Why would anyone want the Kinect to control DVD playback?

I have the Kinect. I like it for some things. But I believe game developers need to spend much more time creating things for which the Kinect works well rather than trying to shoehorn it into existing games (including future versions, etc.).

But why don't you just get a modern Universal Remote? X-Box ought to be a standard option. Works fine for me.

Is this a case where corporate personhood is a good thing?

Does this mean what you should do is fire up a trust and have the trust purchase all the media? Then the trust lives on (and is ownership transfers or was likely already shared with your intended recipient(s)).

Or is that going to get you in trouble with your trust "sharing" its media with you?

Is this a troll? Do you actually believe it's reasonable to attempt to refute current scientific studies with 3rd-grade textbooks?

No matter what folk personally believe (or want to believe), does it not seem inappropriate simply to assume scientists specifically or in bulk are simply stupid? Is it not more productive to maintain an inquisitive approach and ask yourself what you might be lacking in your own understanding?

Now, to the actual point, your trite reference to elementary school understanding of the water cycle completely ignores all the relevant volumes. How much water is evaporating? How much water is raining/snowing? How much water is being pumped out of aquifers? How much water is draining down to replenish aquifers? How much water is being taken out of rivers for irrigation? How much water is sinking into the ground vs. escaping via run-off?

It's trivial to explain the water cycle in a simplistic sense. But it is incredibly foolhardy just to assume certain things are or will always be in balance (especially related to FRESH water). Your claim that increased rain is filling up aquifers can be straightforwardly disproved. They call this "fossil water" for a reason. Worldwide, we're exhausting groundwater (much) faster than it's being replenished. And increased precipitation due to increased evaporation isn't going to help if much of that extra rain is simply falling over the oceans - which is what the vast majority of modelling suggests will occur with increased warming. Some areas will get wetter. Many areas will endure droughts. And remember, heavy rain on parched ground just runs off.

There are many unsolved issues with regards to a Space Elevator, but lifting 36,000 km of cable isn't necessarily one of the most significant problems. Most projections or descriptions I've come across describe things such that we would manufacture and lower the cable from orbit. Now granted, this itself presents many problems since you would have to create all that infrastructure "up there" and then find/capture source material. But you also need to do that for the counterweight. You're certainly not going to lift THAT into space.

Nothing likely wrong about positing multiple types of dark matter...

But what I think is really bothering folk about the supposed contradiction here is why would one galaxy or galaxy cluster have one type and another galaxy or galaxy cluster have another? This in and of itself would seem to be a rather flagrant violation of the Mediocrity Principle.

It would seem more likely that both galaxies would have a blend, if you will.

Is there a time component here? Would dark matter be different in one epoch vs. another? Does it evolve or change over time? The Bullet Cluster is 150 million years back. This new set is a couple billion years back. On the face of it, that'd be just another violation of the Mediocrity Principle, just in time rather than space. But who knows...

Actually, oddly enough it seems to me that much of science fiction is actually limited to a one-dimensional view of the solar system, much less a 2D view. The reference to Pluto is a good case and point.

Everyone seems to think of the planets in such a fashion that they're strung together along a (long) straight road such that to travel "out" of the solar system from Earth you would have to pass along each planet in turn. Who's to say for any given year which planet (if any) you'll pass heading outward (opposite the sun) from Earth even while staying within the ecliptic plane.

One may retort that this usage is just shorthand for each planet's orbit. But the problem is deeper than that. For one example, consider Tony Daniel's Superluminal. The entire series is about an inter-planetary war. The "geography" of the solar system is intrinsic to the plot - which planet can attack which, etc. And it's all wrong for the year of 3017. The book describes a group heading towards Triton for an attack with half the group "continuing on" to Pluto. Trouble is, from the starting planet during that year Pluto and Neptune are in very different directions (almost opposite).

With regards to the warp drive, the ecliptic plane seems hugely relevant. For any inter-stellar travel, just plan things for one (or more) midpoint stop(s) such that your final leg has you heading relatively perpendicular to the ecliptic plane of the destination star system. Then pop out of warp slightly beyond the ecliptic plane (presumably near your destination planet) to dump the energy.

As light and vapid as a first post...

But would it really?

That is to say, is your scenario that downtime of the cloud would result in the loss of a multi-million dollar contract in any way shape or form realistic?

