1%ers have way cooler hobbies than I do.

It's far easier for astronomers to identify black holes by how nearby objects behave--especially by observing their orbits, and the gravitational lensing effects.

I suspect you're thinking about black hole evaporation? It's a real phenomenon, at least theoretically, but the energy radiated in this manner from a typically-sized black hole is way less than the background radiation of the universe, so the mass/energy of the singularity continues to grow.

Incidentally, the evaporation phenomenon is also why you don't have to worry about the LHC ever producing a black hole that destroys the earth--any black hole it could create would radiate to nothing almost instantly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine

...though the lack of variety in the materials at hand would hamper the effort a bit. still, fun to dream.

Not gonna comment on any of the views on issues you've offered, sorry. :D I prefer my conversations civilized, and I don't see that conversation going anywhere but down. I will, however, happily respond to your meta-politics.

To Canadians, yep, that's a sea change in what government does. To Americans, however, they'd wonder what the big deal was with denationalizing, not having two official languages, and restricting immigration- and my motivation for pointing that out is that I didn't figure Americans would translate "Canadian far right" with "the Democrats only wish they had our policies." I would point out, on the other hand, that since a sufficiently hefty number of people voted for the Cons in the last two elections to give 'em power, it's not necessarily that the party's views on public funding of abortion or selling Crown Corps or gun control are shocking (or objectionable) to people, it's more that we had one party in charge for a long, long time, with very few changes in their basic views, and this is the first time there's been a substantial difference in federal government in a while. In other words, different ain't necessarily bad. Or good, see below.

Heavens, I wouldn't accuse you of being NDP- you made no demands that /. be nationalized and its corporate parent's assets distributed to the poor. ;P I assume you're a Liberal, but don't care. I don't think it's reasonable to speculate on a politician's intentions, save for "they want more power" and "they want to use the power they have." I've heard a lot of paranoia from, say, CBC talking heads, or Layton, or Iggy, about how Harper is some radical-right Americanizing demon sent to destroy our soft-socialist utopia, and it really doesn't fly with me. I think he's a lying, slimy bastard, just like everyone else on the hill. He's right-wing for Canada, but not particularly so from a global or historical perspective, but that really only changes how he screws the people, not whether.

And, personally, I'm a political radical on just about any account, so the whole left-right thing seems kind of pointless to me. Nuke Parliament, it's the only way to be sure.

Yes, but they’d have to inject extra code because “virtually any chat room” doesn’t monitor your keystrokes like they’d require for this to work. Even if it says “typing” / “entered text”, that’s not enough.

Well, remember, they're not tracking a feature, "Is a pedophile," they would be tracking a feature "is an adult" and a feature "is in a child's chat typing suggestive messages".

Well, mainstream reporting on science is generally sensationalistic. Even "well respected" news sources tend to say to the researcher, "How far can you possibly imagine taking this in the future?" and then publishing the answer, without any qualification, as what's being done.

It's not hard to monitor typing into an edit box using JavaScript. The script could compute some kind of typing signature and then send that to the server. Copy-pasting all text is a very odd way of typing and could be flagged.

I doubt such a detection algorithm would be accurate for all people, so they should not start auto-suspending accounts based on this. But it would help if a human moderator gets some hints about which accounts to pay closer attention to, since manually monitoring everything is not feasible.

You guys need to stick to trying to make what people want now

With gas prices hovering around three bucks NOW, cheap transportation is what folks want now. Plus, this is a concept car; concept cars are supposed to be what people want now but can't have, or what people are likely to want in the future.

However, this paticular car doesn't seem practical, with only 40 km between charges (24 miles) and a top speed of 40 kph (24 mph). Drive one of these on a road with a 40 mph speed limit and you're likely to be pulled over for blocking traffic.

Give it a 45 mph top speed and 75 miles between charges, keep the cost of the vehicle low enough, and you have a winner. But this ain't it.

Seriously? Toyota -- the guys who ate your lunch in the marketplace -- can't even make a software-gas-pedal work correctly and you're trying to float an EV that navigates autonomously?

TFA said nothing like that; the best it will be able to do is park itself.

The GIMP is brought up because it's the flagship application of the Linux/free software/open source crowd.

GTK+ is (basically) the GIMP Toolkit. GNOME is built on GTK+ and was at one time the only totally free desktop environment because KDE was built on Qt, which wasn't free-libre.

In fact, what would be really weird is if there were a Photoshop thread in which the GIMP wasn't mentioned.

An alternative question would be: why is Photoshop compulsively mentioned whenever there's a new GIMP release?

actually, it is paste. the paste function is named after paste.

the most interesting theory i've heard regarding this is that you'll have a portal gun in episode 3.

the possibilities, they would be endless.