Indian independence, civil rights, women's suffrage, every ideological conflict resolved by the ballot box rather than the gun...

There is no way the US and Australian militaries don't know approximately where this plane is — as revealed by their ridiculously vague "refined satellite signals" news release. And its's unlikely they haven't known since day 1. It just takes this long for the military to ok the release of their precious info. And…

To find this movie scary, you basically have to have spent your entire childhood growing up in the city or dense suburbia. Anyone with any woods experience would just laugh at their bumbling about in a totally wide-open forest that looks like it's about 3 miles from the highway at most. It just doesn't look very…

First things first: we're not going to compare this to the French series Les Revenants.

Bloomberg was probably a couple years ahead of the curve on things like cigarettes and soda, but here too these are national (if not global) trends that he happened to get in on early. I've never seen any evidence suggesting that cigarette or soft drink policies would have gone significantly differently on the…

The sociological evidence suggests that NYC was really no different than many other cities in the US at the time. During the same time period, crime dropped in a bunch of cities simultaneously starting in the 90s, both in places that were doing broken-windows / stop-and-frisk policies, and places that were not. The…

60-65% of the young vote Democrat these days.

Ah, the rightwing brigades for justice. Always ready to crap all over any goodwill that doesn't further their anti-science, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-women, anti-youth agenda.

I am amused that you have a type (misspelling above) in the same paragraph ...

What I like about this photo is that we see lots of pictures of Obama smiling, but usually it's that slightly artificial politician smile (and I say this as Democrat) — chin up, eyes squinting, smile tight and wide. Here he actually looks like he's genuinely having fun for a change — face more relaxed, eyes wider,…

You always get more Huxley during times of peace and more Orwell during times of violence. 2000-2008 was pure Orwell — waterboarding, torturing and its newspeak definitions, Guantanamo, wars against enemies that we ourselves created that we have now always been at war with, infiltration of left-wing groups, etc. Now…

Even cooler would be if it projected a secondary screen of information that didn't actually block or shrink what you were already watching, was fully interactive using established interface technology, was internet connected, allowed you to play video games or use Facebook if you wanted, and kept your lap warm in the…

Wow — as someone who was calling for more heartfelt negative reviews on io9 just yesterday, this has gone beyond my wildest dreams. Thank you, CJA!

The problem with this argument — which otherwise seems fairly plausible — is von Neumann machines. Even in a couple hundred more years, it will be trivially easy to design robot spacecraft that self-reproduce. Who knows why someone would want to do such a thing, but for a civilization that lasts thousands or…

I wasn't imagining it was feasible now, just that it would be feasible in the near future when efficiency had substantially increased. Though I didn't realize your 2-gigawatt estimate was just during direct sunlight with no energy storage for night usage. On the other hand, even satisfying average non-peak energy use…

The US currently uses roughly 200 times that amount of power on average.

Not only is he a traitor for illegally revealing illegal activity, no one should be surprised at what he revealed so no one should care.

I agree, judging a whole genre is pretty silly. But I do think the article itself spends a lot of time about judgments of single books, for instance in its discussion of "Auggie March," and then spends a lot of time psychologizing those who have strong views:

Sorry — I didn't mean to suggest it was cut and dried, and I didn't mean to suggest you were opposed to YA novels. In fact, I was trying not to talk about you directly, but that's I guess I problem due to the generic/specific ambiguity of "you".

Why isn't it "wrong"? If the books are filled with cliches and encourage cliched thinking, that seems wrong. It's not a big deal compared to many more life-and-death matters, of course, but it's still wrong, just like teaching kids in a classroom to think dogmatically rather than critically is wrong.