I always wonder how many of these failed space missions would have gone better if there was a little man or a robot or something that could crawl around on the probe and press the reset button or hit the solar panel unfolding motor with a hammer a few times to get it to finish opening up...

We need to start inventing more intelligent or easy to control microrobots that can do that grunt work that a person could do to keep the systems running good ;)

I'm moving to Korea soon and I'd love to be able to keep up with Family Guy and House and some of those shows, and if I could pay $9.99 a month to be able to get nice easy access to that, that would be awesome.

the question is then, can I? if my billing address is still in the USA, will it work, or will it block me due to the fact that i'll be connecting through a foreign ISP?

I didn't see anything on the initial post on hulu about that...

I for one am not really at all afraid of someone launching ballistic missiles at us. The fact that it hasn't happened yet gives me some comfort that chances are, humans aren't quite that suicidal as a whole.

What does scare me is some lone crazy group getting ahold of a nuke and sneaking it into a city. Missile defense systems aren't going to do anything to protect us from that.

You spend all the time and effort bringing them back, only to have them all die again because of a lack of biodiversity caused by them being based on one parent..

Cold war era paranoia is worth it's weight in gold. I'm sure every satellite launched back then with anything remotely resembling a secret on it, had a device perfectly capable of destroying it all!

It depends on where the previous poster lives... I grew up drinking well water, which was as cool and pure as you can get pretty much, so I find myself being fairly sensitive to what's in city water. Some places I've been, the city water tastes fine, other places the water has a distinct smell and taste, which if you're used to how water "should" taste, is really hard to miss.

For less than $10 I'd buy a lot more cd's than I do now. $9 to download an album, or $8-10 to get the better quality hard copy, it's a no-brainer.

With regards to the Japanese and Korean conglomerates; money doesn't care about history.

I was always under the impression that taking paracetamol and other similar drugs along with alcohol was rather unhealthy to the liver and whatnot...

Drinking lots of water is always good though!

I guess in the end I fail to see what the big deal is.

As long as Google isn't selling my financial data to unscrupulous persons and having me get billed all kinds of money for things I don't want, or creating a dossier on all the weird shit I've searched for and forwarding it to my boss, what's the big deal?

So what if some marketers know everything about what I like to buy or look for? How, in the end, does that really affect my life? Yes, it's a bit creepy sometimes, but it makes no impact on my quality of life.

What *does* freak me out is how my credit card company can ask me to confirm my height and weight when I talk to them on the phone, and when I ask them how the f**k they found out how much I weigh, they tell me that by law they're allowed to download all the information from the Department of Transit and so they know everything that's on my drivers license. THAT's the kind of stuff that I find extremely scary, and that's the kind of thing you can't do anything at all to prevent other than living in a shack in the mountains somewhere.

Wouldn't the real conspiracy be for the government to tell everyone about all the things they screw up, and keep all the successes on the down-low, so as to make everyone think that they simply are incapable of doing anything right?

The question then is, how exactly are you supposed to breathe? If you're out of flux with everything else, where's your air supply gonna come from, unless you wore some kind of rebreather too...

I've always wondered that in Star Trek episodes for example; a crew member gets sent into some slightly out of phase dimension but can still breathe. Where is all this out of phase oxygen coming from?!

I think what I love most about the LHC and whatnot is that, despite all the incredible and amazing science and technology and innovation and potential for learning behind it, what it really comes down to is just us banging rocks together and watching what happens, just like humans have been doing throughout history. It just happens that this time, the rocks are incredibly tiny and incredibly fast.

Kinda puts it all in perspective, in kind of a cool way, IMO.

From what I've gleaned from various Microsoft blogs, they DO release nightly builds, internally to all their own testers and employees.

That way, as far as I can tell, they get all the benefit of nightly builds, with absolutely zero of the downsides in terms of company image and dealing with buggy software in the wild.

I was under the impression that the whole point of a corporation IS that it is technically an individual, just a really big, rich one.

"The definition of a corporation is "An artificial person or legal entity created by or under the authority of the laws of a state" (Blacks Law Dictionary)""

So, tell me again why the corporation shouldn't get taxed as an individual too?