Damn it, Steve! Fine! Time for plan B! Put up the artist rendition of the sexy anthropomorphized herpes-infected man-whore mosquito! Just in time for the 50 Shades of Grey movie!

Dibbs on opening the cage! I'll get to work practicing my mad scientist laugh! "Muahahahahaha! YES! GO FORTH AND FEED, MY CHILDREN!"

Yeah, if you're in the market for cheap plastic crap and aren't terribly picky about quality, that's definitely the place to go. Hopefully that's not where my doctor goes to get his pee-hole probulators. There are some goods where cheap wal-mart quality simply won't do. Hello Kitty Branded dildos, yes, pee-hole probes, no. Because you know if that goddamn thing breaks off inside you, doc's gonna have to go for the forceps, which were probably also made for cheap in China. And you know, next thing you know, you have 18 things broken off and stuck up your pee hole. All because your goddamn PPO thought it'd be a good idea to do bargain-basement shopping for dick probing. And also didn't think you might maybe want some drugs when some guy is digging around up your pee hole. Entirely hypothetically speaking, naturally.

There is no situation I could be in where an incoming call is important enough to warrant my immediate attention. There's a guy at work whose wife is expecting a baby, I assume he's made arrangements for immediate contact. Maybe his wife should have a talk with him about working for a company that lets him work from home.

The old asterisk voice menu system I used to run was pretty good at shutting down telemarketers and robocallers while still letting legitimate callers through. I don't think it'd be so easy to implement on an android phone, although it really should be. Maybe that phone Canonical is working on will have more open standards, but I'm not holding my breath.

I was expecting this to be about slashdot.

That's actually what it's like at "Mojave Spaceport". Hangers of small aviation practicioners and their junk. Gary Hudson, Burt Rutan, etc. Old aircraft and parts strewn about. Left-over facilities from Rotary Rocket used by flight schools. A medium-sized facility for Orbital. Some big facilities for BAE, etc. An aircraft graveyard next door.

SS2 has not completed testing and it is probable that there will be a need for redesign of one or more components. So, this is a really bad time to have the hand-off. Publicity isn't a good reason.

PGP/GPG is much easier to use these days than it was in the 90's. Plugins exist for many mail clients that do the heavy lifting in the background.

Friends and family are surely tired of my tinfoil hat, they just do not seem to care about their privacy. Many say the "I have nothing to hide" line.

If you live outside of Kentucky you might only know them for their derby. What many people don't know is that Kentucky also makes some of the finest jelly around, and that many stores outside the state carry it. So if you've never had the experience, you should pop 'round to your local grocer and ask about Kentucky jelly today!

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.

What kind of talk is that? We need to come up with some decent excuses for why Nvidia can't access the last 500M of RAM! I'm going to suggest that it's global warming! The video card was designed for a room temperature of less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit but ever since global warming, room temperatures have been warmer than that!

If they think the threat is designed to secure passenger/crew compliance for another 9/11 style attack, yeah, I think they would shoot down a civilian aircraft if it didn't respond to their orders. Of course, passengers and crew these days expect any such threat to result in another 9/11 style attack and have proven repeatedly that they will beat the shit out of and quite possibly kill anyone trying to pull shit on their airplane. So the fighter jet is still just multi-million-dollar dick waving. It's probably more to let terrorist organizations know that we will shoot a plane down if we have to, rather than because we expect that we'd actually have to.

I have an old laptop with 4GB but it's running Windows XP 32 bit so I can only use 3GB. Have I also been lied to?

That's hardly surprising. Titanic had 5 times the budget of Serenity and Avatar's was even larger. I was at least as impressed with the visuals in The Avengers as I was with Titanic and Firefly was extremely impressive visually for a TV show of that period.

It's quite hard to separate Cameron's direction of Avatar from his other roles of writer, editor, and producer. When a scene didn't work was it badly directed? Or badly edited? Or just poorly written? It's hard to tell. A perfectly well written scene can be ruined with poor direction and even if well written and directed it can be butchered by poor editing. In the end it doesn't actually matter because ultimately the bad result was the product of the same man's creative failure. As you say Cameron wouldn't simply direct a Star Wars movie. Whedon would probably not stick to directing either but I have rather more confidence in his ability to produce something good.

Sure, there are going to be mediating forces in the environment. Melting is an obvious one. The positive feedbacks have been getting the most attention because they are really scary. It appears that there are gas clathrates in the ground and under water that can come out at a certain temperature. The worst case is that we get an event similar to Lake Nyos, but with a somewhat different mechanism and potentially many more dead. The best case is a significant atmospheric input of CO2 and methane that we can't control.

I don't think I have to discount Trenberth. He's trying to correct his model, he isn't saying there is no warming.