It is not lame, it is completely understandable.

What is lame, is that you call it "a happy in my pants". I feel ridiculous just typing that.

A whole house? Hell, where I live, it's illegal to burn your trash in a back yard bonfire. I don't even want to think about what fees the HOA would levy against me.

I don't have an argument against the wavelength limitations, but this photo shows what adaptive optics can do over a somewhat wide field. Ground-based telescopes also enjoy the benefit of being much, much easier to repair and/or upgrade.

Besides, isn't it going to be ultimately more beneficial to be able to image "small" fields, such as individual solar systems or planets? Not that we have to choose, we've got both ground-based and orbiting telescopes, and that's a good thing.

Not only did they put out no-CD patches for those games, they made them available for torrent downloads originating from battle.net. Just go there, put in your CD keys from Blizzard games you own (it wouldn't take my Warcraft 2:Battl.net edition), and you can download and install those games on as many computers as you'd like. I'm going with others here, and trusting Blizzard based on their track record of being generally good to their customers.

In other news: Man listens to FM radio channel using FM Radio!

Anymore, somebody actually listening to FM radio is news.

Actually, it looks like the answer is going to be to step away from silicon, and replace it with graphene. They can't make it anywhere near as small as silicon (yet), but there's other advantages. The linked article is a pretty good primer on the subject.

The reason this is a big deal, is that this is the type of flash that goes into SSD's. Right now, a 256GB SSD costs over $600. Read/write speeds on mainstream HDDs are one of the biggest bottlenecks in today's machines, and SSDs are the answer to the problem, once they come down in price. Also, SSDs draw less power than traditional hard drives, so longer laptop battery life is an added benefit. Not to mention the benefit that data centers could see, both from a throughput standpoint, and a lower power/cooling requirement.

Alien exhaust fumes.

BAM! I just proved the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. What do I win?

Had her cousin send me a text when they were leaving the mall to come home, so I knew exactly how much time I had.

I tend to find the opposite.

Dozen roses in Mar - Jan: $14-20
Same dozen roses in mid-Feb: $50

Pulled this off awhile back, not on valentines, but it worked very well...

First, I setup a "girl's day out" for my wife and her cousin. Called wife's cousin, asked her to take my wife out shopping/getting a pedicure/etc. I needed wife out of the house for a couple hours for setup.

While she was out, I went over to my parent's house, since they drink lots of bottled water, and recycle the bottles. I knew they'd have pleanty of empty bottles on hand. Also went to the store, got a dozen tulips (or maybe roses, can't remember), a nice quality bubble bath, some of those glass "pebbles" for fish bowls, some ribbon, and a pack of tea candles.

Knowing my wife likes to take relaxing baths, but she almost never treats herself to one, I setup a nice bath for her to come home to. Used the pebbles + water to fill the water bottles (after removing the labels and putting a nice piece of ribbon around the screw threads, sealing with hot glue), and get them bouyant with a flower in each bottle.
Made a nice playlist of some of her favorite relaxing music, loaded it on an mp3 player, and set that up through a battery-powered speaker. Tied back the shower curtain with some leftover ribbon, spread the tea candles around the tub, and through the rest of the bathroom. Filled tub, got it nice and bubbly, and set the floaty flower-bottles around in the water (it took a few minutes to settle after it got done filling).
Finally, lit candles, turned out lights in the bathroom, and set the book she was reading on top of a hand towel.

I think she was in that bath for about 2 hours. I could do no wrong for months afterwords.

I'm a lumberjack, you insensitive clod!

Same as always, "three to five years". (I'm just guessing. Of course I haven't RTFA.)

Just for the sake of argument (though I agree with many of your points), I'll offer up some counter-points:

- Services - A book can't deliver the newspaper to you, without any need for intervention, or killing trees.

- Search - e-books make it really easy to find that quote you're looking for.

- Dictionary - A good e-reader lets you instantly lookup a word that you don't fully understand, in my opinion enhancing overall enjoyment of the book.

- Book price - If/when bookstores start doing things as they should be done, e-books will be much cheaper than a new, retail copy of a book.

- As XKCD happily pointed out, a 3G-enabled e-reader is essentially The Guide

- Obsolescence - Most books sold for this will be in .epub, .txt, or .pdf. I'm absolutely confident that in 5 years, all of these formats will still be easily readable, and if not, there will be many free conversion tools to make them so. In fact, the more of these e-readers that get sold, and the more e-books that people buy for them, the more important this will become, and the more of a "sure thing" this will be.

Also, I'm trying to talk myself into buying one of these things. It's just so damn cool. Now, by no means will I stop buying new books, or get rid of my old ones, but I also won't feel any guilt pirating/fair use-ing e-books of books that I own or buy. Plus, there's lots of good, freely available e-books out there, even if you don't count Project Gutenberg.

So, what you're telling me, is that DNA naturally defragments itself, in order to be usable even in an archived state?