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Colin Pillinger interview transcript (PDF):

Q&A had an interesting interview about "The Birth of a Nation" recently, and there are a lot of good in-depth interviews about recent books. Probably not "based on comics" though...

Hurrah pour Robur-le-Conquérant ! s’écria une voix ironique.

Robur-le-Conqérant by Jules Verne has over 1000 hyphens.

It does seem to matter when it comes to picking Supreme Court Justices. Nobody would claim that Alito and Scalia are interchangeable with Kagan and Sotomayor. Are you really saying it doesn't matter who chooses the next few justices?

And this has an impact on a lot of real world issues: http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

The article confuses Kuiper Belt Objects (more than one thousand discovered), and dwarf planets. To quote Wikipedia: "The IAU recognizes five bodies as dwarf planets: Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake".

2015 will be a great year for looking at two of these. As well as New Horizons, there is also the Dawn probe on its way to orbit Ceres.

Card games sound the coolest, making you think of movies, smoke, poker, baccarat, Bond, etc.

Sadly my vote was for solitaire on the Nexus 7...

Diffidence is "modesty or shyness resulting from a lack of self-confidence". I think you mean "deference".

You wouldn't guess from the summary that the article title is "Going up! Cosmic elevator could reach space on a cable made of diamonds".

If you're a clever insurance company you ask people if they want tracking in return for lower premiums. If your competitors are charging $300, you make the "no" people pay $315 and the "yes" people people pay $285. Then all the bad drivers and all the people concerned about privacy go off to another insurance company. Given the success of Facebook and Twitter, it looks like only 0.001% of the population cares about privacy. Therefore 99+% of the people who move across to your competitors are probably not very profitable anyway. Win-win!

So it's saying "yes" or "no" to the tracking device that is the important part, not the driving data. As long as you have enough blinky lights (and a few real 3G connections) so people think they might be monitored, then you are golden.

There's a lot of exciting stuff happening right now. The Dawn mission is on its way to get a close look at Ceres in April next year. Rosetta is sending a lander onto a comet (which is about to do the exciting thing for comets - i.e. go near the sun). New Horizons is going to fly past Pluto next July. There are two rovers exploring Mars. Not to mention Cassini, Messenger, etc. You can be negative if you like, but I think these missions are pretty amazing.

You can sign up for our flat rate Gold Plan at $1000, or the Silver Plan where we will nickel and dime you until you pay $2010 per year, or the Bronze Plan where you will get some carefully selected ads in return for a lower fee of $500.

This service brought to you by your trustworthy ISP.

Notes: (1) You may occasionally see ads, (2) Ads you don't see will still count against your bandwidth cap, (3) We hate you.

Yes. They will have a dual stack with the IPv6 address being used for a bigger and bigger proportion of traffic. Meanwhile IPv4 will probably traverse some NAT.

Once IPv4 is the minority of traffic (many years in the future), it will turn into a legacy PITA to administer separately. But that is a while away.

Those 30% of Comcast customers aren't calling a helpdesk and reading out hexadecimal digits. If DNS is working they will say things like "www.facebook.com". If DNS isn't working then they can't fix it by reading out or typing those "meaningless characters".

Not viable. It wouldn't help more than a single digit percentage of users anyway.

Facebook uses psychology to make minor changes in our happiness... Something must be done!

Soda companies use psychology to sell huge buckets of sugar water... Hands off our soda, Mayor Bloomberg!