For one reason or another, the cases you describe can be considered rational fears. If the first one feared a wading pool, or the second one feared a snakeskin patterned tie these we qualify as phobias because there is a clear irrational aspect to the fears.

I absolutely *loved* these stories as a kid. I could not get enough of them. I was never frightened by them, I always had too much perverse pleasure in reading the twisted stories and seeing the eerie drawings. It makes me wonder how much these books shaped me growing up, because to this day, Halloween is my favorite…

Thank you for posting this, you've shared several of my thoughts. I agree that they could do better, but they really don't strike me as even remotely as delusional as BlockBuster.

Huh, and I was expecting all of the comments to mention Nyan Cat. I'm impressed that this is not the case.

It has meaning to her.

Comparing the inside of a star to the surface of a planet seems like a dubious way to start off your argument. I think expecting anything to survive inside an active nuclear reaction is unreasonable, and that's not considering temperature at all. So no, I do not believe that there is life inside a star, but I will…

You could just look at it from a greater distance. I'm just sayin'.

I'm a firm believer that every planet has some form of life on it. What I don't believe is that we know what we are looking for at this point. Our entire understanding of biology is limited to one planet and so far we keep looking for something that matches our current understanding. This is not an objective method. I…

Savvy torrent hunters have found good sources and go to them directly, rather than digging through several versions of a single movie.

Digital distribution is a mixed bag for me. I love it in terms of acquiring music with one caveat: I always back it up. If I download an album in its entirety I burn a copy of it immediately. If I puy a handle ful of singles, I'll put all of them on one disc. Sometimes I'll also send them to some cloud service,…

I'm a fan of horror movies in general. The gore trend that american films are taking in this genre lately doesn't grab me, I'm more a fan of the creeping, cerebral horror that affects your emotions and doesn't just go for shock value. I've really enjoyed the run of asian horror movies that have been coming over to the…

I have 26 friends on Facebook. I think that's a good number.

Maybe you could mention that this video is NSFW?

Remember folks, protesting an outdated and biased business model is evil, charging people a high premium for non-essential goods is moral, and any disagreement with these statements is an affirmation of guilt.

I only recently got to play Portal 2(at all) from start to finish. When I got to use the white gel, I had fun with it. Yeah, there were clearly parts where the line of site was so specifically restricted that it's intended use was obvious, but the times where it wasn't immediately clear were the most fun. "COVER ALL…

As always the intent behind an action is at least as important as the action itself. My friend's daughter is an over-achiever. She works hard in her high school; she's in honor classes and in marching band. She's frequently kept busy from the early morning until the late hours of the night just doing school…

What grade are you talking about? I've had a number of classes that required 3 or 4 textbooks for a one-semester, 3 credit hour class. 4 max? That would have been nice.

Doing this with live streams seems fairly straightforward, but this does seem like it can be applied to "on-demand" streams as well with a little effort. If each user had a bit of a buffer cached that would allow a relay of the same stream assuming other users accessed the same stream within a few moments of each…

Think of every network connection as a pipe. Currently, for every user accessing a video or stream, that's one pipe running the entirely distance from source to destination. A million connections makes things difficult to maintain.

That's cool.