Building a 4mm thick sphere of 100% efficient solar collectors at an earth's radius around the sun seems like a lofty goal within 1400 years. The only assumption is that the laws of thermodynamics don't change. That is the only assumption made that would make any difference.

What we REALLY need are light bulbs that understand the binary language of moisture vaporators.

Porn has sound?!!

What about this "Apple Wheel" thingy? Sounds like a terribly interesting project to me!

"Jay Maisel is a hack." No kidding. It's just a picture of Miles Davis playing a trumpet, the only thing special about it is that he got lucky and it got used for the cover of a very famous album. No one went out and bought Kind of Blue because of the awesome cover art.

Two things - First, they never showed the system being used with more than one large display controller. They show it being used in conjunction with normal wiimotes. It's unclear whether more than one is supported. Second, the controller is dumb, and simply streams the display that is generated by the console, so it doesn't need expensive processing power or storage.

I don't understand how you can claim that "the 'fair' tax misses a lot, and is exceptionally regressive," when your very next sentence indicates that you don't know anything about it at all. The answer to all your questions is "yes," btw.

I don't necessarily think I'm getting screwed over. Honestly, I'm pretty sure there's nearly as good of a chance that I'm paying less than I should than that I'm paying more than I should. But I put as little effort into doing my taxes as possible, and if there's something that's not obvious, I just guess. I used to spend weeks organizing documents, reading all the relevant publications, etc. Then I realized that it's not really my job and I have better things to do.

I really don't care if it really is 50%. The problem is that the US tax code is incomprehensible and expensive. It's over 70,000 pages (http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2010/03/growing-complexity-of-us-federal-tax.html). I believe the FairTax is under 150, but I'll be generous and say that 500 pages would be reasonable. That's 69,500 pages of fluff, special cases, loopholes, and various other ways for people and corporations to avoid paying what they would otherwise have to pay. Not surprisingly, the costs to enforce this tax code are astronomical, as are the costs to businesses and individuals to comply with it.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/1281.html

See the 3rd question from the bottom "Since business purchases are not taxable, how does the FairTax keep individuals from pretending to have a business so they can buy things tax free?" http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_faq_answers

What are you looking at? You're laborers. You should be laboring. That's what you get for not having an education.

Brain and brain! What is brain!

Brain and brain! What is brain!

The iPhone gaming craze is a fad. How many silly games are there in the app store? 50k? more? And how many are actually worth playing? Maybe a couple of dozen? People say the Wii sucks because of all the shovelware, multiply that by 1000x and you've got the cell-phone game market. I predict the death knoll of cell-phone gaming within 5 years.

I've always wanted a decent racing game for the Wii as well, and I bought F1 2009, but the lack of analog throttle and brakes made the whole game pointless to me. No one has ever produced a real wheel/pedal set for the Wii, so you have to simulate throttle input by tapping the accelerator at varying rates. On the other hand, I probably play Mario Kart online 12 hours a week. Honestly, racing video games have about as much in common with real world racing as the COD type games do with actually going to war, so the items and video-game physics don't bother me a bit, because it's just addicting and fun.