The fact that you came from Cleveland, TN, home of the Church of God and Lee University, is essentially all anybody has to know to figure out the environment you grew up in.

No, they don’t. That’s trademark law, not patent law.

Came to post the same thing. We have learned nothing from Star Trek, nor from our own history. It is precisely the horror of war which makes them stop (and particularly the civilian casualties of war). Wars end when one of the combatants loses their will to fight, and that loss of will is predicated primarily on the…

Meh. Now do one on League...

So now all I have in my head is “what if the Brady Bunch looked like Game of Thrones?”

I just finished Aurora. Great book.

“I don’t know why anybody would buy a tux.”

I had LASIK in the late ‘90s, and everything went fine (ended up with 20/20 and 20/15, from 20/400). No complications. And yet a friend of mine lost an eye due to an infection after his surgery.

The fun part about Moscow was having a geographical map in English (with the Latin alphabet equivalents of the station names) and having to learn the Cyrillic equivalents which were actually on the station signs. One can very quickly figure out how to pronounce things in Russian, even if you don’t understand what the…

Several years ago, when I bought my first flat screen TV, I used a similar chart and decided to save some money and get a 55” 720p TV. At a 10’ viewing distance, I wouldn’t really be able to notice the 1080p difference. I would have to have bought a really unaffordable, much bigger TV to see 1080p at that distance, so…

Continuous tone instruments (fretless stringed instruments, for example, or the human voice) can play in just intonation and actually produce truly in tune chords. This is exactly what good barbershop quartets do, and why they are able to reinforce the overtone series to the point that you will hear more notes than…

“I think what the author of the quote meant was that it was astonishing that it happened, through random mutation.”

It’s a bit of both, and the website details the ways in which it functions like a government agency vs. the ways it functions as a private enterprise. By design, it’s not supposed to live on taxpayer dollars (which is what generally drives the discussion around whether the fruits of its labor are public domain or…

At this point, I would personally not hire anyone with a Gawker property on their resumé. Not that I would ever be in a position to, since I don’t work in a field for which any of them would be applying for a job, but still...

“Gonna Sue when stocks go down too? CEO promised they would go up.”

The USPS is not a government entity anymore.

The modern version of Russian Orthodox icons.

Like any of the others aren’t?

Even if a particular intelligent species has been around for hundreds of thousands or millions of year, there is no guarantee that they would have made linear (or even geometric) technological progress during the entire time (thus making them “very advanced” compared to us).

Mark my words, this will be a real thing inside of six weeks.