We are already surrounded by micromachines that absorb the materials needed and create copies of themselves. Why the world didn't ended covered by green goo millons of years ago? Not all materials are usable, so you can generate scarcity, and not all copies are perfect, thing that gives evolution if you have factors…

in ST:TNG there were a couple of good space battles between Ricker and Picard, one of them even was when Picard was Locutus of Borg.

Windows itself. Is the most default app of the default apps. Even can afford running some windows apps with wine (if no similar functionality in already existing linux apps) but running Windows itself is the start of the problems.

Meme/culture manipulation. It won't destroy the world, but probably anything else won't neither. But once big players start to control what and how people think in big scale, and have several parties trying to get mindshare, nothing will matter anymore. Is like the global thermonuclear war game, but where everyone can…

0th. Go vandalize/rob houses because all should be evacuated and whats valuable inside is alone. And get caught by the storm.

Will this measures be of histeric proportions?

People are not all alike. For social networks some post every move and mood change they have in a day, and others only post when something critical happened. You don't want to miss the hurricane alert because the 3 spammy ones are telling the world how they felt all the duration of a sport event, I use to mute posts…

In the other side, it isnt a full speed bullet. Some years ago a falling bullet hit me, and luckily was in an elbow, so it bounced, not even hurt. Didnt knew what it was till i found it in the floor. Now i can say that bullets (at the very least, the one that ever hit me) bounce on me.

The Microsoft suit to HTC didn't raised a few cents on HTC android phones, but several dollars, and probably forcing the equation to the side of forcing HTC to include Mango as OS for their cellphones or totally switch to what could be an inferior OS, just because they have patents on things like the FAT filesystem or…

Being alive and suffering (with no hope of recovering) could be seen as worse than being dead.

Holy Bible in Babel 17 language.

In 5-10 years should be Stephenson's Diamond Age in that list. Children are getting netbooks, tablets and other internet devices, and having virtually that "smart device" pictured in that book.

In the opposite side of the video games in science fiction category, should be Tron and Global Thermonuclear War. Even 30 years ago there were good enough video games to give argument to science fiction movies.

Not sure how the math goes regarding number of possibilities between 10 random char alpha+digits+symbol passwords vs 4 random words from a limited set (not the whole dictionary), but looks like there are less alternatives in the second set. If everyone uses that way to encode passwords things will be actually easier…

I should had mistranslated something but, grass feed beef, a gadget? White tea should fit better in the gadget category than it.

The voting was veru weighted by how popular or widely known are some books. Probably most that had read Hyperion put it in the top 10 (ok, i liked it, im partial in that evaluation), but far more had read or knew about lotr, hgttg (heck, there were MOVIES about several on that list, including good ones like the one…

For me easy to remember passwords are basically easy to remember input + easy to remember and self run transformation on it (transforming common letters, stripping initials, adding fixed or relative prefixes/sufixes, etc). But too standarized ways to pick both (and that includes the xkcd example) makes them…

What makes a difference to us, be the next universe, or even the next galaxy? IF there is absolutely no way that we or anything we do could reach them ever (for reasonable values of ever) that other universe exist should make no change. And about the possibility of that maybe there is another earth out there, just by…

Flowers for Algernon was a magical book, but i don't see any uplifting there. I see a human getting more intelligent (not from being animal to being human), and a mouse gaining intelligence too (but no up, or down, to get human culture, something more real like solving puzzles). But if humans getting more intelligent…

"Best" is meaningless without defining the ranking criteria. My Kindle count as "best" for me mainly because the very readable screen, pretty long battery life, and pretty comfortable to carry around. Paired with Calibre, it can read a long enough list of formats, and have a good selection of titles.