YEAH! Google should be all about the short term and next quarter's profits! That's how our economy's so strong today!

"Critics, though, have always pointed to multiple hurdles - to the cost of launching and assembling large solar stations in orbit, to the losses in efficiency in conversion, and to the safety issues surrounding some wireless transmission methods, particularly those that use microwaves.

Astrium says the latter can be addressed by using infrared lasers which, if misdirected, would not risk "cooking" anyone in their path."

I got a great laugh out of that one. A+ journalism!

When you see kids insisting on incorrect spelling/grammar online, it's not necessarily because the medium encourages bastardizing the language in every instance. It's a desire to cool by being anti-intellectual. In their minds, only a nerd and an adult takes out the times to make everything they type in informal settings 'perfect.' We even do it here in sophisticated places like Slashdot. When someone brings up or wants to enforce the subtle differences between affect and effect, we just hand-wave it, call them grammar Nazis, and move on. It's the same thing. So next time you feel like blindly criticizing the next generation, why not try holding that critical lens to yourself as well?

"More lively" does not mean "complete other end of the spectrum." It means "something more engaging and able to garner more public interest, which is the objective of NASA TV," in other words, make it watchable. That's why the submitter mentions Carl Sagan; he was able to mix science, inspiration, and entertainment so that people still watch Cosmos today.

This is a terrible mistake on the Chinese government's part. Just because every ruling party member likely looked at pornography as a child and became terrible people does not mean that every person who sees pornography in their childhood will grow up to be just as cold, calculating, and authoritarian.

So everyday when I'm not procrastinating or tending to hygiene/food, I'm working.

Weeeeeeeeeell, the the Star Trek timeline really diverges from ours drastically from this point. By now we're supposed to have driven Khan into space after the Eugenics Wars which devastated the world and be on the way to WWIII. You could say that the path is very different now.

Actually, this has been a well established practice for years in high energy density (HED) physics. On all of the big lasers like NIF, OMEGA, and NIKE government projects doing largely classified research get first dibs on operations time. There are many groups doing peaceful energy and astrophysics research as well, but they tend to be less priority and have to do a lot of work proving their experiments before getting shot time. NIF, for example, is only just going to be accepting proposals from outside groups this December.

This may clarify a few things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour

I think for the next April Fool's day, Slashdot and Fark should merge into one messy, horrendous website.

Just goes to show you that you can read all of the documentation you want, but experience is what really matters.

A story is posted about Google apparently engaging in some healthy (and frankly long needed) competition against Apple/Amazon, and the tags we get are 'donoevil,' 'queuethefanbois,' and 'fuckgoogle.' At least someone came along and put a ! in front of the last one but the tag being there at all is an artifact of seriously unconstructive vitriol. This is a story about Google expanding into new markets, not about Google doing anything wrong. These tags must be here accidentally at best and as flamebait at the worst.

NO!

If we keep treating people like they're too stupid to understand the science behind things, then it's going to just get harder and harder to get any real change in the technology our society uses. Not to mention the young people we scare away from science and technology. Rebranding a technology works only in the short term until the public catches on or some uses the exact same tactic against you. No, what we need to do is work to slowly win the culture war and continue to make the work of scientists again treated with appreciated with appreciation instead of suspicion.

Of course he's being over the top about it. Otherwise, we wouldn't be on /. discussing it.