How about a ban on any design criticism at Gizmodo until they fix their comment system?

For those worrying about losing the friction drive when the wheels are wet, they could try lining the inside of the wheels with rare earth magnets and using spinning magnets in place of the spinning friction drivers. No idea whether it would work though...

I'm saddened to see how many people consider Starship Troopers not fascist these days, usually with no more argument than that stupid claim "if you think it's fascist, you missed the whole point of the book." No, I did not. I've taught the book a few times, and if nothing else, the reactions of students confirm the…

Anyone know what sort of MPG these get? Even with the springs, it's hard to believe all those mincing steps can be very efficient.

I would be just as dismayed if they resurrected Kubrick, fed him Hitchcock's moldering brains and Welles's desiccated heart, and let resultant zombi-genius direct. It doesn't matter whether it's Michael Bay or Aronofsky or whoever, remaking Videodrome is fantastically stupid, for about a thousand reasons. The only…

97 replies to this interesting post, many of them thoughtful and interesting in their own right ... and this is what Gawker's awesome new comment system decides we should see.

Does anyone know where I can get an extension that blocks the pointless "This"es that begin an ever-increasing percentage of Gizmodo headline these days?

You really can't prove a theory, only disprove it. In 10 years, this will be known as just one more particle that was predicted by the Standard Model and later discovered. There have been dozens, and while this one is a bit more important, it opens up no unanticipated avenues of discovery, and leads to nothing more…

Funny how first you get rid of the blog format, and then you change the inherently blog-like format of comments into something more like the atemporal, curated news format as well. This changes comments from a conversation among a community to a series of drive-by shouts. As with the last transition, mostly I pity…

I entirely agree about the questions of intent — that's exactly why I never use the term. And it's quite the same in real life: claiming that someone is arguing with you just to be a jerk inevitably leads the conversation into personal invective and unprovable claims about secret motivations. That doesn't mean it…

This essay seems to conflate "trollish" with "rude". "Troll" — at least in the olden-days (2010?) — had a very specific meaning: someone who was being intentionally disingenuous in order to stir discord. It's certainly bad to rudely accost strangers and explain in harsh terms how they're wrong, but that isn't (or…

If Apple's introduction of their own Maps app means that I'll be able to download a stand-alone Google Maps app with all the functionality of the Android version, then I'm all in favor of Apple Maps. Bring on the crippled Beta!

I suspect Apple's future is to replace the Pro with a Mini with a stack of Thunderbolt ports. Most peripherals would work fine, and though an external GPU would have somewhat less bandwidth and more latency over Thunderbolt, this is just in keeping with the move at Apple from Pro to Prosumer across the line.

While not all conservative SF is optimistic, much optimistic SF is conservative. Even lefty utopias tend to be hard-scrabble. As SF moved leftward with the new wave and all that came after it, it also got a lot more attentive to all the suffering that, even apart from SF and the future, you have to be pretty…

Seems to me the main challenge is oxygen deprivation. If that's all you want, there are many easier ways to deprive yourself of oxygen and risk a stroke without paying tens of thousands of dollars.

I just don't understand why TV writers/producers play it so "safe" with the procedural plots and the subplots that don't advance things. Is this something they are taught in TV-writing school, to make sure at least 80% of every episode will have no bearing on any future episodes? Why do network TV producers assume…

This headline is going to cause some of your more technically-minded readers to go bonkers.

Apart from regurgitating the obvious policy of Seamless and every other online ordering company, the original content of this article consists of the author asking a single delivery guy what he thinks. Pretty poor, even for Gizmodo.

Though on the other hand, as my wife pointed out, we never actually see Cersei enjoying her lover, and her and Renley's are both distinctly effeminate. So the "powerful woman seen having sex for fun with naked masculine man" does remain absent.

Hear hear!