It's not a term to hide the fact that "we don't know", it's a term to punctuate that "we don't know". If we were really trying to hide stuff, we'd define it as stuff we already know about rather that come up with a new term (like the MOND guys are doing with dark matter).

Where are you getting your info? I go desert camping for weeks at a time and then we only plan for 2 gallons per person per day and that includes showers. Used to be 2.5 but we always had lots of water to bring back with us so we cut it.

No. Ever tried to entrench yourself into concrete?

No, there probably will not be very many collisions of stars. However, there probably will be large disruption of large objects in oort clouds around such systems. The few millions of years during the collision and few million years after will be a time of large comets and possibly even some "dwarf planets" crashing through some otherwise stable star systems in erratic orbits as they get disturbed.

They don't have to do it uniquely. They just have to do it better. Google wasn't unique. Facebook wasn't unique. They both offered services that other companies were already in the lead for. People just seemed to like them better and switched. In the new world, web viewers are the commodity most these companies are fighting over, and it's just a matter of getting them to go to your site instead of somebody else's.

Perhaps they need to do like Apple. Find a startup like NeXt. Buy them, and then turn over all their resources over to the startup to run, essentially letting their people take over the company. Let the new fresh talent do the next best thing with the old company.

The vampire thing has been ongoing for more than a century and a half so far and probably will never be over. Before Dracula, there was Lord Ruthven who every author made their main vampire. The 19th century was full of books and plays about vampires. Thing is that vampires are allegories for sex, death, and even sometimes romantic love which people have tended to dwell on since they started telling stories. They may be over used at times, but will never be over until something else comes along to replace them.

It's not even that. As people become more productive, that increase in production leads to better and better products. Those products require more labor to afford. The general population will never have that much leisure time because there will always be more expensive items to buy due to that increase in productivity. Sure, I could cut my work to 4-8 hours a week currently and live like what was considered a 'good life' around the end of the 19th century. I know some people who have or do live like that. Backwoods guys that live in a 10'x10' shack and satisfied to make enough to buy the food, clothing, and books. People that dropped out of their PhD programs to live the life of a beach bum. Idealistic gypsy wanderers that essentially couch surf across the world writing books on their hand me down laptop. Trouble is I want lots of things they didn't have then like cars, computers, cell phones, internet connection, decent sized house full of stuff, etc. That requires me to work at todays levels enough to get those products.

Which is why those jobs that went to China will not return. They are still worth what the Chinese are getting paid for doing them. Nobody wants to work that much to receive the level of compensation that they would receive. If those jobs come back, they will be automated and the automation will be handled by a relatively few skilled workers. The world may always need ditch diggers, but 50 guys with shoves that have to be supervised to make sure they are doing a good job aren't worth one halfway competent guy with a high school diploma (and probably more these days) who can run a $100k ditch digging machine safely.

While I don't doubt that the British did what you said they did, it wasn't necessarily greed or laziness. The simple fact is that ideas about heritage, property, and such have changed greatly over the years. There was an article on BBC a while back lamenting the loss of many such cultural heritage spots in Britain for similar reasons. Laws protecting such things are relatively recent development as society grew rich enough to preserve as well as value them. Respect for the past means little if you are still trying to get everybody in the present fed. Previous to the last century ownership had complete rights to tear down, reuse, or do whatever they wanted with their property, no matter what the history behind it.

To be honest, it never has been. Photographers, long before Photoshop or computers, have been editing photos to the point that normal people can't tell the difference. It's always funny to read some photographer go off about the abuse of digital editing these days and give evidence of some well known photo as what photographers used to do 'in camera' only to have some other photographer show the original photo and show that most of that great photo was not done in camera.

Naw, I think the emerald dream and Deathwing stuff in Cataclysm has been around since vanilla also. Little bits here and there that ended up getting answered just like the undead bits got answered by WotLK.

Not sure if everybody deserves a college education, but today's society needs more people to have a college education. As we get more automated and make higher valued merchandise, the people needed to develop and run the industries will be needed to have more education than the people before them. A person without a high school degree can't be a ditch digger because these days a ditch digger is going to be put in charge of a $50k ditch digging machine that will do the work of fifty men with shovels in one tenth the time and do it cheaper and better. Manual labor jobs are increasingly becoming rarer and rarer or at least not worth it to pay what people want to be paid for such labor.

Actually, it was the aliens that threatened the world. In the later books (the movie was made from a book), we find out that Colossus detected the aliens and was trying to take over to protect against them, only to reveal that knowledge as he was being shut down. In the second book, the aliens took over and in the third book, they had to bring Colossus back to life to defeat the aliens and save the world.

I'll agree with that. I have a laptop and several desktops that I use for a variety of things. Still, I'm not frustrated with my iPad because it does what I want it to do which is act as my computer when I don't need to do actual office work, or in my case photography work. Of course, if they'd make a hard drive version of the iPad that I could download photos from my camera to while on vacation like I used to be able to do on my iPod, it would mean I'd need a laptop that much less.