"I will not buy this passport. It is fake."

At least the bot didn't pay a hitman to have random people killed.

NASA didn't decide to build that; a Republican senator from Mississippi forced through the budget amendment even though it was pointless. Apparently stimulating the economy down there with some completely useless waste of resources is more important than actual space research.

Blaming NASA for it is just adding insult to injury - what an asshole reporter.

Instead of fancy breathalizer equipment, making people read a bunch of letters and numbers is probably enough.

That's supposed to mean the size of his body, or the size of his ego?

All you need is a small black hole to bend the light towards you...

Ebola and ISIS both still have fairly bad raps, so fat chance for Comcast.

Unary representation of your program's Gödel number. You can code in one letter, but your program may get pretty long.

(which Google, btw, finally realized can be more than two words to be omitted from a search because they're too common)

Yeah, in the early days multiple words were just an AND keyword search. I think that changed over 6-7 years ago, though.

In the time between these bursts, maybe a few species got lucky and made it almost to space colonization before getting scrubbed.

Maybe we're one of them.

I saw that episode.

Wow! That sure is an unexpected application of a new super-tensile material. :P

No government would want to trust their TLD (on which relies the entire country's infrastructure and economy) to a foreign country that interferes with it. Once that can of worms is opened, you'd probably end up with each country hosting their own alternative root and mandating their ISPs either default to using it or being able to fail over to it quickly when necessary.

But for one simple payment or $100,000, you can pre-purchase your batteries for the next 500 billion years!