I'd like to volunteer to spend a month in space - purely for scientific purposes, you understand.

The secret to a long life is actually very simple: Keep Breathing. That's all there is to it!

Of course Canada is a state; they just think they're a country. It's kinda cute, actually - like when little kids play grown-up. Just don't try to tell them they're not really a country, or they'll get all upset about it.

No one really wants a free market; everyone wants to "level the playing field" - in a direction that completely coincidentally benefits them at the expense of others.

That's not to say that a free market is bad, just that fox is no more and no less hypocritical than most other companies.

Yes, getting 100+ miles high is the easy part - getting that high with 17,000 MPH of sideways velocity is where it gets tricky. Without that much sideways velocity, you just fall back down.

Yes, those greedy bastards - providing money to startups who otherwise might never get off the ground. I hate people like that!

P.S. The hip term is "vulture capitalists" - if you're going to be snarky, at least do it right.

Phones? You had phones? Why, back in my day, we had to yell really loud!

(now get off my lawn!)

Yes, that was my first thought - extending my mouse's lifespan would be great, because I hate trying to find another one when the buttons stop working or the wheel stutters.

But NOOOOO, it's not anything useful like that - just some crap about making people live forever.

Wow... yes, that's pointless.

Excel has certain settings (e.g. selected page, column widths, etc) that are saved with the document, but which do not cause the dirty bit to be set when they are changed. This way you can open a spreadsheet and look around, but it doesn't prompt you to save unless you change something "important". It seems like "last printed date" should be treated similarly.

True, modern radio buttons don't have the same tactile feel as old-fashioned ones do - but computer "radio buttons" have never had that tactile feel, so in that sense they're actually more like modern radio buttons than they were like old-fashioned ones. The analogy is getting more accurate, not less.

And yes, I remember the partial-press phenomenon - but I always thought of that as a harmless "bug" due to the mechanical nature of the mechanism, not a "feature" to be emulated. Certainly computer "radio buttons" have never exhibited that sort of behavior.

Instinctively saving (which I tend to do about every other sentence) without changing the name first has the same effect - I finally learned (after screwing up WAY too many times) to ALWAYS change the name FIRST ("save as..."), and THEN make the changes and save again. That usage pattern is now burned into my brain, to the point that I get nervous when I see someone else modifying a template without doing a "save as" first!

What I don't understand is why word thinks that printing a document constitutes some sort of change, and it asks me to save (even if the doc is in my "temporary internet files" folder!)

OK, I get that printing might (might!) adjust the pagination or whatever, but surely any moron can see that any such changes are changes it made on my behalf, not changes I actually made! Yet year after year this bug remains...

But it doesn't have to be mechanical buttons - I've got a modern electronic radio, but when I press one of the presets, it switches to that station and simultaneously switches away from whatever station I was previously listening to.

For contrast, imagine if they were "checkboxes" instead of "radio buttons" - pressing one would result in listening to two stations at once, and then you'd have to go back and de-select the previous station. Only a geek could rationalize a UI like that: "But it's better that way: what if you want to listen to two stations at once? Radio buttons inhibit your freedom!")

I think radio buttons are a useful analogy, though perhaps there are better names out there - maybe something like "channels", but that focuses on one particular application of the control, rather than the functionality of the control itself.

The warning doesn't bother me - I rent from netflix, use DvdShrink to rip the disc (movie only) to an ISO file, then send the disk back. I literally never see the screens they've already got telling me not to do what I'm doing; adding more (that I also won't see) doesn't change the situation.

Who's being a dick now? Of course you can't own a person - we settled that about 150 years ago (at least in the US; YMMV). If the darpa clones WANT to join the army, they're entitled to do so same as anyone else; if not, they can't be forced into it any more than anyone else. If you start with the common-sense premise that the rights and responsibilities of a person arise because of their personhood, and are independent of how they came to be a person, it all pretty much sorts itself out.

Perhaps there are as many as three separate issues:
- are babies whose genes come from one parent legally different from babies whose genes come from two parents? I can't think of any reason they would be.
- are babies who develop outside of wombs legally different from babies who develop inside wombs? Again, I can't think of any reason they would be.
- are babies born of surrogate mothers who were paid by a corporation legally different from babies born of surrogate mothers paid by an individual? I still can't think of a good reason why they would be different.
Plus of course there are many possible combinations, but even if you mix all 3 (a corporation pays for a single person's DNA to be cloned into a human and somehow has the fetus develop without the aid of a womb) I still can't see how the legal system could or should allow the corporation to "own" the person (or kill them, or whatever). Once the person reaches adulthood they're no different than anyone else; the only thing even slightly tricky is the first 18 years.

Yes, if the company somehow ditches responsibility for the person's upbringing the expense would fall on society at large - but that already happens all the time (via orphanages, adoptions, etc) and given the likely expense of the cloning process I can't see there being a significant additional burden to society.

As for being physically normal, random birth defects do and probably always will occur, but if it can be shown that the company's actions (or inactions) were negligent, I'd expect the system to treat the company much like it does a pregnant woman who smokes, drinks, does other drugs, etc (I'll admit I don't actually know how high the bar is, or what happens to the parents who exceed the threshold). Companies could go out of business, but then again mothers who smoke and drink and whatnot die and somehow we muddle through.