"Park wherever you want, boys - it's already paid for!"

Happens all the time in the executive world; The Boss doesn't know WHEN he'll make it to the airport so his assistant books him on every flight.

My thesis adviser and his wife did much the same thing; book all of their travel at peak times, then take the bump and the free ticket / bonus miles / whatever and the free hotel room and fly out the next day. They flew mostly for free for the entire time I knew him.

NOOOO! NO NO NO NO NO NO. The MidWest is AWFUL. It's filled with rednecks, guns, churches, pickup trucks, and so many other horrible things. Much better if you stay on the coasts. MUCH BETTER. You can thank me later.

There's another twist to this. I once worked with a company that had developed a little sensor that would let you know if you'd left your infant in the back seat. They ultimately decided not to market it at all; the liability insurance required, should it ever fail, even once, dwarfed the modest profit it would have brought in. I understand LOTS of things don't make it to market, for that very reason. The number one cost in my aluminum ladder isn't aluminum, or transportation, or sales; it's liability insurance. For a damn ladder.

Yep. My gas vehicles go three hundred miles, require all of five minutes to "recharge," and "charging" stations are EVERYWHERE. Especially out here in Fly Over Land where people often put a hundred miles a day on their cars just to go to work and back, electrics are just science fiction. I think the nearest large city to me (the capital of the state) has three charging stations. Natural-gas-powered pickups, however, are thick upon the ground.

The knife-in-the-hand scene actually goes deeper than you think. "Pain is in the mind," right? The DA is also teaching his recruits that no matter what happens, the medics can patch you up afterwards, so don't worry about injury or pain.

There were only two battleship-on-battleship engagements in the Pacific, and neither Yamato nor Musashi were involved. However, Yamato did put its big guns on an escort carrier - the USS Gambier Bay, which sank shortly thereafter.

Sure, they reacted quickly but it should never have happened in the first place. The damage to the Lenovo brand is permanent. There are plenty of folks who won't by a Sony product of any kind, for similar reasons.

I worked for Radio Shack 'way back in the day, in college and grad school. They had a nice stock-matching program and it split three times while I was there. When I finally cashed out it payed for my first decent car. But my real claim to fame was to own the second TRS-80 Model I sold in my city. The district manager got the first one; I got the second. 4KB of RAM and it could (a) beat me at chess and (b) with the Eliza program converse convincingly with my girlfriend. She said that the computer understood her a lot better than I ever did!

What really killed nuclear power wasn't "The China Syndrome" or Greenpeace - it was that the price of fossil fuels didn't continue to increase as expected. That's unfortunate, as while I like inexpensive energy I also believe that we should make ALL of our electricity with nukes (or hydro) and save fossil fuels for applications where nothing else will do (e.g. aircraft). And here's a litmus test: if you're serious about global warming, you've pretty much got to be pro-nuke. No other technology - not solar, not wind, not whatever green scheme you dream up - can produce electricity on a large scale. Wanna save the planet? Push for nukes and plug-in electric cars.

"...do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying..." There is so much wrong with this sentence.

Robert J. Sawyer is apparently an idiot. Contact with a superior culture always goes badly. Any aliens with the ability to travel to Earth will be as far beyond our understanding as we are to a mound of termites. We'll be lucky to survive First Contact at all.

Wow, it's not often that you find a script that will not only crash every open tab in Firefox but also take down every other instance as well.

OK, this was SUPPOSED to be in the thread about our Glorious Overlords at the UN appointing an ambassador to the aliens. How it got attached to the Hawking Radiation thread is a complete mystery to me.