We'll be able to live on Venus and Mars before we can live on this planet, even if it is a paradise.

The fastest man-made object ever was the Helios 2 probe in the 70s. With a gravitational assist from the Sun, it was able to reach 150,000 miles per hour. Even if we could escape the solar system at 10x that speed (which is FAR beyond our current capabilities) it would take almost 10,000 years to reach a solar system 20 light years away.

Realistic interstellar travel requires relativistic speeds, and right now we aren't able to accelerate anything much bigger than a hydrogen atom to those kinds of velocities. Not only that, but when you start to approach your destination, you need to be carrying just as much energy to slow back down.

A lot of people seem to think we'll be launching robot probes on 200 year missions within our lifetimes to go explore these newly discovered planets. It's easy to have one's imagination off by orders of magnitudes when thinking about interstellar distances.

Because Government is the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They are different from you by definition. It's like this in every single nation-state that has ever existed.

Nah. It blows.

Star wars might have only passable acting, but it has great characters that you actually care about. The only remotely charismatic character in Avatar is the evil army guy.

And the special effects might have been impressive in a technical sense, they look like the box art on graphics cards.

Oh, I get it, it was supposed to suck.

What Kurzweil doesn't understand could fill a book.

Several in fact.

You are the perfect example why people need to use 2 drives, if they want to go SSD (assuming you aren't willing to drop like $600 for a massive SSD). Buy 1 reasonable SSD for your OS and apps, then use a secondary HD for mass storage (MP3s, movies, pix, etc) since large files and heavy writing doesn't benefit from SSD. Moving your PageFile to the traditional HD might improve your performance further. SSD wins when it comes to small reads, especially random ones, which is what your OS and apps do a lot of.

Knowing Intel, most likely the new drives, which double the capacity, will remain the same price. Therefore your 160gb drive for $399 will be 320GB for $399, and imho approaching $1 per GB on SSD is a big freaking deal. Of course this info is an early leak and Intel has no mention of price. But with a new fab and smaller nm, most likely Intel will deliver on this theory.

The problem with IE6 is that it doesn't render CSS properly, has ugly javascript quirks, and is STILL FUCKING USED BY 30% OF THE DAMN INTERNET.

And yes, I am a web developer.

You're thinking like a nerd and not like a business person. What really happens is MySQL's main branch turns into crap, your average developer downloads MySQL because they don't know what a fork is and their boss just told them to "try this open source product". It really sucks compared to current commercial offerings because MySQL hasn't been updated in X years. Guess what just happened, unless money was an issue, they probably just decided not to go with OS.

This is what Oracle is hoping for, and imho it will happen, more-so as time goes on. MySQL may seem pretty good right this moment, but what about 2yrs from now, 5yrs, 7yrs? These forks have to make a name for themself, but chances are, the devs have either: quit the project entirely, gotten hired by Oracle and don't work on any OS code/forks anymore, or the senior devs are competiting with each other because they're all working different forks. More likely than not, Oracle has destroyed MySQL.

Dan is talking about paying money as a routine, like a salary. The security exploit pay is like a reward, you don't get paid for the effort, anybody can make the effort but only 1% of the people who would try are capable of finding a real security hole. The effect doesn't apply.

20% of school leavers in the UK are functionally illiterate

You mean graduates?

I can't stand self righteous a**holes like you... you'd be the first to complain about your ad free cable costing $500/month

Actually I think your specialty, if you do get the prize money, will be subtraction (from the pool of money). No adding will occur at all.