i happened to be looking at light bulbs at Home Depot today and saw at least a couple of LED's labeled "Dimmable". Too bad the $15 price for the smallest bulb ($38 for an indoor flood!) sent me moving on down the aisle to bad old incandescents. So, they are out there, can't testify to how well they dim though.

agree 100%. There's a lot of flag waving horseshit going on in this thread. I don't care WHO does it, I'm just glad that SOMEONE has picked up the manned space flight flag since we (the U.S.) have decided to let if fall (sorry, engineering studies and crap on the drawing board that will never be built don't count).

Great! NASA did some awesome manned stuff 50 years ago! Now what? Don't get me wrong, I'm a space nut. Just had a lovely weekend trip to Johnson Space Center a couple of months ago. I remember the first shuttle launches as a kid and how amazing they seemed. It was like a REAL spaceship! Then the disappointment when they just went in neat little circles in LEO for 30 YEARS! 30 years guys, 3 times longer than they spent getting to the moon. Think of everything that has changed in that time, except for our #1 people launcher.

Just because our leadership has given up doesn't mean it should stop. It's nice to see the Chinese taking a long term, methodical approach to this, they don't seem to care if it takes 50 years. Back here in the U.S. our leaders are poisoned by the Wall Street mentality that says if something spectacular doesn't happen by next quarter it was a waste of money. Yes, there has been some amazing stuff from Hubble and the rovers and various probes, but let's face it folks, what sells the space program is manned flight, not wall-e.

Anyway, stop with the flag waving and just be glad someone is doing it and has a plan. If nothing else we may see what NOT to do when (if) we ever decide to go back to space.

and .056 GW from powering my flux capacitor. so close, yet so far.

"You don't have to use PSN to use a PS3"

Wait a sec...this is not entirely true. I don't game on my PS3, I DO use it for Bluray and for Netflix access. About once a month when I launch Netflix, I get a message along the lines of "Your PS3 requires a system update". You cannot use Netflix without doing the update and (here's the punchline) the update REQUIRES you to login to PSN. there may be other PS3 apps that have similar nonsense going on, i wouldn't know. I do know that I would not have a PSN account if i didn't have to have it for these damn forced updates.

Apple will now patent "holding your phone correctly".

I'm sick of Apple. I've never been a fan of their closed ecosystem, and I find that they seem more "evil" than MS ever did to me. Dunno, in the 90's MS seems to be kind of naive and amateur in their strong arming. Today's Apple is sneaky, insidious and far more dangerous in my opinion. They are very good at convincing people that should know better that an idea wasn't legitimate until it got that Apple polish.

Oh well, I'll continue to exercise my right not to buy their stuff, and hope that their patent trolling and lobbying don't screw up the alternatives too badly.

funny, i read that as "they could charge more by reinventing the wheel".

no one's really saying yank one out of an F18. With all the previous planes produced for the military, all the major ergonomic requirements should have been known in advance. little things like accessibility (under the seat and behind your back is not a good idea) of emergency handle and realistic limits for pull pressure should have been ironed out decades ago. Planes change, pilots, not so much. Of course that only addresses the final failure of the emergency part of the system, not the utter crap of the O2 generating system failing to begin with. Why there's not an automatic cutover is beyond me. Light goes off, system switches over and pilot stays alive while determining whether this is a real emergency or not. I'd think that fail safe would be the operating mode for anything directly keeping your operator alive...

Maybe I'm attributing corporate greed to an error of simple human nature. some smarty pants engineering team probably wanted to get to the "good stuff" and called this one in. Too bad all the bells and whistles don't mean much if your subsystem kills the pilot first.

Studies be damned, there's a huge difference between talking using a handsfree and holding the phone. Handsfree, it's no different or more distracting than talking to a passenger. But the second that phone and hand goes to the ear, it's like half the brain shuts off. It happens to me, it happens to my wife and it appears to happen to just about everyone else. One of our driving games is to guess whether the person driving 20 mph under traffic flow/having trouble staying in lane/driiiiifting over slowly when changing lanes is on the phone. I wish i'd kept records for the "show me the data" crowd here, but after a few years of this game I can tell you that the hand to ear oblivi-bots are winning. It's getting to the point it's not fun anymore, we could just say "on the phone" and most of the time we'll be right. not much of a game these days.

I don't know where you are, but where I live most 80's vintage American cars don't appear to be in very good shape (paint jobs appear to be particularly bad quality in the 80s). There's a big difference between "still on the road" and "safely, reliably and comfortably still on the road". Still running is not a sign of quality.

Whatever. I distinctly remember from Back to the Future that all the best stuff is made in Japan. And that was in 1985, so there!

interestingly enough, there may be a remake of Starship Troopers in the works: http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/1157184/starship_troopers_and_the_state_of_hollywood_scifi_remakes.html

no i get where you're coming from. had i never read the book, i'd have probably thought it was an ok movie. I was in my mid 20's when the movie came out and yeah it still annoys me. It probably irritated me more than it would NOW, because NOW every book, comic, or vague idea obtained while straining on the pot is seen as not a single movie that should be made with some care and/or integrity. Instead it's seen as a franchise gateway to a downhill slope of forgettable sequels. Now days you'd expect The Sound of Music to be remade w/ a cliffhanger ending and giant Michael Bay explosions.

Maybe it's always been like this and i just need to get off my own lawn.

oh come on. then they should have named it "bugs from outer space" rather than blatantly trying to capitalize on the "source" being the RA Heinlein novel and then stripping 90% of the book. This is NOT the same as the rabid fanboy rage over Arwen being a strong female character in the LOTR movies. There's a huge difference between taking creative license when presenting something in a new medium and taking source material and gutting it.

ahg, please don't ever bring up the Starship Troopers movie. I've loved the book since I was a kid and was so exited to see the movie. God what a total, abysmal let down and a complete failure to capture anything of what the book was about or even, if you ignore the deeper themes, what made the book fun. I will say that at least if it had been made in today's CGI orgy we'd have gotten proper power armor. Of course then people would claim it's a Halo rip off. I imagine we'll hear that if there's ever a Ringworld movie too.

the opening shots of the Nostromo (inside and out) still hold up today in a way that CGI effects today will not 30 years hence.

preview... silly me. this should say: Hating on CGI is not what's going on, people are hating on the abuse and overuse of CGI.