He claims the light-sensitive pigment melanine plays a crucial role, but the article lacks technical detail. It focuses on the possibility such solar panels could be built very cheaply to solve the (third) world's energy needs. Although the hair has to be replaced every 6 months, it is obviously abundantly available.

The idea is intriguing, but can it work? I'm clueless and unconvinced. Can one of the local physics geek please give an assessment?

I disagree. The whole ship could be remote controlled by FTL subspace communication, which is available in that universe. But even if you accept the presence of a large number of meat-bodied crew, they wouldn't need to be housed in such an inefficient fashion, let alone to cross those unneccessary distances on foot.

Of course this makes no sense because Star Trek wasn't made with realism in mind. But that is also true of your reasoning about how it is "natural" there would be corridors.

All in all, the corridor is popular simply because it is a single, cheap, permanent set that can easily be turned into any corridor going from anywhere to anywhere on the ship. And that's all.

You know what? The Soviet invaders claimed to bring them exactly that: stability. And progress. And what they claimed was the most successful political system in the world. We call that attempt contemptible and foolhardy because we aren't Soviets or socialists, but to an Afghan, it was very much the same thing the US are attempting now. And the Afghans have rejected non-Afghan ideas of "stability" for over two millenia.

Alexander the Great claimed (and probably honestly believed) to bring peace, progress and prosperity. The Afghans would have none of it. The mongols brought the protection of their divine Khan. The Afghans would have none of it. They drove away the Turk kingdoms, the Arab kaliphates and sultanates and everything that came at them out of India. They humiliated the Red Army, the largest and most feared in the world. Even China, which annexed large parts of central Asia, knew better than to fuck with the Afghans. Now the US are making their attempt, and Afghans are simply chalking one up the list.

Trust me, if they were into buying any "stability", they wouldn't have been fighting this hard for over two thousand years.

It isn't just sense of direction. A good memory of maps certainly helps, as does a good ability of integrating several memorized maps with each other.

That's lame. I'm always directly "above" the center of every single planet, star or other spheroid body in the universe.

Of course I'm fairly far from away from most of these centers, but if Neil Armstrong could be "up there", I don't see why we all couldn't.

Success in school is highly correlated with success in many other areas using a host of different measures. Health, longevity, average income, you name it. Pretty much all of the success indicators are correlated to each other in some fashion. So even if they hadn't measured other forms of success, the current state of biography research would predict it to be there. But they did measure, and it was there.

Gaming journalism has long been dead by any traditional standard of "journalism". I worked in games nearly ten years ago, and even then, reviews were easily influenced by ad revenue, "exclusive" deals and such. Some magazines put on a show claiming they weren't like the others, but everyone knew that was a scam.

The game I worked on became "game of the month" in Germany's largest gaming magazine solely because we threw in a pile of merchandise they could use for a raffle. We didn't come up with the idea, the magazine did.

With this kind of conduct increasingly apparent even ten years ago, the only thing that surprises me about this is how this sham has been shambling on. But there are enough other branches of worthless journalism (i.e. men's and women's magazines which recycle the bulk of their material every two years), so go figure.

What tells you Wolfram isn't logging all searches and archiving them for three months? This would be enough to, say, make it dangerous to feature search results or screenshots in whatever Wolfram doesn't like, say in critical reviews. Unless there's some strict legislation/ruling that limits these perversions, I can easily see how this kind of argument might help intimidate people and blackmail them into license fees.

The Electric Sheep screen saver (awesome, BTW) auto-GPLs all images it produces. Has anyone thought about whether that is enforceable by law?

This is scary shit and requires attention.

True, but the most important benefit the first German archive got and that apparently helped convince the second is the captioning of images. They never had the staff to do that, so putting the stuff on the wiki is a smart move.

Those 250,000 are just a fraction of the 3 million that archive has - much of it on microfiche and hard to access. There is more of that coming.

That should tell you something. By and large, people get bashed for pissing other people off, and best practice for pissing people off is interfering with their lives. Atheists, agnostics etc. do not have holy rules they believe they have to bugger mankind with, except agreeable basics such as the Golden Rule. They get bashed less because they deserve less bashing - according to those who bash.

Or do you prefer to believe there is some web-wide troll conspiracy going on that limits or directs anyone bashing impulses?

Now will you explain how bashing is an attack on the first amendment, rather than the exercise thereof?