If "see" just means light is entering my eyes, then sure I can see. But I wouldn't call it anything close to "fine". I wouldn't want to go without glasses if my in-air eyesight was that bad.

I'm guessing China would take the Russian approach to space travel: quick, cheap, dangerous.

Any materials buffs know if there are media in which a human would actually be totally blind? That is, where the refraction is such that either most of the light doesn't hit the retina at all or the image is far too blurry to be useful?

News to me. Everyone I know or have ever heard from about underwater vision can't see clearly underwater without goggles or badly misshapen eyeballs. I certainly can't, and I'm better than 20/20 normally.

This is exactly what came to my mind while that Blood Stain Child was playing. Conceptually, the Ghost music is still way more advanced than BSC, which seems to be little more than a standard style mashup (like the Korn posted here).

It wasn't so long ago (and may still be) that people hired mourners and wailers for funerals. Those who were genuinely mourning had already done their more dramatic outward expression of grief, but still wanted everyone to know (or at least believe) that the deceased is sorely missed. Buying mourners was as normal as…

Not different. Republics are a form of representative democracy. So saying, "The U.S. is a republic, not a democracy" is a logical error equivalent to, "Socrates was a man, not a mortal." So yes, they are different since "Republic" is a member of category "Democracy", but not different in the same way that facism and…

Interesting comments.

If people can't get behind a project long enough for it to be completed, I think it's for the best that it never happens. In Canada, as in many three-or-more-party democracies, if only one party is in favour of something, the general population does not want it. Our recent election pace worked well to keep some…

And Socrates was a man, not a mortal... ?

Funny thing about god proof: many people claim to be willing to accept the existence of a supernatural or transcendent being, but only on the basis of non-transcendent, human-sensible, natural phenomena. Something tells me the twain shall never meet.

First, mods aren't always about fixing the game. Often they're just meant to improve them, the definition of "improve" being entirely subjective.

Things I liked:

The thing is, the complainers get all that. We understand exactly what the "point" was because it was drilled into us through every civil v. savage cliche in the book.

The problem there was that you were uniting against other people. That's exactly the kind of unity we don't want.

For a long time, giving something away also apparently signed me up as 24h tech-support-for-life. In the hands of others, my ex-property always became a much bigger pain in my arse than it ever was while I owned it.

Didn't even think of that! I wonder if there even *are* plants that could handle the seasons in addition to hot weather. So far on Earth there aren't any climates that have both. Also add that there's basically zero topsoil past the current grain belt.

Even in this article, it's only in the title. (Paragraph four doesn't offer a date.) But I'll keep on hoping that hyperbolic view-grabber titles will someday die out.

True that. But my issue is that I *love* Akira. Enough that I want it to remain unsullied by prequels and re-imaginings.

The temperatures might be appropriate for a tropical forest, but there's no way it will actually exist in a couple centuries without some massive human effort. Trees just don't move that quickly, and it's a long way from Yucatan to Nunavut.