... with a few fireworks to let folks know you've arrived?

Anyway, it's not clear whether they looked at a pure Alcubierre warp, an Alcubierre-Broek thin-bubble warp, NASA's latest, or what.

In a 2006 paper by a whole laundry list of authors (Hart, Held, Hoiland, Jenks, Loup, Martins, Nyman, Pertierra, Santos, Shore, Sims, Stabno and Teage), "On the Problems of Hazardous Matter and Radiation at Faster than Light Speeds in the Warp Drive Space-time" (which begins with the monumentous understatement: "A warp driven vehicle travelling at a speed faster than light may collide with objects in front of the ship, which would be hazardous to the ship and its crew") had this to say: "the gravitational gradients in Broek regions will disrupt hazardous objects in the ship's neighborhood. This is a property of Broek space-time, any natural object will be disrupted and deflected" (bold added)

Certainly worth looking into further, but it's still too early to say exactly what the properties of an actual warp field will be.

LBJ made a grave mistake in Vietnam.

Actually the mistake was in DC. He kept on JFK's SecDef, Robert McNamara, and listened to him. That war started under JFK.

Exactly this. Canada has -- or had, back when I was living there -- something called a 'declined vote'. You showed up at the polling place, then formally declined to vote. They had to record that, it was roughly like voting for 'none of the above'; if enough people did it, they'd have to hold that particular election over again. (Not that that ever happened in real life, alas.)

Here, third parties have little enough chance to win or even seriously tilt the election (except when there's a major random 3rd party candidate for president). If you'd really rather vote 'none of the above', pick some 3rd party and vote for them. It sends more of a message than just not showing up.

You may have a right to complain if you're too apathetic to show up to vote -- but I have a right to ignore you.

Close. Plenty of people pay their taxes, whether they want to or not.

The problem is that politicians would then rather spend those taxes on something new and shiny than on maintaining the existing infrastructure. New and shiny gets votes, repair jobs don't.

Not knowing chemistry can kill you. (Like, you mix chlorine bleach and drain cleaner and die from chlorine fumes -- among many other scenarios.)

Not knowing public speaking, or music, or political science, or creative writing, or HTML is far less likely to be fatal. Moreover, it's a lot easier to teach yourself the latter than the former, at least without getting put on some DHS watch list (although political science and public speaking might be iffy there too). School chem labs generally beat what you can do at home.

Mind, my dad gave me my first chemistry set for my seventh birthday.

Shooting to wound is enough to get you killed -- as any combat shooting instructor will tell you.

If you're actually in such a situation, you're pumped so full of adrenaline it's all you can do to shoot straight at all (shakes); your best bet is to aim for the center of mass and hope you hit something that will put the guy down so that he can't return fire/stab you/bludgeon you to death with a shovel. (The latter is a risk if you're using too small a caliber -- real incident.)

Or perhaps you believed all those westerns where the good guy can shoot the villain's gun out of his hand?

This reminds me of the old remark about Unix (and Linux) being very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.

The nice thing about not being beholden to commercial interests -- as open source isn't -- is that it doesn't have to compromise to make the lowest common denominator happy.

Ubuntu is hardly the only distro out there.

(Personally I don't give much of a rat's ass about computer games; when it comes down it they're all about playing against a programmer who is actually no longer playing, and a random number generator. Cheap thrills. For my other 3D needs I have a Radeon card.)

I've been writing software for nearly 20 years and this has never been the case anywhere I've worked.

Then I can only conclude you've been working in the shrinkwrap software industry, or whatever they're calling it this week. In businesses where software is part of the infrastructure rather than the sole product, then yes, specifications are very real, and tend to be stable. Although come to think of it, when I was in the software biz, we took specs pretty seriously too. Mind, we weren't doing phone apps or mass-market software-in-a-box, we were doing enterprise level systems where you weren't worth talking to unless you were thinking of spending at least a half-million on the product.

(As for complete well, I could probably write a book on "debugging the spec". But debugging the spec means a lot of time not spent on debugging the program.)

To do things like buy Apple at $2 and get in on some IPOs. Gotta pay for the time machine somehow.

And then it gets interesting...

Apple INVENTED Swipe to Unlock (or at least patented it first) it was a big deal when it first came out..

Funny, I've had this gizmo on my garden gate that I swipe to unlock. It's been there for decades.

Patented != invented, as any idiot who has been paying attention to what the PTO has been selling* would know.

*The PTO finances itself with fees, not tax money. It collects more when it issues a patent than when it doesn't. There's no money-back guarantee that the patent will stand up in court -- but usually it doesn't have to.

To defeat the squirrels, just reinforce the layer of bug screen (whether fiber or metal) with a layer of chicken wire. Then reinforce that with a layer of chain-link fencing if you're worried about the zombie apocalypse.

Always nice to see another Niven fan.

Anybody know a way to speed up the rotation of a planet?

Slam a (largish) moon into it at a shallow angle.

Mind, that tends to melt the surface of the planet, so you'll need to leave it for a few hundred thousand years to cool off.

Less dramatic is to put one or more dense moons in low orbit around the planet and let tidal drag do the work. That still tends to heat up the surface, though, so expect volcanoes. (See Jupiter's moon Io, for example.)

Moving said moons is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)

You can't fool Mother Nature with parlor tricks.

You can't fool Mother Nature at all. Anything you can do, she permitted. Which is not at all to say that we know all that she permits. Saying causality is violated merely because some information leaked beyond its light cone is like saying you're predicting the future because you expect thunder some seconds after seeing a lightning flash.

The weird thing is, if the supernova 1987a observation (not experiment!) implies that neutrinos move at lightspeed, then they can't have mass. Massy neutrinos would be retarded by the gravitational field of the star going supernova to the extent that they should have arrived considerably later.

(I forget the number -- worked it out once -- but long enough that it's unlikely anyone would have correlated the simultaneous detection of bursts at several neutrino observatories with the 1987a event. Hell, if the arrival time didn't so closely coincide with the light pulse from 1987a, they could have been from an earlier supernova -- but the coincidence is too bizarre.)

I suppose it's possible that they only have mass in some of their oscillation states, not all of them. Which leads to a whole 'nother crop of interesting questions.