Exactly. People have cool ideas for stuff all the time. Unless you know how to actually make it work, you shouldn't get a patent for it. This kind of thing is bullshit and stifles creativity and progress.

This kind of patent upsets me. Just having an idea for a cool thing should not be enough. You should have to demonstrate that you know HOW to do said cool thing, and get a patent for that. I had a friend in high school who thought of himself as "an inventor". Among his inventions were such things as tiny, pea sized,…

One of my best friends uses a ruggedized, waterproofed feature phone. He does a lot of activities including scuba diving and surfing. The diving especially is his main reason.

Quit monkeying around. Aping anti-semitic stereotypes is no joke.

I would be willing to believe it could have been accidental. The server room at my lab is number 404, and when I asked the IT guy if it had been done on purpose, he was flabbergasted. He had never even noticed before.

My job doesn't require my full attention (watching underwater transect video and recording fish and invert species) so I listen to podcasts while at work or while driving, so I don't have to worry about spotty reception or finding new channels while I move.

Podcasts are almost all I listen to. Primarily of NPR shows like Car Talk, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Planet Money, and Freakonomics (plus several others). My job is often boring and doesn't require my full concentration so I need something to keep myself occupied. Music just doesn't cut it and Podcasts offer the…

I'm having a hard time imagining what you are doing that there isn't a laptop out there with enough power. If you are willing to spend the money, there are some BEEFY laptops you can buy. If cost is a concern however, I guarantee you that a computer like the one you describe won't be cheap, for two reasons. One, it…

I would nominate you for #commentoftheweek except those don't exist anymore. So have an internet instead.

Self-reflection is no the same thing as self-absorption

I suppose that's possible, but by the title of the painting, I assumed it was supposed to be Temerarire himself.

While the Temerarie painting looks cool, it doesn't match the descriptions in the book very well.

All of these seem like the kind of problems where we don't know enough now or don't have the technology now. None of them seem like fundamentally impossible barriers.

A change of only one atmostphere (which going from sea level pressure to vaccuum would be effectively, and I'm pretty sure most space ships are not at a full atmosphere of pressure) you usually won't get the bends. You can do a pretty rapid rise from 33 feet (the depth of water requried to reach 2 atmospheres of…

That does also have a lot to do with it. As you pointed out, because tuna eat other fish, they are several steps up the food web so the organisms have had more of a chance to accumulate mercury.

I'm not sure of the biochemistry of dioxin, but trout and salmon are generally pretty low in mercury because they are short lived. The longest lived salmonids tend to only get to about 5 to 7 years old, which isn't long enough to accumulate much mercury. It's the longer lived fish like tuna and some species of…

I buy my phones based on which ones are both good enough to have the hardware features I want, and popular enough to have the development infrastructure to guarantee ROMs. I just bought the HTC One X and while I don't expect (or really even want since I don't like Sense) updates from them, I know I can install…

you are having issues with the wifi eating battery? I leave mine on and when I put my phone back on the charger at the end of the day (~15 hours later) it usually as 20 to 30% left. Now, that's probably at least partially because the reason I leave my wifi on is that I'm on a wifi network at work and at home, but…

The fact that the alien civilization will be (hopefully) also trying to communicate with us is the one thing that makes it seem possible at all.

It's this kind of thing that makes me think that communication with alien species will never be possible. We were unable to decipher a novel human written language until we found a translation (Rosetta stone and ancient egyptian hyrogliphics), and are having immense difficulties with the communications of a fellow…