Yeah, most of us speak l337 nowadays. Comic very related: http://megatokyo.com/strip/9

If there's ever a robot uprising, I bet it's going to be started by us making them do stuff like this.

I agree completely. Frankly I think these idiots have done a lot to help the gay community. I remember back when they were picketing the funerals of dead soldiers, ranting about how they went to hell since they defended an allegedly gay-loving country. The best part was seeing marines going up to them and just glaring at them with pure hatred, clearly on the verge of beating the shit out of them. I have a lot of respect for our soldiers (regardless of what our leaders are telling them to do) and that just really struck me as a symbol of patriotism standing up against these people. It's because of stuff like that that no one takes them seriously. We all know they're total scum so we don't need to talk about it every time these people stage yet another silly protest.

In short, they've essentially made it fun and cool to hate people who hate gays. Keep up the good work Westboro!

OMG, so are you!

"...my office building mysteriously implodes."

*shifty eyes*

This exact sort of thing is already happening in the U.S. except rather than keeping people in prison to make them work, the prison lobby wants to keep people in prison for the sake of needing to build more prisons. We've got both the prisons' investors and prison guard unions constantly lobbying for harsher punishments for lesser offenses. It's a scary to think that it's profitable for anyone to lock people up and throw away the key...

Blizzard has got you covered: http://us.battle.net/matchmaking.html

Yeah, it looks like he's headed for -1 Troll any minute now.

I *love* this idea. Neural interfaces are still very much in their infancy with the best commercially available probably being the OCZ NIA and even it is mostly a glitchy gimmick at this point. But the standards they're considering for this X-Prize seem very high. Providing vision to the blind and being able to control virtual bodies both require an understanding of very intricate neural operations that we probably won't see for many years. Sure, there's been devices created that can sort of do these things already but not on levels that can significantly help the disabled. All the more reason that this prize is a good idea since it will hopefully draw interest to the appropriate fields of study. Unfortunately the kind of things that they're talking about will almost certainly require implants. Further advancement in non-implanted interfaces will undoubtedly be much slower so don't assume that you're going to be roaming the hills of Azeroth as if you were actually there any time in the next 20 years. But hey, hopefully I'm wrong.

I bet NORML is desperately searching for the haggis lobbyists so they can hire them.

Don't think of it as getting hit by your own irony stick... think of it as getting hit by your own "we we".

I agree with the spirit behind this idea in that companies should be required to justify costs to prevent price fixing but I'm sorry, this just wouldn't work in the real world. The companies would make the cost breakdowns nearly impossible to reasonably interpret to hide the $10,000,000 worth of "consultant fees". (For people not familiar with business, a "consultant fee" is the cash that goes into the pockets of the CEOs and their buddies who come and hang out at the office for a few days a year.)

I really don't think we're going to fix problems like this until there's no such thing as greed in society anymore... which isn't going to happen until we achieve a perfect utopia where money is no longer really required anyways.

Not to be disagreeable but saying that it's a "waste of space" implies that space is specifically supposed to be used for something. (Your statement implies that its purpose is to contain life but that's not entirely relevant here.) What you're essentially doing is assigning a meaning to space itself, but "meaning" (not to be confused with cause-and-effect as it so frequently is in philosophical arguments) is a totally human created concept so the "waste of space" argument is unfortunately invalid.

That said, I really, REALLY hope that life is abundant in the universe. I just don't think that much can be said to predict whether or not it is until we get out there and look for it which is exactly what they're doing here.

I've frequently wondered the same thing but I assume they mean base 10 since they're clearly more evil than hard drive manufacturers.