As long as we're talking about "reading again", you might review the statement you quoted originally: "Unless Congress passes a law stating that nobody else in the USA can have any concrete until the Houston Dome is finished, the only way to lock up the entire supply is to outbid everybody else put together." Nothing you have said contradicts that statement, in either your first reply or the second.

As for stretching the time out to 20 years, that would make no practical difference (it's not like they can lock up half the supply of concrete in any easy way), and doesn't change my overall point.

So, if we're talking about someone who's as stupid as rock, you flaming on about nits which make no practical difference, and failing to dispute the truth of the statement you actually quoted, pretty well settles it for me.

Do you honestly believe that you can get the taxpayers of Houston to spend 20 years paying to stockpile concrete for such a project?

This isn't like a bridge, which costs a lot of money but can be finished in a few years and then used for decades afterwards. You can issue a government bond to pay for construction, and then pay off the bonds with tolls over the bridge. A dome over Houston, per your suggestion, would take 20 years before you even started. And unless you plan to charge a toll for everybody who goes in or comes out, the only way to pay for it is with tax money.

If my property taxes went up that much for a project that wouldn't even be started for 20 years, I would move away and not pay it. Any businesses operating in Houston would almost certainly leave the city if their costs would go up so much. Companies are expected to file quarterly reports on how the company is doing. They can't afford to blow cash for 20 years on something that doesn't help the bottom line. If you don't pay property taxes, maybe the problem doesn't seem so immediate to you. But you would pay, anyhow. If the supermarket where you shop finds itself owing an extra $5million a year in property tax, where do you think they'll get the extra $100K per week? They'll get it by jacking up the prices they charge their customers.

Sci-fi ideas make great fiction, but in world where you have limited budgets, and where there are no replicators so anything you build costs actual money, we're never going to have a dome over Houston. The concrete we're talking about is $86billion just for the cement, saying nothing about the aggregate, rebar, capital costs for equipment (we have to dig the circular trench), fuel costs, or labor. If we figure the total cost of the foundation ring is 10 times the cost of the cement, we get $860billion. Divided equally by the 2.2million people in Houston, that's ~$400K each; for a family of 4, it works out to $1.6million. Spread out over 20 years, that works out to $80k per year in extra property taxes for a family of 4. Does your household budget have room in it for spending an extra $80k in taxes every year?

Actually, you missed the bit from the Discovery Channel episode which made it clear the Houston Dome would never happen: they said that the foundation ring would require so much concrete it would be equal to the entire production of all US concrete plants for 10 full years. So before you can even start on the dome part, you have to sink billions of dollars into the project for 10 years; enough billions that you outbid everybody else in the entire country who wants some concrete. Unless Congress passes a law stating that nobody else in the USA can have any concrete until the Houston Dome is finished, the only way to lock up the entire supply is to outbid everybody else put together.

If I lived in Houston, and somebody said "your tax rates are going up 1000% for the next 10 years, so that 25 years from now maybe you can live under a dome if you still live here", I'm moving somewhere else. And since 99% of the country does not live in Houston, the political will to say "everybody else has to give up all construction jobs for the next 10 years" isn't going to be found in Congress.

It opens with a little panorama of the sites I go to most often. I like it.

I'm willing to go for more than just one option when you go: it seems to me that the two obvious hardware things are (1) close laptop (sleep), and (2) hit button (turn off). So the menu should give you those two choices, along with "restart" and "log out". Still, that's only 4 menu items. And I see no reason at all to include a software shutdown button which looks like the physical shutdown button on the laptop. Even if we want "lock" on the menu, I don't see why it needs a button either.

Apple's detractors consider the company to be a bunch of control freaks, which is true, but that's exactly why their user interfaces are so consistent and usability is so high. Their mania for controlling every aspect of the user's experience has an upside and a downside. That the company that's so driven for consistency on the App Store also has a consistent website should hardly be astonishing.

As for Microsoft's website, the company's main product has a number of different interfaces for different things, when there's no sensible reason for it to be different (Office uses the Ribbon, but Internet Explorer doesn't, to take one example). That the company whose main product has a number of different and confusing elements has a similar website is also not astonishing. A finished system's structure tends to mimic the structure of the group that produced it. Read about the Windows Shutdown Crapfest and think about the implications for their website.

