Gingrich said this in Florida, a few weeks before the Floriday primary. Newt needs a win here to cement his momentum, because if Romney wins it's a serious blow to his candidacy. Because of that, I expect him to spend the next couple of weeks telling voters any outlandish fantasy it takes to get elected, up to and including telling people in Miami he'll invade Cuba and kill Castro.

They're not imaging the event horizon, they're trying to image the accretion disk around the central black hole, and hoping they can see the event horizon's "shadow" against it. I doubt that we're going to be directly imaging the event horizon for the central black hole anytime soon.

The Milky Way's central black hole is 4.l million solar masses. The Schwartzchild radius of a static black hole of that mass is roughly 12.3 million km, or 17.7 x the radius of our sun. That's roughly 1/3 the size of Mercury's orbit. You could put it in the center of our solar system, and not devour a single planet (though they would start orbiting a *lot* faster).

Hold out your fist at arm's length. If you put the Milky Way's central black hole where our sun was, it would be roughly that big.

Now, imagine trying to see something that size, which is perfectly dark, from 27,000 light years away and you'll understand how difficult it would be to directly image it.

I was talking about games that use Steam DRM, vs just the Steam store. The only two non-Steam games I have are Fallout 3 and Arkham Asylum. Past that, if you don't use Steam DRM, I don't buy it. Respect your customer, or you won't have customers.

These guys are walking billboards highlighting the value of Steam vs the crap DRM-ware of Ubi, Origin, MS Games, etc.

I was stuck at the office very, very late one night. Nothing to do. So I logged into Steam, downloaded a game I owned ("Bloody Good Time", excellent FWIW), and played a while until I could get of there.

The MBA's at Ubu/EA/MS would explode at the very concept. And it is why I will be spending my money at Steam.

(And Gabe, if you read this, I can haz HL2e3/HL3 now plz?)

Of course, if we had that fiber network we've paid for several times over in telephone fees, that would also deter thieves from stealing copper too...

Agreed. I was surprised the first time I visited the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. *THAT* is how movies are supposed to be seen. I can see why Harry loves 'em so much.

I have a MBA from a top tier school, but I also have a decade of experience as senior sysadmin for a large academic computer cluster and a large chunk of a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, so hopefully I'll have some street cred when I say this.

I promise you, if Wall Street paid $500k a year to geology majors, you'd see that discipline packed with money-grubbing psychopaths too. You're confusing the body of knowledge, with the people who learn it.

Yes, I know MBA's who are parasitic, narcissistic sociopaths. I also know MBA's who are good decent people with honest ambition and a desire to make their mark and be their own master.

Believe it or not, there are nerds in business and politics, just as much as in computers and physics. I happen to enjoy economics, finance, entrepreneurship, and public policy. A MBA allowed me to scratch those itches.

Saying "MBA's are all PHB's" is like saying IT people are all BOFH's. You're painting with a mighty broad brush.

My parents live a mile off the main road at the bottom of a valley. No DSL, cable, 3g/4g, satellite, but with the help of a big honking antenna and a couple of amplifiers, they can pick up solid TV signals.

I'm salivating at the prospect of getting two of these radios and trying to set up a point-to-point bridge between their house and mine. The 145-225 MHz band out to be a lot more amenable to line-of-sight obstacles than 2.4 GHz.

They don't have any cell reception, barring standing in the right spot in the yard. They live at the bottom of a large valley that blocks cell signals.

One thing I have thought about is buying two antennas and building a passive reflector to beam some signal into their valley, but I'm waiting for Verizon (or anyone, for that matter) to roll out 4G before I spend money on it.

I've used Lynx since the early 90's, but it's not a realistic solution for my parents. Since they have both Chrome and Firefox installed, I disabled loading photos in Firefox to give them something Lynx-like, but it renders a number of sites unreadable, primarily ones that validator.w3.org barf at.