Thank you for that little pearl of wisdom. Nothing like a bit of blatant ad hominem, with no attempt whatsoever to deal with the point, to break up the day.

Anything else you'd like to say about the completely irrelevant topic of your perception of my personality, you amusingly stupid mucksavage?

Car Talk? Are you f***ing kidding me?! Two assholes with abrasive Boston accents sit there laughing like hyenas at everything the other one says? How anyone listens to that garbage I do not know. Every time it's about to come on I have to dive for the radio and switch it off because I can't even stand the sound of "Suppoht foh cah tawk ..." intro, to say nothing of the fingernails-on-a-blackboard country music that follows.

Click: "You know what?"

Clack: "What?"

Click: "I got up early this mohning! Hwahwahwaaaa!"

Clack: "Hwahwahwa! Really?!"

Click: "Yeah! Hwa hwa hwa!!!"

Click and Clack in unison: "Hwa hwa hwa!"

Makes me want to punt the radio into next week.

RadioLab's okay, but the annoying editing is just...uh oh, here it comes ... annoying, like when you're tuning into what someone's saying and his voice starts fading out yadda yadda yadda ... narrator cuts in across the front of him to comment on who he is or what he's talking about. It'd be much easier to listen to without the gimmicky editing.

This American Life is okay, but I find Ira Glass' creaky voice a little hard to listen to sometimes. Sounds like he's constantly nervous.

As for the local announcers here on KQED, some are better than others. There's one guy who shall remain nameless who I have yet to hear complete a sentence without stumbling over himself, and there's a female announcer who's not much better. People like that wouldn't last long on the BBC. Maybe they're dyslexic or something and have a hard time reading what's in front of them, and I have nothing but sympathy, but they shouldn't be on the air.

But in general I find the quality of NPR's production values a lot higher than PBS. I guess it's a lot easier to do a good job on radio than on TV, so you don't need the BBC's massive budget to nail it.

I'll bet your Thanksgiving dinner table is a real barrel of laughs. What is it with you mad hatters that you have to turn every discussion into an anti-government / anti-Obama rant?

Mods, mark this moron as off-topic and let the rest of us discuss the actual topic.

His point is that this "We're #1" hubris is a bit misplaced when it was the Russians that got just about every single first in the space race. Year the moon landing was slick and the joyride on the surface in a rover with a driver's seat was kinda cool, but don't go around saying America was first in everything.

This complacency is going to be America's undoing, and the standard racist /. reaction to every non-American space venture is just a symptom of it.

Stand by for a bombardment of "Haha look at those cute non-Americans trying to land on the moon" wankers in 5-4-3-2-1...

Electronic Design Automation company here. Our figures for the last two months of website visitors are:

48.33% Chrome
23.64% Firefox
17.94% Internet Explorer
5.31% Safari
1.35% Android Browser
1.06% Opera
0.75% Mozilla
0.38% Maxthon
0.38% Opera Mini
0.16% Safari (in-app)

...for producing the first informative post on this whole sorry thread.

Gawd slashdot has gone downhill over the years!

Made a fortune on the internet.

Started a car manufacturing company producing high-tech electric vehicles that make anything produced in Detroit these days look like a Model T.

Building spaceships to take tourists out of the atmosphere.

"Just lucky in life"? Maybe, but it makes me wonder what you've achieved lately.

If only the same thinking were applied to defense spending.

If you "don't want to be surrounded by skyscrapers" then move to the suburbs or the wilderness. Living in a place like San Francisco and complaining about the city's evolution and increasing density is the very definition of stupid.

Higher density (which is better for the environment, you know) is the only thing that's going to solve this problem, not standing like an idiot in front of a coach and angrily waving a sign.

You were doing fine until you got to this part. It's not the fault of the Google employees, it's the fault of the protestors. If they'd stop blocking new residential developments at every turn and trying to shorten the tall apartment buildings that do manage to get built, the city would stand a better chance of building enough housing stock to meet demand and rents wouldn't be so high in the first place.

They are total fucking morons. Their problem is with rising rents. Rising rents are a result of a shortage of housing in the city falling way short of demand. Shortage of housing in the city is the result of these same idiots objecting to every residential development taller than a gas station. Who do they blame? Not themselves, they prefer to scapegoat some tech workers, most of whom spend money in local businesses and help the local economy anyway. These ignorant cretins are so fucking stupid on so many levels I don't even know where to start.