this was awesome.

confused? do both. delete one then add a temporary one.

I remember someone predicting that when Bush announced his planned trips to mars and the moon, it was really a politically astute way of dumping the space program without looking like he was dumping the space program. There was no provision for how to pay for these new missions and by the time actual funding was going to be needed, it would be somebody else's problem (without even having to paint the shuttles pink). Otherwise, the very real problems of what to do with the short term needs at NASA were going to be center stage and have to be dealt with in his administration. The lack of a shuttle replacement, problems with the existing shuttle's safety/reliability, how to maintain the ISS, etc.

the physics of it don't pan out though. any asteroid large enough to be a significant threat is not something we could damage with current nuclear yields and making larger bombs, while possible, would be more dangerous to have here than the remote chance of an asteroid impact.

we'd be better off investigating other means of modifying an asteroids path such as solar sails, robotic mass drivers, parking a small mass near it for gravitational deflection to name a few.

not his fault. someone must've beat him to it as there was already a scene (sort of) in Drawn Together a couple years back.

and for those that don't want or need such tools can probably get most (all?) of what they need relatively cheaply from say emachineshop or the like. also a good idea if you are bad with power tools unless you like having 3 1/2 fingers.

not sure if lawyers would be able to successfully argue that or not, but the intent of that provision was that you couldn't criminalize something and then try someone for committing the crime prior to it being a law. invalidating patent/copyright protections would not be making them criminal nor trying to prosecute a person or corporation for claiming a patent/copyright.

that, is hilarious

not necessarily. sometimes new products can come with significant manufacturing cost reductions, not often, but sometimes.

The fix would be to have the monitor hardware take the limited info and spread it around to the appropriate groups of pixels instead of trying to have the video card render and push billions of pixels through the video cable. 1920x1080? right, each pixel of input maps to blocks of 15x15 (to pull a number out of my ass) on the actual display. 960x540? each pixel maps to blocks of 30x30, etc.

since it's a replacement for a run of the mill glass eye I imagine he just pops it out and puts in a new one?

Except a well designed hud would be reflected and focus adjusted for a relaxed eye (i.e. infinite distance) instead of trying to focus for 3 inches away. Still distracting but not the eye strain from going from focusing close to far to close you're describing.

oi, that should be electron not election obviously.

well, really the neutrino is needed just to conserve lepton number so it could be:

• proton + anti-neutrino -> neutron + positron
• neutron + neutrino -> election + proton

the relationship I was getting at was more along the lines of electron capture vs positron emission than time reversing normal beta+/- decay.