While it was pitched that way it actually dealt heavily with various political and ethical issues.

Yes. One of the things I liked about TOS was you walked away feeling like there was a moral to the story. TNG had a couple of those, but most of it amounted to space drama or space adventure. Nothing too deep. Enjoyable, just not really thought provoking.

Sigh...no mod points, but this is really the problem. If I'm of a mind to carry a gun around, it likely means I'm of a mind to use one should a problem arise. And that threshold of when I pull out my gun varies between people. Some people need to be threatened with a gun themselves; others only require your foot to get stepped on accidentally, or a dirty look. Without a gun, their only response is a likely non-lethal shouting match or at worst a fist fight (which last longer than a gun battle and are more apt to be stopped by the audience, with the audience surviving the attempt). With a gun, someone is likely to die.

Guns have their place, but it isn't in your waistband, nor strapped to your back in an open-carry town. Those bozos carrying round rifles to inform people of their rights generated a bunch of 911 calls. Because, you know, you're carrying around rifles in the street. That's a culture change no one wants, thanks.

Okay, so as much as I hate to say this, referencing the Daily Show for facts is the liberal's answer to quoting Rush Limbaugh. Those shows are entertainment -- everything is taken out of context for humor or to drive home a point which may or may not be salient. John Stewart knows his stuff, certainly, and I am in no way comparing him to Mr. Limbaugh in terms of knowledge, but don't think for a minute that he presents an unbiased view of things. I'm betting the reason the gun laws were so successful in Australia has nothing to do with the laws themselves -- it has to do with the culture (as someone said). People weren't randomly killing each other en masse or in major gang warfare daily like we do here in the US of A (or however the media is presenting it).

Because, seriously. You might need a gun in Australia, but it's for the man-eating spiders.

I'm going to suggest that while there are larger open source consortiums like Apache that organize developers and projects such that they do wind up looking like a commercial project, you need to remember the main difference:

YOU are responsible for open source software implementations. There is no inherent support structure, there is no liability nor responsibility to maintain, fix, or continue development on an open source project. If you want to implement it, you are either paying for developer time (perhaps your own time) to perform those duties, or taking a risk that the project will continue to be updated by the author or others in the community.

Graphene Aerogel Takes World's Lightest Material Crown

A crown should weigh heavy on a ruler's brow, lest he forget the weight of his responsibility.

Well, a contractor experienced supporting a particular industry would find the processes in place and help the customer learn about what can be done to improve them. Most customers moving to new tech won't know what to implement, they just know things need to be more efficient. As a contractor it is up to you to NOT do what the customer tells you, but to convince them to use the best solution for the problem.

And UC isn't even that prestigious.
It's the best state school system in the U.S. Admittedly, the way the budgets are falling, it'll go private one of these years...

These big schools and their even bigger price tags
But you know, brick and mortar, textbooks, electri...oh, right. Online. You think there'd be some sort of discount. Especially for a class I took in Junior year of high school. I can see paying $1400 for a specialized course like Nuclear Physics or Laser Science. But pre-calc?

Therefore, 1 bag of popcorn every 3 seconds....(144k bags * 3 sec per bag) / 3600 secs per hour = 120 hours

Because I'm aiming my laser at each bag individually. If I were going to cook a room-sized tin of kernels, I'd disperse the heat using a stained glass window.

I drank what?

I would imagine that going with a single source solution is what allowed them to afford it. "If you just use us, we'll keep your servers up until we don't, and we won't charge you an arm and a leg."

I saw Serenity before watching Firefly. It ranks in my 5 ten movies of all time (err...along with the Princess Bride if that gives you any idea of how I like my films). Firefly, of course, is a fleshing out of Serenity (or inverted vice versa) -- more detail of a great thing. I didn't feel the characters were different between TV and movie but I'll agree they all couldn't shine given the fact the movie wasn't 10 hours long. Which was a bummer.

the best sci-fi movie I'd seen in a long time

Yes.

Joss Whedon's Star Wars would be a bigger disaster than three episodes about Jar Jar.

I disagree. Serenity made me feel like Star Wars all over again: fun, smart, adventurous, light-hearted, but also thoughtful. Joss aces that kind of stuff. See Avengers for details.

I'm 100% certain everything I know I learned in school.

Not.

Send them to a piano instructor, make them join the debate team, have them crack a book that isn't assigned reading. Have them code a smartphone app that manages their time.

Great book(s). I think even the first book would need to be broken into at least two movies. Would probably make a good HBO mini-series.

I say that for one decade, you place the same restrictions on men that you have on women, and allow women to have the rights of men.

That'll learn 'em.

In fact if you bother to open a history book instead of the comic books you apparently feast upon for your simplistic world view, you'd find that MANY past civilizations have migrated after conditions changed where they were - this was all pre-technology.

I'll bite. Pre-tech we had about 6 billion fewer people. Now, almost all land in the world is owned or not worth owning or living upon. Small migrations may be possible but if larger migrations were possible, millions of people in Africa might have shifted to considerably more human friendly areas in the past century. People move because of hunger and war, but generally those migrations are not sustainable as a future settlement area because of the lack of resources, well, everywhere. They are expected to move back.