...if only your life is on the line, and not, say, the lives of millions of others all the way down to their great great grand children. Innovation at the cost of safety is great in some fields. After all, the only one dieing is the idiot who blew themself up. But when you accidentally start a meltdown because your "fun" design didn't include all the safety gear you thought it did, I don't have any complaints for having more safety than innovation.

So what are Best Buy's total assets for all their stores? That's a lot of prime retail space in many places, to say nothing of the huge quantity of electronics.

Students can get up to $5500 per year in government aid depending on their need that they do not have to pay back. The government also backs loans at much lower interest rates available elsewhere. Once virtually everyone has access to large amounts of money for college, colleges can easily raise their rate and still have a large volume of students attending - and this is seen by the fact that almost every college raises their tuition and fees far in excess of the rate of inflation every year. Colleges practically bleed money, and very few of them have any semblance of balanced accounting.

So we can make more money off of it.

Find a chief executive who actually likes sci-fi, rather than one who admits he hates it.

There are a lot of reasons we haven't gone supersonic with air travel. Sonic booms do things like shatter windows, set off car alarms, drive animals nuts, etc. The concord flights had to wait until they were 100 miles off shore before they would go supersonic, and they were also extremely inefficient, which means extremely expensive. It really is not cost effective for any airline to do supersonic flights right now, although Virgin has designs on a sub-orbital plane that will fly from New York to Paris in something like 2 hours. There are also new airframe bodies that do not produce a sonic boom when they break the speed of sound, but I'm not sure how efficient those are for air travel.

I know this is the internet, but come on, that post reeked of sarcasm. No need to go on the offensive.

China values imitation much more than the USA does.

You should check out just what exactly you do when you distill a drink. Basically, you evaporate all the alcohol out of the mash (which is where the urine and meds are in this), collect it via an inverted funnel at the top which has tubing going through a barrel of cold water. The cold tubing condenses the alcohol vapors, which comes out of the bottom as alcohol. This is basically moonshine at that point, and takes on the flavor of whatever you put it in as it ages for years. Given that the type of sugar usually defines the type of drink you're making, I'm not really sure how this qualifies as "whiskey", though.

The "watch video" button has never been less appealing...

This seems to be the equivalent of bragging about getting increased range in a normal car because you put another fuel tank instead of having a trunk and removed everything else that makes a modern car modern. Like important safety equipment, or air conditioning. I don't get it. Tesla has already done what these guys are trying to do ten times over without sacrificing all of that. And good luck getting through the southern Mexican parts of the highway in that thing. You'll need it.

Just like anything else, if it's done correctly, it can be great. The problem is most people don't bother to spend the time at it and throw out a half-assed system. To date, Fallout 3 is the only one where the scaling isn't horribly done. The first time I played through Bioshock (PC) I had adaptive difficulty turned on. About 1/2 way through the game, I began wondering why every enemy I came across took 5 or 6 headshots with anti-personnel rounds to bring down. Unfortunately, it took them a while to patch it so that the difficulty would turn itself back down if you weren't doing as well. Oblivion was horribly done. Enemies would scale up as high as your level, but your ability to scale up your damage was often cut short long before that. A level gained due to speechcraft and alchemy would net the same increase in monster stats as a level in blades and repair. In the end I wound up editing the game via the construction set just so I could actually enjoy it again. Ultimately, companies need to hire players rather than play testers. Someone who's going to go through a game because they enjoy it will find many more problems than someone who's told specifically what to test for and look at.

It's amazing how descriptive a patent can be while still claiming virtually nothing at all. Almost every hybrid vehicle on the market could be sued under that patent. Aren't patent trolls the greatest?

You're forgetting the obvious "Upgrade their network to handle the capacity using the massive profits they've been reaping in for the last 5 years" option. Their network was in place to handle everything up until now, and they've done nothing to try and keep it up to date. Like hell I'm going to support a company that's going to charge me more for something I'm already getting than one that's going to charge me more but guarantees I'm getting better than what I'm currently getting.