I've found that upper floors and specialty libraries (science, law, etc) are the place to go when looking for a quiet place to study. Our science library even had soundproof booths you could reserve.

Orson, stop telling our secrets.

My common sense is tingling.

Two characters from Star Wars were completely and totally awesome: Han Solo and Darth Vader. Han wasn't in the prequels at all. Vader got maybe 5 minutes of screen time and IIRC Vader doesn't even force choke someone, threaten people, or do any other badassery in that 5 minutes. He just whines and breaks stuff. The decision to bring back just about everyone in the Star Wars universe except for its two resident badasses is just as terrible as all of those Police Academy movies that happened after Steve Guttenberg said "Fuck it. I'm outta here." Tackleberry is cool but he can't carry a movie.

JJ Abram's whole life is about time travel: Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, JJ Abrams stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished... He woke to find himself trapped in the past, directing movies that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Jerry Bruckheimer, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only JJ can see and hear. And so JJ Abrams finds himself leaping from movie to movie, striving to put right what Uwe Boll once put wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home

I just hope they get the right Ronald P Moore. Despite what James Callis says, the Ronald P Moore in the Portland phone book is NOT the same one who did Battlestar Galactica.

" the GOP could have filibustered it into the dirt and they did not."

No, they couldn't. The legislation as it exists was passed was passed in two parts. One part was passed through the Senate in the brief period when the Senate had 60 members caucusing with the Democrats. Republicans did not have the votes to stop cloture. The second part was passed under reconciliation which does not require cloture but is limited in scope. That part was basically comprised of tweaks the House wanted to make to the Senate bill. Republicans couldn't do anything about either part of the legislation at the time it was passed.

Well if you were raised on the show that should be par for the course. The big surprise villain at the end of Episode 1 of Day of the Daleks is:... wait for it... wait for it... the Daleks. That character in Keeper of Trakken who looks JUST like Roger Delgado? He's going to be the next Master. It's a predictable show. It always has been. If the predictability bothers you now that probably says more about how your taste in television has evolved than it does about the series itself.

You may want to actually read what the posted above you wrote. You might learn something. "you need 60 votes" isn't hard to understand. It just happens to be incorrect. There is nothing in the Constitution requiring a 60-vote cloture in the Senate. It can be overridden. And it would only take a simple majority to do so. The only thing stopping them is etiquette.

All I got from this article is that once you add in the cost of the Surface's most notable feature, it costs $20 - $30 more than an equivalent iPad.

The OP probably got this idea from driving in Dallas. Some toll roads like Bush still physically have the booths, but they're not open anymore. Newer toll roads like SRT don't have the booths at all. With the exception of DFW airport, I'm not aware of a toll road in the DFW area where paying at the booth is still an option.

The conversation went something like this:

Microsoft: "If you're a researcher on this Windows 8 thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on it."
Gartner analyst: "Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes."
Microsoft: "Let me see what it says in this edition, then. I've got to see it."
... "What? Bad! Is that all it's got to say? Bad! One word! ... Well, for God's sake I hope you managed to recitify that a bit."
Gartner analyst: "Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
Microsoft: "And what does it say now?"
Gartner analyst: "Mostly bad."

Did that person manufacture their own tiles or did they go to the store and buy them by the box? Everyone is building something from a kit these days (and by "these days" I mean "since the industrial revolution"). Some kits are just easier to assemble than others. There's nothing more glorious about gluing tile to the ground than there is about gluing vinyl to the ground. They didn't "do it themselves." They just did part of the assembly. The amount of effort put into the creation of ceramic tile is far greater than the amount of effort it takes someone to put that tile on the floor and make sure it doesn't move. Ditto with everything else mentioned in the article. We have a romantic view of what it is to be a craftsman, but really a craftsman is just using an older kit that's a little harder to put together.

Well, consumers right now are buying what they think they want. A lot of consumers are new to smartphones and don't know exactly what they want. On top of that, the consumer is likely in at least a two year contract on whatever they do choose. Their exposure to the phones will consist of looking at and maybe holding a security-tethered phone in the store right next to a bunch of other similarly-sized phones. That's going to lead a lot of people to buy as big, shiny, etc a phone as they can afford out of fear of not getting a capable enough phone. While I think that for now a run-up in phone screen size is inevitable, I do think that phones will settle into a small range of screen sizes over time just like has happened with things that have experienced similar run-ups like number of steam holes in an iron, SPF on sunscreen, amount of Vitamin C in vitamin supplements, etc.

"The most advanced tech they can operate is the play button on the dvd."

I'm going to have to call BS on that one. They can quite easily navigate on-screen menus to order UFC pay-per-view fights, thank you very much.