You took the wrong lesson away from The Island. The correct lesson: clone Scarlett.

SETI is looking for intentional signals, not the alien equivalent of Abbot and Costello.

I taught in Saudi Arabia during the last year. There's a mandatory Google safe search there. For the first few months I taught English before teaching IT. When students would ask what certain words meant, I'd show them pictures on Google images. Occasionally, the word wouldn't show. These were non-porn words. I wish I could remember what some of those words were because I'd like to check to see if they're also blocked in the US. What a fucked up thing, Google.

A close friend, who uses Tmobile in the SF Bay Area for the Nokia N900, got an iPhone 4S half a year ago. Both phones were bought at the non-subsidized expensive price, unlocked. Where the N900 had been getting 3G signals, in the same location the iPhone 4S would get EDGE only. Siri would be useless. Apparently the iPhone 3G was not on the same frequency as the N900 3G.

That changed about a month ago, where suddenly during the long daily commute up the peninsula (between Silicon Valley and San Francisco), suddenly there would be big areas with the iPhone 4S lighting up with a nice strong 3G signal where there previously had not been any before. We speculated that this was due to MetroPCS merging into Tmobile, but we really didn't know that much (does MetroPCS even have iPhone-compatible 3G?).

While the usual convention is to measure speed, I wouldn't say it's non-intuitive to measure slowness. Slowness would be the reciprocal of speed, so if it requires twice the time, then it's twice as slow.

In a similar vein, in the US, people seem to measure fuel performance by mileage (miles/gallon), whereas in Canada, it's measured by fuel consumption (litres/100km). So better fuel performance is a higher number in the US, but lower in Canada, the advantage of the latter being that it is additive (you can take two numbers and average them, unlike mileage).

So that addresses your other examples: thinness can be measured in pages/inch (in the case of paper, say) or # rack servers/metre, etc. And coldness would be Kelvin[to the power of]-1, of course.

I've always wanted to know: is there an email client that can run on command-line? Is this what Mutt is? (I know it has an interactive interface, but not sure if it also has command line.) I'd like to have something that I can script --eg. remotely ssh in with a non-interactive command to 'mutt --retrieve --most-recent --condition="WHERE Sender Matches mom@her_email.com" | grep -i "my new phone number is" '

In my particular case in mind, I'm trying to send a bunch of Christmas email greetings. I'll probably have a short text and a PDF attachment, and just have some script grind it out slowly, sending to 1 email address at a time. I don't care if it takes 48 hours to send them all --I've had enough with snags about how I can't send to all 2000 recipients at a time, and how I have to break it up into 30-50 recipients at a time, keep track of who has been sent what, etc. Not to mention: in the past, Kmail has refused to compose HTML messages, Thunderbird had some funny incompatibility with my email provider (which was also my shell host and web host, but I just didn't have time to go figure out the problem), and installing Evolution completely steamrolled my Kubuntu installation with some GNOME crap (KDE wouldn't unmount devices properly because GNOME thought it would be fun to just automount every single thing I plugged into USB).

Also, I want something command-line for my N900. Enough with interfaces -- I'll let bash talk to my email client. I'll compose my text in Vim and let some script take care of sending. If Mutt is it, then I'll install Mutt.

It's perfectly fine to count eggs before they hatch. I have a dozen in my fridge right now. They look delicious. In fact, I hope they don't hatch, because I'm really craving eggs, and not chickens. Now, counting *chickens* before they hatch on the other hand...

"Sent from my $foo" means "If there are typos or if my message is curt, please forgive me, but you know how it is typing on these devices."

I'm not really a fan of either approach. I want to mix XBox 360 chocolate with Wii-U peanut butter.

An external USB drive is clunky, not elegant. It's worlds better than a maximum 2GB SD card, though and it's non-proprietary (although I'm sure Wii-U-branded drives are coming).

XBox 360 got it right in that the add-on drive might as well be built in to the unit. But I would much rather have had an enclosure which allows me to buy any standard drive instead. Also, it's not transparent enough. The XBox 360 asks you to select where to save stuff. I don't understand why it should. Either the system shouldn't *care* where stuff is located or if there is a reason it cares, it should make the determination on its own and not bother the user.

This may come as a shock, but some of us actually talk to flesh and blood women. We don't have wives who can be raped via botnet.

(Maybe I'm feeding a troll, but I just couldn't resist... ;) )

If the WSJ is excluding details to make a point, it is the epitome of triviality to argue against those points by showing what was excluded. If the WSJ is wrong about something, prove it. Otherwise, just stuff it, because your cheerleading for the NYT at the expense of the WSJ won't convince anyone. Those who are "uniformed idiots" because they read the WSJ certainly won't be convinced (the name calling is a nice touch - really brings people to your way of thinking). And those who already agree with you don't need convincing.

Rational thinkers will not be convinced, and those are the only ones you can possibly hope to sway.

You say that like "guilt-trip-control" is a means to an end. It's not.

Empire > New Hope

Really? I use permanent marker.

I want to be left to die in the desert, of course. Preferably a spice blow will finish me off before dehydration.