Ok, so I know he's fairly well known, but good god y'all Jack Vance is awesome and is underappreciated imo.

I also have to agree with those above who say Cordwainer Smith.

Dragons!!!

Aye, the buttery topin' in Tortuga be runnin' low, argh. Soon I'll only have me grog to put on me popcorn while watching a cam of the back'o some landlubber's seat! A pirate's life for me!

Yeah but when nibiru comes back around, we'll be up a planet and then who'll be laughing?

Um, you were looking for an example of a hydrogen explosion and you picked Fukushima?

The thing about producing H2 from water is there's nothing to ship. A power facility only needs a source of clean water, and some reclamation of that might be possible. Certainly running H2 around in pipes under pressure when there's water EVERYWHERE is unnecessary, or at least less efficient than deploying sufficient amounts of these reactors, or just transmitting power.

The Shoggoths wipes out the Elder Things

It was Adam and Eve not Adam and Nemo!

Your confusing the micro and macro views.

Your post can be reduction ad absurdum'd to "Well, our murder count for the year is low, so let's let this murderer go free".

From a marco view, I agree. 17 lives lost for 50 years of space exploration is not too bad. Comparing it with pioneering days is a bit apples and oranges, but overall I would say NASA is decidedly more risk-averse than the English Gov't was wrt their explorers in the 1500's.

From a micro view, i.e. viewing the Challenger disaster in a vacuum, it was the result of mismanagement and arrogance. It had avoidable errors and the mgmt mentality that led to this should be guarded against.

Newt's President of the Moon,
He carries a harpoon.
But there ain't no whales
so he tells tall tales
and sings his colonizin' tune

The problem with the RIAA and MPAA is that their terms aren't reasonable. These two organizations and their member orgs have been dragged kicking and screaming into the new millennium. Their failure to offer reasonably priced compelling legitimate options is what makes the piracy faction so large and so gleeful.

You know what kills piracy? Netflix and Spotify, not SOPA.

Whereas the number of chinese and european expats in the US is so small?

It's also seen as less powerful because it's more confusing (dynamically types and the wacky cross-browser implementations being the main sources of this in my experience). Some of that is also legacy leftover of javascript as a scripting language being conflated with "that script you use to do rollovers" in the ie-netscape days.

As you say, javascript as a language is plenty powerful, see what can be done in unity and flex for examples.

...so I get a mug?

Actually, scrolling on tablets is dead fucking simple and ridiculously intuitive.

What problem is Opera even fixing?