I am no fan of "the cloud" in this context. But is there some aspect of Office 365 (or is this now Office 347?) that would prevent people from making offline copies of their work? Wasn't the idea of the ability of making offline copies via Office 365 one of Micrsoft's earlier advantages over Google.

The cloud may make collaboration easier. The cloud may make presentations easier. But if I were your Customer and you were dumb enough not to have ANY offline backups to send me in lieu of an ongoing Microsoft outage, you'd lose my business for that demonstrated stupidity right there.

Bravo!

Well played, sir.

That CHARACTER patiently awaits us all...

There needs to be a "ON TOPIC" mod...

No.
That's not the circular part.
That part is relatively trivial. Do forgive trying to express this in ASCII...
Sum[from 1 to infinity]{3/(10^n)} is 0.3333...
This is just the basic definition of what that means.
3 * 0.3333...
= 3 * Sum[from 1 to infinity]{3/(10^n)}
= Sum[from 1 to infinity]{3*3/(10^n)}
= Sum[from 1 to infinity]{9/(10^n)}
= 0.9999...

Again this is pretty basic arithmetic, distributive property of multiplication if you want to be pedantic.

No, the circular part of the logic is starting with 1/3 = 0.333... to show you 1 = 0.999... Why in the world do you believe 1/3 = 0.333...? But this is why folk earlier suggested that if you had no issue with 1/3 = 0.333..., then you shouldn't have any issue with 1 = 0.999...

At any particular n, the sum is less than the fraction it represents. This the same issue for 1/3 as it is for 3/3 or 1.

Now, now...

Galactic suburbia isn't quite so bad. Nice and stable. Helps to keep those planetary orbits from changing too much or too quickly. I mean a good wallop a long time ago to create the moon is all well and good. But after a while you just want to settle down. We really don't to get pelted with comets and planetoids all that often.

Things are a lot tougher closer to the core. It's simply much to busy. Nearby stars bustling together. Everybody taking these whiplash commutes around the central black hole. Pesky neighboring stars who keep perturbing your Oort cloud sending debris down on you regularly. Many young stars just cannot handle it. Oh they seem successful; the get nice and big. But they just explode. And let me tell you, you just don't want to live where you could get shot up every few million years or so.

Isn't the text you copied EXACTLY what the GP said?

Are you interpreting the "Constitution" in "Constitution or Laws of any State" to mean the US Constitution? Wouldn't it be a much more straightforward interpretation that this is referring to state constitutions?

You seem to be suggesting this reads basically:

This [United States] Constitution and [laws and treaties] ... shall be the supreme law of the land ... no matter what the [United States] Constitution and any State law says.

The overall context and purpose of that sentence seems to make it patently clear that is rather "{Constitution or Laws} of any State".

The dark matter halo around our galaxy is theorized roughly as a large sphere, not just extra mass along the flattened wheel of the spiral. Look at the graphic here: http://startswithabang.com/?p=656

That's a lot of extra room. So much so that even when those researchers calculated that our solar system should have 300 times the dark matter density compared to the galactic dark matter halo, this only ends up being a very tiny fraction of the earth's mass in dark matter bound to our solar system. See: http://www.universetoday.com/15266/dark-matter-is-denser-in-the-solar-system/

So basically, it's going to be rather difficult to detect dark matter nearby.

You may jest.

But I seriously wonder if something like this may not be better overall.

This is along the same sort of thinking that IP-over-Carrier-Pigeon may actually have sufficient bandwidth for your needs as long as you are willing to accept the rather high latency.

While we're considering things that are 30-years out...

For the sake of discussion, let's presume the existence of a space elevator. Then we set up a constant chain of sending and receiving boxes with... well... your springs.

The "boxes" and "springs" are well open to interpretation. I imagine sufficiently advanced flywheels may be better than springs. But better still might be something chemical, nuclear or anti-matter. In essence these are just batteries of some kind or another. We send them up to our fancy sail and cable to get charged up. Then we bring them down and ship them wherever we may need them.

You see, the concept of a laser or microwave to beam down the energy seems problematic to say the least. Too wide a beam and too much energy loss. Too narrow a beam and you need to target something far from civilization. But too far from civilization means increased transmission loss. And this doesn't even begin to address the issue of country A constantly destroying country B's satellite lasers because they really don't like country A having the ability to toast country B.