This week's hottest star is a place called, "Umph!" in the old Andromeda district It has everything from quasars, pulsars, and holy men playing pinochle in a kiddie pool!

Rest in peace, Mr. Nimoy. Mr. Spock entertained and inspired me as far back as I can remember, and that's probably more than anyone else has done for me consistently. You will truly be missed.

Quit pointing out cool planets. I wanna GO there!

My cancer got AIDS-infected Ebola. Ebolaids. What are the odds? At the very least, up-vote me for the grammatically-correct hyphenation.

Content doesn't matter in today's blahgspheres, only noise - and boy o, look at them comments!

He didn't say he was in a cubicle.

First off, I'm sure that this will get marked as flame bait, because it's easier to rate than to reply. The point isn't really whether IE is too integrated with the OS or not - so what if it is? Personally, I hate IE, *but* a lot of Apple's success is attributable to the tight integration of all its apps with the OS, while *nix distros generally suffer from having too little integration. If MS didn't have such a lion's share of the market, this would not be any more of an issue that it is with Apple. The reason it's an issue is because we've forgotten sportsmanship. If you're losing in a game, you don't (or shouldn't) cry UNFAIR! Instead, you find a way to win. If people think that a crappy browser being too is too integrated into a mediocre OS is unfair, then WRITE AN OS THAT PEOPLE WANT - after all, it's not like the bar is set that high with Windows. It's just too easy to blame failure (in this case, failure to gain a majority market share) on unfair play. Unfortunately, those who spend their time pointing out why they can't win will never do so.

Exactly - When all is said and done, it's an OS. What's the real benefit of Vista/7 over XP? There's actually very, very little. It's the applications that really matter, and there are very few that are "Vista Only" People get side-tracked (MS and Apple fans alike) by how pretty their OS is or can be, when it's really just an OS. Why pay more money for something that runs your same apps the same way, only slower? We've become a culture of upgraders - upgrading for no other reason than to just "feel" that we have the latest stuff. After all, think back to the last 5 software upgrades you did - did you do them "because it was time", or because you had an actual need that was affecting you?

Depends on whether she can be made to keep quite or not, I suppose. Erm.... the laser that is.

This isn't anything that every science journal hasn't always done. Look at New Scientist, Scientific America, etc. - they all use science fiction-ish headlines to grab readers' attention. Read the article and forget the title, I say. Otherwise, your cynicism might keep you from some good information. And if a catchy, sensationalized title makes more people read an article like this, should we be complaining?

Am I the only one who got a little turned on by the phrase "everyone's mother tongues" ?