A family-member bought eclipse glasses for the extended family on Amazon. She bought it from this 100% legit listing: https://www.amazon.com/Soluna-.... When we started seeing the news stories about fake eclipse glasses, we went back to the site and checked the listing, which said they were CE and ISO certified for eclipse viewing. The glasses had the ISO certification printed on them as well.

So we went and viewed the eclipse. I probably only looked at the sun through the glasses 30-60 seconds total, but my kids may have spend longer looking. The next day, I noticed that my vision was blurrier. Since there are several things that historically can impact my vision, I decided to see if it improved in a few days. When it didn't, I double-checked the glasses. That's when I saw the reviews and Q&A on the listing talking about the fakes, and sure enough, the ones we received were fakes from China. We did not receive any email from Amazon

Comparing them to a real certified pair, the fakes let through more light, though not enough to cause me to squint. The fakes don't have that metallic sheen the real ones do, and I wonder if that's the infrared/UV shielding. I went to the eye doctor and they found no signs of solar retinopathy, though admitting that the signs can take a few weeks to show up. I think my kids are too little to accurately report slight vision changes, but the other 2 people who used the fakes didn't seem to have any issues.

What is interesting here in terms of the lawsuit is that on Amazon, even if you are reading details about a legitimate product and looking at a picture of the real product, there's no telling if what you're going to get in the mail is actually that product. In fact, unless you're looking for it, you rarely even know what seller is being automatically chosen when you add something to your cart.

I'd like to see this poll redone with these options:

* Yes, and I read the full memo
* Yes, but I didn't read the memo
* No, and I read the full memo
* No, but I didn't read the memo

This sounds great to me as a buyer. But consider:

1) Company A buys tons of products from a competitor
2) Company A returns them all at competitor's expense
3) Bye-bye competitor

In the study the people read for four hours before sleeping. I love reading as much as anybody, but is this a realistic scenario? I'd be more interested to see the sleep disruption from 30 minutes to an hour of reading on light-emitting screens before sleeping.

Who wants jobs?

Seriously, who wants to commute 5 days a week and work 8+ hours a day doing something they'd rather not?

Let AI take all the jobs it can. As it does so, shorten the work week, provide more benefits to the people, and before long we're living in a utopia where more time is ours to work on our hobbies and spend time with our families and friends. Of course, we'd have to prevent private industry from owning all the robots and AI, less they become the de facto new government.

My thoughts on this is that an arrangement could be made where private industry has to pay a monthly fee to the government - what amounts to a small salary - which goes towards benefits/income to the masses. Private industry gets work done through AI and robots at less than what it would cost to employ someone, and that money goes to the benefit of the people.

Of course, it's more complicated than that, and that's just one possible scenario that could work. But the point is - the goal isn't more jobs, but a better life.

So, installing malicious software means your information can be accessed? SHOCKING.

Man, here I was hoping helm's deep would reinvigorate LOTRO. And yes, I had even pre-ordered it.

Well, we're talking types who think they absolutely need a loaded gun everywhere they might be in the house, including racks by the bed and whatnot. And that their life WILL depend on it any day now, when squads of evil government black muslim communist ninjas will burst into their home to confiscate their bible and replace their medicare with an evil socialized one. And their kids who think that playing cops and robbers with daddy's gun, presumbaly in between eating paint chips and being homeschooled in how many dinosaurs fit on Noah's arc, is a good idea.

I dunno, it certainly is tragic, but their noble sacrifice to improve the species' gene pool will be remembered.

Actually, you probably don't want an appliance powered by a black hole, because those convert matter into energy via Hawking radiation and the energy output actually ramps UP as the size decreases. A very small black hole, say, 1 kg in weight (a little over 2 pounds) would convert itself into energy in about 84 attoseconds and release the same energy as a 21 megaton nuke or so.

You'd need a pretty big one for it to be stable, and I doubt you really want a vacuum cleaner weighing as much as the Everest :p

On the other hand, if we ever tame one, it would make an awesome source of energy for something that needs a lot more energy. Such as a continent. Or a warp-capable ship. Hmm, the Romulans were up to something.

Of course, it would still be a Tamagochi that blows up with the fury of a supernova if you forget to "feed" it, but, hey, it's all good as long as we call it a warp core breach. Right?

Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned Romulan singularity warp cores though... I hear the Tal'Shiar are nastier than the NSA and CIA put together ;)

True story, at some point in the past I had to work on a company's internal application for data entry. Well, it was a lot of data and, as requested by the PHBs, pretty much half the fields were needlessly mandatory. (Which brings us of the fear of working for incompetent people;))

Most of them were pretty much impossible to validate too, because they were stuff like city or street names, and even in telephone numbers people tend to use letters. So the only real restrictions were field lengths and that they're mandatory.

So then comes the request to basically make reports and searches on that data.

And I kid you not, half the records had stuff like "n.a.", "I don't know", "no idea", etc in at least one of those fields.

And these were internal users, not some 6 year old over the internet.

Well, duh, they'll just run an electroplasma manifold between it and the warp core ;)

Why not spend that time trying to produce a replicator?

Or am I to expect a "Replicating food is killing farmers, and it's illegal!" response?

There was news recently that NASA _is_ paying someone to develop a 3d printer that prints food, for their spaceships. Which I suppose is as close as we can get to a replicator with the tech level we have for now.

Err, no. Both kinds were called deflector shields, in the canon. See: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Deflector_shield

The lower level one emitted by the navigationa deflector (a.k.a., deflector dish) dish was nothing else than a lower intensity force field, but still a deflector shield. (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Navigational_deflector)

Well, sorta. If you do enough technobabble and you're willing to count close enough as a hit, then getting it right isn't that hard.

Point in case, in ST's case the Navigational Deflector (emitted by the deflector dish) was actually supposed to protect against space debris, micro-meteorites, etc. (Still a good idea, mind you, because when you're moving even close enough to the speed of light, a single grain of sand packs more energy than a broadside from a 20'th century battleship.)

Dealing with particles via magnetic field was actually the job of the Bussard Collectors (you know, those red glowing things at the front of the nacelles), a.k.a., ramscoops. Which actually didn't deflect it, but collected all that mostly hydrogen in the ship's path.

So, yeah, if you make a complete hash of which did what, and how, and still call it a ST deflector shield, yeah, you can count it as a hit.

But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." :p

(And yes, I'm a huge ST and SW nerd. I know, I know, I'll go not get laid now.;)

Well, yes, but my experience is that even if I've never screamed at an admin, nor informed them of their mothers' extramarital activities, the majority seem to make it their duty to keep me from doing my job anyway.

In fact, for some (I'm looking at the fucktard duo administering the MQ server,) the nicer you are and more willing to explain why you need a queue for the application already approved by anyone who had a legitimate say, the more they'll abuse that and your time by MAKING you have to explain for weeks or get nothing from them. The guys who do tell them to STFU and do their own job, now those get what they asked for.

Now I have sympathy for admins, and understand that other people shit on their day. But WTH does it solve to in turn have them shit on MY day and my coworkers' day?

If X bullied admin Y, and Y bullies innocent bystander Z in turn, what did it solve, other than make an extra person unhappy? And how does the former even excuse the latter, anyway? Much less make it right. Two wrongs don't make a right.