Tipping in restaurants is traditional in America to the point where waitstaff actually make a significant portion (even the majority) of their income from the tips. The minimum wage for waitstaff who get tips in the US is set significantly lower than the minimum wage for the rest of the working population.

Leaving a very tiny tip (a penny is more traditional than a dollar) shows that you didn't forget about the tip, but you put some thought into choosing an amount that really expressed your feelings on the quality of the service.

Perhaps the same people that convinced us that "there must be human life everywhere, like on Star Trek" on "millions and millions" of worlds was the same guy who told us there'd be flying cars.

I know what the movies have said for so long...isn't it *possible* we're alone?

Our existence looks like quite a long-shot; 90% of the stars out there don't have so much as terra firma, much less ATM machines.

Every time NASA foists a planet "Just like Earth" it comes with a 15G gravity or really, really, really bad hotel service. :)

But it's more than that. For man to evolve and even *know* other planets exist, for example, they have to be on planets far enough from black holes AND in places where the view is not obscured.

What will happen to science as we get better and better sensors and we can't find anyone/thing suggesting intelligence? Will it survive?

No, that is a popular stereotype put out by Libertarians (which are not conservatives, they're economically conservative but socially liberal). Conservatives think of liberals as being delusional, and liberals think of conservatives as being deceived. There's no reason for either side to want to be lumped together.

Sounds like a singer, ever hear of a Momsen Lung?

--

Florida Journalist Completes Sentence.

Yeah!

Same reason xWINDOWS is so screwed up, to taint Microsoft! YEAH!!!

Technically you have to raise prices by 50% to make up a 30% loss.

Vs. their idea on including silent letters in words... :p

they are in the biz of selling others the idea, while they themselves keeping a screen of "plausible deniablity" up so that when things eventually crash they can say "oops".

Incidentally, no one calls it "McMurdo Ice Station". In fact, calling it that belies a misunderstanding of its setting, which is within an ice-free chunk of volcanic Ross Island. An "ice station" sounds appealingly clean to me...more like South Pole. MacTown (its nickname) is one of the dirtier (albeit dry) places I've ever been.

I hear that large companies are recruiting people with BS's in physics cause those people know how to crunch numbers. Just cause your degree is in something unrelated to your field doesn't mean it doesn't help you in whatever field you do go into.

Your view is long on optimism, but short on history.

I think that this is not a big deal. The radio in my car is permanently connected to +12V and I can turn it on and listen to music with the engine off and the key in my pocket. As long as the car supplies power and the speakers are analog I think that this could be done to any car...

Fail, and hard. That's an optional DRM tech (DRM is evil, etc.) which can be used with the Flash VM. You might as well say that Linux is closed because some Linux apps are closed source, or that HTML5 is closed because it's possible to obscure Javascript so much that reverse engineering is required to reimplement some Javascript-based utility.

By defining Jesus as the appendix, Jesus is in (almost) all of us. Your definition is specious, and your conclusion requires published evidence.

You have something broken with your setup. If it were that bad, no-one would actually use Hulu. To wag my little tail, 1.83GHz Intel C2D with a GMA950 running Hulu fine for years, and that's on OS X where Flash is known to be more sucky.

Considering the prevalence of Marxism in colleges, most (I want to say the percentage being somewhere in the 60s) that college students leave their parent's religion in pursuit of the secular humanist agenda that has been pushed on them by profs who claim it is the only "intelligent" way to think. Your religion now entails of some mysterious Gov't entity that will make your problems go away through promises of safety nets, re-distribution of wealth, and a general distaste for anyone with Ambition. How is this different than what your Right wing parents believe? Good job on switching brands of Koolaid there, you must be so proud to be enlightened now.

what was wrong with regular html and pdf?

There's no lock-in with those formats, silly.