(transliterated because Slashdot apparently doesn't allow input in other languages) "boroun na" ==> "are able to"

It's a typo in the article; basically it's saying the laser can pull objects from far away.

Haven't they played any of the Metroid games? We're all doomed!

C

It seems like you don't know the right Christians, then.

Or, maybe, that these people are the same people as everywhere else -- generally rotten, hypocritical bastards.

In my personal experience, the Christians that I've known have been good and bad, same as everyone and everywhere else. I've been especially lucky, on the other hand, that the authority figures (priests) in the Church that I was raised in were good, well-educated men who had no problem with reconciling real life with what was written in the New Testament (I personally can't get over Christians that can quote the Old Testament better than they can the New Testament, but that's a different gripe altogether). In fact, the way that they managed to live what they preached -- one priest, for instance, donated a sizable sum of money to the Church when it fell on hard times, even though he makes a very small salary himself -- was truly inspirational to me. I would like to one day be as good a Christian as the example they set in front of me, but I'm not hopeful (I'm afraid I'm one of those other "normal" people).

I think you're guilty of the exact same kind of behavior, unfortunately, that you rail against from the theists -- a sense of moral and intellectual superiority that lets you separate them from yourself and subsequently dehumanize them in order to do them harm (in this case, social ridicule). Granted, some of the ideas are very bad, and especially can't be reconciled with modern scientific thought, but in my mind the way forward isn't to establish entrenched camps of intolerance and start firing at one another.

C

Now, now, the Canadian government has apologized for Bryan Adams on several occasions!

Likewise in Southern New Jersey (and Philadelphia before this -- the very heart of Comcast darkness)

I get OpenDNS error pages for nonexistent domains.

Or after we've actually gone through the trouble of figuring out that the solution we came up with fixed the problem at hand and caused many others due to the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Asbestos for everyone!

Seriously, though, if there are better solutions available today than terraforming and introducing pesticides that wipe out indigenous species (read: medicine and vaccines) and the only barrier to entry is the cost of said vaccines -- which are themselves artificially inflated to preserve drug company profits by trade agreements and intellectual property laws that effectively kill thousands of people around the world yearly -- don't you think the rich people that own the companies profiting while people who can't afford their products are dying should get an earful?

C

I thought C compilers had gotten to the point where C was just a convenient syntax for assembly anymore?

I'm only half-kidding here. I'm sure the main reason is for portability across different chipsets, as well as ease of debugging. But, as I said, I think a lot of current C compilers can generate code that's not appreciably larger than hand-written assembly.

Compiler writers, please educate me otherwise.

C