Technically speaking, the president doesn't have the authority to declare war -- only congress has that power. Consequently the US hasn't been at war since February 10, 1947. Peace is nice, ain't it?

Can I use pgp in Apple's Mail client? Can I install anyone else's mail client? Oh, right.

I was already aghast at Gizmodo for running a story with the poor engineer's name -- there was absolutely no journalistic reason to give his name other than to give Gawker's editors a bit of titillation. He's a human being; human beings make mistakes. I'm more than slightly disappointed that Slashdot, a community that should be sympathetic to the guy, is having a laugh at his expense. Seriously -- who hasn't ever lost their phone or their wallet?

If, mind you, it was even legitimately lost in the first place -- which I still don't believe.

Why did you choose McCain's maverick status (or lack thereof) to illustrate his being worse than Obama? I'd have gone with one of his more obvious promises myself, like not closing Guantanamo, beefing up troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or pushing through legislation written by massive corporations...

If it's going to damage my liver, I'm switching to scotch. I'm sorry, Jack, but I just can't take the chance...

It's about time -- Inkscape on Snow Leopard has been hideously broken for months now.

Hooray. Just...hooray. Next time I'm in New Town early in the afternoon I'm going to think of this and snort Tennet's out my nose. Thanks, mate.

Neither! This data is statistically useless -- what we need to know is how many attacks occurred in the first half of 2008, otherwise the comparison is completely useless. Look at it this way: what if (due to some outside factor) the vast majority of cyber attacks occur in the first half of the year? We know nothing about the distribution of attacks over time, and so we can draw no conclusions from this report!

I hate it when people misuse statistics...

Same, same -- As soon as I heard about the movie I went out and grabbed a copy of Ellison's screenplay. Man, do I wish I'd known going into the theatre that he wasn't the author...

They'd better wait and read Stephen King's Under the Dome first...

You want a round of Heinlein movies? Dude, don't get me wrong, I adore the books -- but the man basically used his plots as jumping-off points for politically bizarre monologues. Moon is a Harsh Mistress? Stranger in a Strange Land? Starship Troopers?

Not that they'd make any of those, of course. They'd start with one of the entirely plot-free books (For Us, the Living springs to mind, as does JOB), since they're basically tabula rasa for a Hollywood screenwriter. Fuckers.

100%? 100%?!

Not 100% my ass -- it wasn't even close. Not in the ballpark, or the neighboorhood, or even the same damned continent. If I had to give a percentage number I'd probably rate the correlation between Asimov's I, Robot (a collection of shorts, for christsakes) and the movie as, oh, maybe -12.3%.

And that's being generous.

I know you're joking here, but seriously -- they did. Do.

Eh.

I think it was the Futurists who tried to popularize the moniker 'sf' as short for 'speculative fiction.' They wanted to get away from the perception of their genre as young adult trash, and doing that required that they drop the 'science' part. Odd, isn't it?

For good technobabble I can't think of a better example than Primer -- absolutely great engineerspeak through at least the first quarter of the movie. Totally and completely believable.