This may not be a huge factor, but every hour off is one less hour for someone to slip in malware. Viruses that activate during startup got in while the machine is on.

These remind me of an old Don Martin Mad paperback with a defective, er, detective story satire (called The Letter, to save other vintage Mad-philes the trouble). The private eye had a naive assistant who kept staggering back with ever more weaponry stuck in him. In his last appearance, he had more stuff sticking out…

I'm all for going to the stars, but building a safe haven on a devastated earth, or restoring it to habitability, will be child's play compared with the challenge of building habitats in space. For one thing, you won't have to lift gigatons of material into space. And a mistake on earth is way more survivable than a…

People who are not disabled don't need an Americans with Disabilities Act, right?

Can we have a national dialog on why we won't link benefits to socially responsible behavior? Why we rack up millions of dollars on frivolous appeals by people whose guilt is beyond question?

"How often do US planes fly over our country carrying a thermonuclear warhead?"

Honor the memory of Kodak, which did the world an incalculable service over a century of making film. The present business model for printers (cheap printers, expensive ink) is doomed. Where is it written that any company is entitled to a continuing income stream from a product? You sell it, pay your operating costs,…

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Kinkade ought to be called "The Artist of Slush." Not a jab at his painting style, just that a large part of his work is of snowy scenes with ankle deep slush in the roads. It looks pretty until you think of actually walking in it.

I like how in Hitchhiker's Guide, all the equipment is perfectly ordinary industrial equipment (minus the light years long boom, of course). And I was going to nominate Jurassic Park, but there it is! For me, the opening of 2001 is better, but best of all is where the twin wheels of the space station sweep by. To see…

For a topic that was supposedly the great love of Sagan's life, Contact (the novel) was horrible. Drab, dreary, gray, and with an amateurish, then-I-fell-out-of-bed-and-woke-up ending. The aliens transmit the plans for a complex machine (as in A is for Andromeda by Fred Hoyle) but then erase the digital recordings of…

"I find it amusing....I find it offensive...." Who cares?

It's a pity nobody seems to have done a time lapse of the recent transit of Venus from Iceland. Iceland was in a small wedge shaped area where the transit began before sunset, the sun dipped briefly below the horizon, and the transit ended after sunrise.

I went to one where a mysterious force bent trees at the base and caused a building to slide downhill. The mysterious force is gravity. A process called soil creep tries to bend saplings but plants have a built in gravity sense called geotropism that opposes it. Soil creep also caused the building to move. Lots of…

Do not say "forever" to a geologist. It does not mean what you think it means. If your avatar is self contained, there is a finite probability of its being completely destroyed. If your likelihood of surviving a year is 0.9999, your chances of surviving 10,000 years are 0.368. In general, if your probability of dying…

I'm 65 and working on Arabic. I learned German at 17, Russian at 20 and Spanish at 25. And the article specifically states that he makes exception for non-native speakers.

Lately I am being photobombed by some fat gray haired guy who jumps between me and the camera.

20 million barrels a day? Just for the US? Much better to bio-engineer a micro-organism to produce hydrocarbons.

Solution is simple. If you're tethered, you get overtime. That will fix it quickly.

Abolish the "Canon." State for all the world that the only Star Trek story lines are those created for the films and TV series, and fanfic, novelizations, etc., have no standing. Not now, not ever. That way the series doesn't get written into corners by outsiders.