I think you could add Donnie Darko to that list - he ends up getting back into bed, knowing that a jet engine is about to fall on him and kill him, in order to pinch off an alternate timeline that is consuming the universe of the normal timeline.

That was mind-blowingly cool.

I had the iPaq 3650 (the original, silver, curved bottom one), and I also had two sleeves for it that I bought, so it wasn't just for enterprise customers :-)

In some countries - including Saudi Arabia - you do not have the right to "become a Mormon", or any other religion. If you are Muslim, and attempt to convert to another religion, you can literally be put to death for it. Look up the Saudi Arabian penalty for apostasy. It's death. Just recently, they extradited a…

So.... you're saying that if in some country, homicidal maniacs hold mass executions of 7-year old children every year, and enforce discipline by using explosive neck-collars on every person in the country except for the ruler and his family (who hold the controls that detonate every one else's neck collars, and…

As Fauxcused said, multiple independent analyses of Wikipedia find it to be comparable to the Encyclopedia Britannica in the number of errors per article (in both cases, low). And Wikipedia articles themselves are sourced, with the sources linked and listed at the bottom of the article.

No, I'm afraid you must have mis-read my comment, or projected some of your own assumptions onto me, since I certainly did not (and never have) assumed that we're at the endpoint of evolution, or engaged in anthropomorphism. I was pointing out what seems like a rather uncomplicated concept: that the Fermi paradox…

I don't need you to tell me how large the universe is, I grew up watching Carl Sagan's COSMOS show, and studying physics and engineering (in which I eventually got my undergraduate degree). You, perhaps, should keep in mind that the universe is nearly 14 billion years old, and our own galaxy has been around for a…

People don't generally choose their religion (they're born into it, and very few ever change), and they don't choose their ethnicity. And while it's true that not all Republicans are stupid, obviously, making a snarky remark that Republicans tend to seem more stupid is not the same as saying that "all black people…

I'm not really clear (at least from this blog post) how putting a supercomputer on the moon would help out much with the growing data traffic from interplanetary probes... I mean, maybe putting a big radio-telescope/dish on the moon along with enough storage to let it buffer incoming transmissions (in order to…

Still beats the crap out of fake money. Try getting a new TV with some Monopoly money, for instance.

You're assuming some limited span of time during which a civilization exists, and you also seem to have the implicit assumption that their searches would have only started recently. Even assuming that technological civilizations are relatively rare, just one civilization that had FTL capability one one billion years…

"Imagine dolphin philosophers, bonobo therapists, raven playwrights and poets," he says.

I'd really like to believe this is possible.... and hate to rain on a fine parade, but...

Except for the 6.68 billion people who don't live in the United States... (yes, I know, some other countries also have "carrier subsidies", and not every person will buy an iPhone, etc, *but*, most people in the world are on GSM networks, and in many, many places it's common to just buy a phone and then insert your…

Maybe somebody should create a Kickstarter project to take the (now open-source?) WebOS and get a version that works fluidly on hardware like the One S, or Galaxy SIII or something.... there seem to be a lot of people who love (or loved) their Pre. Or maybe the project would be to design new hardware for it, and…

The HTC Rhyme doesn't look too horrible, although it's not immediately obvious what makes it better than the original (HTC built) Nexus One, which was a great phone at the time (imo). I bit the bullet and bought a HTC One S when I moved back here (to the U.S.) in May, and I've learned to adjust to the larger size,…

Malkevian - the theory of evolution does not say anything about the big bang, or where life comes from originally. Evolution just explains how the forms of life on Earth changed over time - and the theory has been essentially proven to the extent that any modern theory can be. There is far more evidence for…

As it turns out, that is not the case. The theory of evolution does not in any way cover how life began, and the theory does not rely on anything that cannot be proven. In fact, scientists have proven each of the underlying pieces on which evolutionary theory rests.

Except, of course, that's not what the theory of evolution posits at all. There is nothing in evolution anywhere about "life gradually appearing" at all. You're thinking of the theory of abiogenesis, not evolution. Which, of course, you would know if you ever bothered to read an actual science book that explains…