disregard for pretty much everything. But Star Wars seems a much better fit for Abrams, since that's what he's always wanted to do.

You're kinda missing the point of asteroid mining. The idea is to gather useful materials up there and keep them up there to support a space based civilization. That way you can use and move the stuff around using energy efficient transfer orbits and modest amounts of delta-vee, instead of lifting mountains of material against Earth's gravity. A lot of high-tech from Earth will be needed to bootstrap early operations, but the goal would be a self supporting space-based society based on raw resources available in space, eventually trading with Earth-based societies.

I don't know how long developing such a society would take, but it'll likely be started by people nearly everyone else considers lunatics. Something like Mars One should be a rehearsal for later attempts at colonizing space itself, without a planet under your feet.

I've no comment on Watto, but the pod race was an obvious homage to the chariot race in Ben Hur. I guess they could have demonstrated Anakin's latent force ability in some other way that sold toys, like having him do a fakie 900 blindfolded on his hoverboard. But honestly, the pod race was no more contrived than the ridiculous scenario in Star Wars where they had to fly down this long trench to launch a couple of torpedos.