Hmm, if you're trying to argue that Revenge of the Sith isn't our generation's greatest work of art, shouldn't you try to come up with counter examples that are actually from, you know, our generation? Something bothers me about eldavojohn's summary... Titian: 1488-1576 Bernini: 1598-1680 Monet: 1840-1926 Picasso: 1881-1973 Pollock: 1912-1956

"There was no deregulation"? Keep repeating that to yourself often enough and maybe it will become true.

The Glass-Steagall repeal did happen. The failure to properly regulate derivatives markets did happen. And only in a true right-wing fantasy world would *even less* regulation lead to more smaller entities, instead of fewer bigger ones.

Fortunately, back then you couldn't patent a concept

Not true. In Richard Feynman's memoirs (either Surely You're Joking or The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, I forget which one), he tells that after the Manhattan project, he and his colleagues were asked by managers to come up with ideas that they could patent. Feynman, half in jest, tossed up a few including "nuclear-powered aircraft" ("nuclear-powered ship" was already taken). The patents were applied for, and were awarded, and a few years later, Feynman was approached by an aircraft manufacturer, who assumed, given Feynman's name on a nuclear-aircraft patent, that Feynman was an aviation and nuclear energy expert.

Now this story is merely amusing, since even today, nuclear-powered airplanes are completely impractical, but still, I'm reminded of this anecdote whenever I hear people claiming that the phenomenon of stupid or obvious patents started only recently.

It was so depressing, I was down for days afterwards. I decided never to read anything by King again. (His Dark Tower series is also seriously depressing, but I wouldn't call that sci-fi.) As for hard sci-fi, I'd say Frederick Pohl's Man Plus.

This (second from right) is my favorite. You do need glue or tape to make it, which may disqualify it from the record books, depending on how purist your rules are.
The one in the photo has a straw for a fuselage, but you can make it from paper by folding a long strip of paper into a three-sided prism and taping or gluing it shut. The two ring-shaped wings should be slightly different diameters, and the plane should be launched small ring forward. It is amazingly stable and I could throw it farther than any competing plane in my class. I'm not sure if it would travel the full length of my elementary-school gym, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

I use MapDroyd for this on my Android phone (free), and CityMaps2Go on my iPhone ($2). Both are very basic -- no navigation -- but they have nice integrated UIs for selecting and downloading maps. You won't be able to load the whole world, but I loaded NYC, all of NJ, and all of the Netherlands, using county/province level maps (which have perfect detail; I feel no need to get the city-level maps at all), and all that fits in a gigabyte or two. If you plan ahead and download only the maps for the areas you want to visit, a 16 GB iPhone or an Android with a 32 GB SD card will take you a long way.

This (second from right) is my favorite. You do need glue or tape to make it, which may disqualify it depending on how purist your rules are.
The one in the photo has a straw for a fuselage, but you can make it from paper by folding a long strip of paper into a three-sided prism and taping or gluing it shut. The two ring-shaped wings should be slightly different diameters, and the plane should be launched small ring forward. It is amazingly stable and I could throw it farther than any competing plane in my class. I'm not sure if it would travel the full length of my elementary-school gym, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

This "slippery slope" meme seems to be the libertarian's favorite argument against any legislation, but how do things actually happen in the real world? Certain people behave in ways that happen to be legal but which most of us find immoral (which, in fact, most of the perpetrators would find pretty nasty themselves, if it were to happen to them). So, we change the law and ban something. Libertarians immediately extrapolate the new legislation to a ridiculous extent (straw man argument) and thusly "prove" that even the non-exaggerated legislation is wrong. The rest of us ignore the screechy libertarians, and wait for any actual *evidence* that the new law is abused, and, lacking such evidence, sleep soundly at night. Many countries in Europe have limitations on public speech that would give a U.S. constitutional fanatic a brain embolism, and yet magically Europe persists in being a place of open discourse, not a police state. So, relax, and give some thought to the people that some of these "dangerous" laws are actually meant to protect.

http://www.viruscomix.com/page329.html

Apartment with thin walls.

Shouldn't we also acknowledge that the root cause of this kind of misery are people who'll believe whatever they read, without any due diligence? If we were to apply scientific publishing standards in the news -- that is, whenever you're writing based on someone else's words, name your source -- then any allegation could be tracked back to whomever made the initial comment, or it would dead-end at an anonymous post. A non-anonymous poster can then be required to either produce their evidence or to retract/apologize/pay damages; anonymous posts can be used as a starting point for an investigation (this is precisely what anonymous tip lines are for) but should never be considered evidence of anything in and of themselves.
Seriously. If you get an anonymous email accusing your next-door neighbor of being a child molester, are you going to go over there to beat him up? Anyone who has actual evidence of something like that should be talking to the police, not sending anonymous messages and forum posts around. Whenever I see anonymous accusations, I treat them with a lot of suspicion.

Technically, you didn't -- the crew compartment survived the fuel tank explosion; the crew were still alive until they hit the water.

How did that cold-hearted garbage get modded "insightful"? Maybe I'm really, really unusual, but I do, in fact, care about all those 7 billion. Sure, I can't keep up to date with every facebook page on the planet, attend every wedding and every funeral, sit by every bedside, etc. etc. etc. In fact, I can make a substantial difference in only a handful of lives, and the rest of humanity is utterly beyond my ability to help. And yet, I care about them.