Popularized it, perhaps, but I wouldn't say created it.

That said, I think the GP may have been talking about the Mac.

According to the article, it's larger than a Boeing 737. For a seaplane, that's pretty impressive.

And heavier in an airplane is better...how?

Seaplanes only land on water. Amphibious planes usually have retractable landing gear that goes into a water-tight compartment so that they can land on either water or on an appropriate runway.

Well, to each their own.

As always, it depends on a few things. I have no problems renting movies from Netflix and not owning them, but there are some movies I prefer to own. I can imagine the same thing--I've bought some "throw-away" books for airplanes and such and would be fine with the idea of just being able to pull up one to read. But there are some books that I've read that I enjoy and I want to keep and re-read every now and then. So Apple wins both ways--you "rent" the book, read it, decide you like it, and then overpay to get the book from Apple's Store.

Depends on what you're using it for. If you've got your standard courseware, why would you need to upgrade the iPad? So it's running iOS 5 instead of iOS 8, that doesn't affect your courseware.

I'd also point out that an iPad 2 from 2011 is compatible with iOS 8 from 2015. So there's four years right there.

One of the things I always like to point out in the "Manned versus Unmanned" arguments is comparing the amount of lunar material brought back. The Apollo program returned something like 800 KG of moon rocks. The Soviet Union's landers returned something like 0.8 Grams of moon dust. And those rocks were brought back because an astronaut (who in later missions was trained in geology) actually thought they were interesting, whereas the moon dust returned by the Luna probes was whatever happened to be within reach.

So it costs a lot more. The question is, do you get more value out of a manned mission versus a robotic mission? Apollo brought back 1,000,000x the amount of lunar material for 1000x the cost. So if you're just calculating based on those numbers, Apollo gave a better return than the Luna program. But that initial cost was pretty off-putting.

As people at NASA and others have pointed out, what the rovers have accomplished on Mars could have been done by an astronaut in a couple of days.

An analogous issue is time versus money. I could buy a ticket on the Concorde way back when and get from New York to London in three hours for $6000. I could buy a ticket nowadays on a non-supersonic transport for maybe $1500 that would get me there in 8 hours. The question is, is it worth the extra $4500 to get there five hours earlier?

Mars isn't really changing. There's really nothing about Mars we need to know right now, such that it would be worth spending that initially large amount of money to find out.

With appropriate equipment, you can camp in Antarctica...

Actually, the flight was beginning to go off course and they couldn't reach the pilots so they shot it down and spared the world another month of "What Happened to Flight 17?" stories.

We should be grateful to the Russians...

Who decides what is bad and what isn't bad?

This is interesting from a nationalistic point-of-view. Consider Siberia. Warm it up, get rid of the permafrost, and there's some nice arable land there that could feed a lot of people. That would be a pretty good thing for Russia. Consider America's wheat belt, where lots of food is grown for people in the US and abroad. If that were to, say, dry up, that would be bad for the United States.

Right now, you're seeing trade routes open up in the arctic ocean. That's not a bad thing for countries like Canada, Russia, and some of the northern European countries. But if China's rice fields suddenly are starved for water, that would be bad for people in China.

So, yeah, climate change could be a boon for Russia. It might not be so good for the US.

Well, that can depend on where the change happens. Here in Southern California, 1 degree isn't going to even be noticeable. But take a place where it's usually right around 31 degrees F and make it 32 degrees F and the locals will certainly notice the difference between rain and snow.

My favorite additions:

Heaven is where:
The police are British
The mechanics are German
The cooks are French
The lovers are Italian
The teenagers are Japanese
The movie makers are American
The musicians are Russian
The women are Swedish
And the whole thing is organized by the Swiss;

Hell is where:
The police are German
The mechanics are French
The cooks are British
The lovers are Swiss
The teenagers are American
The movie makers are Japanese
The musicians are Swedish
The women are Russian
And the whole thing is organized by the Italians...

There's also a good one where heaven is "An American Salary, a Chinese Cook, a British House, and a Japanese Wife" whereas hell is "A Chinese Salary, a British Cook, a Japanese House, and an American Wife."

Good point. I get in my automated car to take me to the airport. Then my automated car goes home, where it has a nice parking spot with inductive charging that doesn't cost me $20 a day. When I get back from my trip, I signal my car to come get me and it drives back to the airport by itself.

Not to mention Carbon Dioxide! Dear God, won't somebody think of the Carbon Dioxide!

Speaking entirely for myself, the theater has to offer something that I don't get at home.

I don't have a full-blown "home theater." I don't really even have a partial-blown "home theater." I have stereo sound on a 34" LCD TV. If I want to get fancy, I can run the sound through my amplifier and decent speakers. And this is fine for the cute and cuddly romantic comedy or serious drama. The theater doesn't offer anything extra. On the other hand, I watched "Gravity" this past weekend and I remember thinking that, yeah, some of those scenes would be really cool in IMAX 3D. I'm sorry I never got a chance to see it that way (I was planning to do it, but things kept coming up).

I wonder if piracy has an effect on the kinds of movies that end up in theaters. It may be harder to get that quiet dramatic film made than the special-effects laden "blockbuster" that you would want to go to the theater to see.

There is an intriguing aside, though.

Take a movie like the upcoming "Guardians of the Galaxy." This is the kind of movie I want to see on a big screen--lots of explosions, daring-do, grand space battles, a raccoon with machine guns, etc. Conversely, take a movie like "Jersey Boys" and I don't see a real need to schlep to the theater to see it--the viewing experience will be about the same if I watch it in the theater or on my 34" Flat-screen in the living room or if I watch it on the 19" RCA CRT in my bedroom.

Give me a low quality copy of "Guardians of the Galaxy" and it will probably inspire me to see it in the theater. Give me a low quality copy of "Jersey Boys" and I'd probably be content to watch that and not see it in the theater or rent it later.

So I wonder if piracy is having an effect on the types of movies that we see being made.