Let's take the Wachowski brothers. In The Matrix, they created one of the great action movies of our time, blending incredible visuals with an engrossing (if admittedly derivative story) and pulled it off masterfully. And yet, the followups were *terrible*, and what have they done since? Speedracer. *gag*

Somewhere I read (so we know it MUST be true) that the studio nixed the original Matrix followup, and so they had to take one movie's worth of material and stretch it out to two.

I can't find a link for it now, but given what JMS wrote about studio interference with Babylon 5, it doesn't seem hard to believe.

[W]e already have the ability to abolish most, if not all life on the planet with nuclear weaponry.

"I'm going to grant your greatest wish... I'm going to show you a world without sin."

It is deeply depressing that from amongst a list of alternatives whose achievements are up there in the realms of magic/fantasy, the one thing that humans are capable of right now is seen in the poll results as by far the least possible.

Not enough people want it, and many other people actively oppose it.

I saw Claudia Christian on stage at a con the weekend of the announcement, and she told her side of the story. She said that she had just asked for some time off (three or four episodes) to work on other projects, and Strazynski refused. That was the deal-breaker in her new contract, so she refused to sign. Then JMS spread the story that she was greedy.

The version of the story as I read it from JMS was almost identical to what you've written here, and he never said anything about money. The problem was that while he was willing to informally agree to try arranging the shooting schedule around other work she was doing, something he had done for other actors over the course of the series, there was just no way he was going write into the contract that she had the option of making B5 wait when they needed her. It's not like she played one of the Ambassadors, who could be left out of several stories in a row -- she was the station's second in command, and her role was going to be expanded for the 5th season (she was going to be the one to fall for Byron; that's why they set up her latent telepathy in season 1).

In my view, I think Ms. Christian botched badly. The IMDB lists only a few things she did around the time of B5's final season, one apparently a lame "Titanic" ripoff. Did she really think "Final Voyage" (IMDB rating 3.3) was a great career move?

Buddies, yes, griefing, not necessarily. I know a woman whose husband went totally into World of Warcraft, and it got horribly bad. He ignored her, the family, everything. Then their teenage son started lifting weights, saying he didn't want to just play at being strong, he wanted to actually have the muscles. Dad was interested; they worked out in the basement for about an hour a day. He still played a lot, but he was willing to give up an hour to better look the part. (She made a point of rewarding this by being touchy-feely after he'd worked out, which she says wasn't hard because she really did like it.) Then she found out about the local SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) chapter, and the teenage son said he was going to try to find out about how to use a real quarterstaff. Dad thought the idea of doing game-like-things IRL was fantastic.

He still plays WoW, but only an hour or so a day. And he and his son made two chainmail shirts (instructions on YouTube), and so on. The thing is still there, but his mania is spread out to include other real people and his real life. (I joking suggested the wife get a chainmail bikini.)

Whatever game this is, you might be able to slowly pry him out of it by asking lots of questions about how the game is played and finding out about the various stuff in the game. And then see if there are any real-life elements which can actually be done. If it's pirates, maybe you could get him to accompany you to see one of those visiting tall ships that sails around.

You've probably got way less leverage than a wife and son, of course, but what worked for them may work for you: don't attack or criticize. People usually don't respond well to criticism. Embrace and extend instead. It's harder to guard against a friend than it is to guard against a critic.

Quitting is easy. I've done it loads of times.

I know somebody who can actually say that: every year they give up caffeine for Lent.

I'm not Catholic, but having seen this in action it makes a certain sense. If you aren't sure whether you've got hold of it, or it's got hold of you, see if you can do without for six weeks. If you can't, then you've lost control.

I try to avoid caffeine all the time. That way, when I need it, I'm reasonably confident it'll work.

I don't think for one second that Stephen was mocking NASA; he actually saved it from the prior leading write-in: Xenu.

But if I read The Fantastic Article correctly, "Serenity" finished in 2nd place, and so Xenu was never in the lead.