One of my favorite ideas lately is expanding upon minecraft to allow for bots.

I've thought for awhile that Minecraft would be a great sandbox for writing AI routines. I agree - there's lots of potential for supporting bots in minecraft.

1) Criminals or potential criminals. People not to be entrusted with information regarding important dangers the country faces.

2) Brave men and women who fight in wars and give their lives for their country.

1 and 2 are the same people, viewed at different angles for different purposes. I find it sad that people who are expected to give their lives for their country if need be are not deemed worthy of knowing more about the inner workings of their country. Instead they are spied upon and, under a magnifying glass, treated as insignificant. We should all have the right to understand the inner workings of our country and take part in shaping its security and its future.

If Musk waited around for everyone else to "get it" he'd probably need at least 2 lifetimes to accomplish his dreams. Jobs' style sounds like a good choice.

We can only talk about something for about 2 days here, and then container story gets buried no matter how important the topic.

I've thought of this as a problem as well. Slashdot also disables comments on a story after some time. One thought I had was the ability to post stories under a set of tags, and people could view all the stories under a set of tags and view all the comments under a set of tags. Hopefully the tags wouldn't dilute the conversation too much - I'm not sure it's a good idea, actually, but might spark someone's imagination.

My main use case is converting PDF -> EPUB. I haven't found the output the greatest, at least on my Kobo. Will have to check the new version out.

A video explaining plastic to oil conversion. I noticed in the video that all the plastics were perfectly clean. Recycle bins are a lot dirtier. How much water would have to be used in this process to clean the plastics? Can the poisonous gases generated be burned off safely? Interesting tech, anyway.

Procedural-generated space game - nice. I was thinking a couple days ago about whether there's a Tradewars 2002 type of game with procedurally generated warps, resources, etc. Yeah, retro. :)

It makes no sense that horse armour can't be crafted. I hope they change it. The new launcher is a step in the right direction - upgrades were a killer for bukkit servers since you couldn't play them after a client game (until the server also upgraded). Now at least you have a fairly straight-forward way to play on servers running older software. I wish horses could be summoned like on World of Warcraft. In their current form your horse is basically locked to a continent unless you want to build a massive bridge to get somewhere else. Horses also wander off too quickly. Can't even cut down a tree without having to go and chase it down. I also find the constant need to get XP to repair items is makes minecraft "grindy". I use my tools/weapons to gather resources and the XP I get is enough to keep them repaired, but more often not enough left to enchant new tools.

I was wondering the same thing. A large percentage of sites point at at least one of google-analytics.com, googleadservices.com, *.googleapis.com (and likely others). An addon like RequestPolicy for Firefox lets you limit connections to 3rd party websites (and can be educational as well).

You're right, it isn't an either/or proposition, and yet some people are clamoring for the NSA to be shut down (the "flying blind" choice). But imagine a continuum between "flying blind" and "sacrificing privacy of X thousand citizens" where greater intelligence gathering correlates with greater privacy invasion. Somewhere along the line there will be a point around which the majority of people say "yeah, this is the right balance", don't you think? Is it possible to avoid *any* collateral damage while retaining an effective level of intelligence?

I've come to think that any person or organization with an important enough purpose can get away with most things. Some examples: Even a convicted murderer can get off the hook if they help bust a giant racketeering ring; a failing multi-billion dollar company will get bailed out by the government if it is a big enough backbone for the country's economy. In this case, an agency as important to the security of the USA as the NSA will be allowed to continue operating as-is despite a relatively small number of infractions. If the choice was between "flying blind" and "having massive intelligence but sacrificing privacy of X thousand citizens" I think the choice is pretty clear.

To be taken seriously, he'd have to put Snowden in charge of this new transparency initiative. Obviously that's not going to happen.

If you can't smother the shitstorm in the media, you might as well get all your dirty work done in short order so this rash of privacy and human rights abuses can becomes last week's news as soon as possible.

Genius! Actually... I probably would watch that. :)

I'm actually not a Doctor Who fan (nothing against it... i'm too impatient to watch it) so I may be misunderstanding how "regeneration" works, but imagine for a second a Doctor who's been a man for over 10 generations who wakes up to realize he's now a woman! It might be interesting if they scripted it as if the woman still had the mind of the original male Doctor. "man realizes how some people treat women" angle. "man can't wait to be a man again" "man spends too long in the shower washing his privates" I dunno. :)

It still matters if you care where the species originated. For example, the difference between Europa (a) having originated life completely independently of Earth and (b) having been contaminated by life from earth and then evolved separately is very significant.