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But he's not capable of writing honest, serious disagreement with consequences, among people who are both on the 'right' side. He apparently intended to explore this with Mesa and Beowulf's philosophical differences*. Honor was supposed to die, and there'd be about twenty years until The Next Gener...

I can't help but wonder if his life-long status as a city boy divorced from farmland could account for some lack of imagination regarding agriculture. Probably, but a lot of his writing predated the Green Revolution, which brought astounding gains in productivity. I don't think anyone (farmer or ot...

I'd argue for a small, if somewhat accidental hit. While not used to talking to the moon, he is sort-of right about one thing: we do have lasers transmitting information in plastic tubes. At least, that's my understanding of what fiber-optic cables do. Asimov is referring to optical waveguides, whi...

The US Marshals are denying that Khobragade was cavity searched.

In her case, I doubt she would get a jail sentence even if convicted - just a slap on the wrist, some fines, and don't do it again Maybe. But State could've quietly handled this entirely under the radar (maybe declaring Khobragade persona non grata after bringing in Richards' family). It feels much...

Lagmonster wrote:Their whole "open-source is the future of PC gaming" line. Any truth to that?

Not really, but Valve doesn't have much of a choice.

Any compatibility issues? Is there any part of the system that is overpowered/underpowered compared to the rest? You have a fast and large SSD, so you could probably go with a 'green' low-speed hard drive for mass storage. I personally prefer Samsung's Pro and Intel's higher-end line of SSDs, but t...

The full complaint (PDF) Thread title changed to reflect the status of the arrested person (diplomat vs consular officer, their immunity levels are different). It looks like India is transferring her to the UN to give her full diplomatic immunity. No word on if State will accept the appointment or ...

Official statement by US Attorney Preet Bharara: There has been much misinformation and factual inaccuracy in the reporting on the charges against Devyani Khobragade. It is important to correct these inaccuracies because they are misleading people and creating an inflammatory atmosphere on an unfoun...

Twilight Zone moment. The People's Republic of Haven isn't a parody anymore. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=msnbc+krystal+ball+poverty One, you could've posted the direct link to MSNBC. Two, guaranteed minimum income proposals have been floating around for years. Three, what do you meant "isn't a parody...

Free Republic? Really? It's originally sourced from PPRuNE . It's not the most reliable of sources but I've heard similar reports from a few other places too. This seems to happen a lot with Korean airlines - much to much deference shown to superiors just because they are older. There were some cra...

Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics are currently free on GOG.

Simon_Jester wrote:I wonder if they routinely fail to sweep, or if it was a one-off weird kind of thing that happened for strange reasons. This might actually happen pretty often if they never swept the plane.

You are supposed to sweep the plane before you close it out.

Skywalker Sound did quite a bit of the audio effects, so it should be no surprise that it sounds like Star Wars.

Parallax wrote:Episode 24 AKA The Crew Goes Swimming Because We Haven't Met Our Fanservice Quota.

At least the guys are all wearing speedos, so it's equal-opportunity fanservice!

A few years ago there was a pretty good thread on DDG-1000; I wonder how many of those problems got resolved.

Note: I am a professional software developer with reasonable experience in web development, some scientific computing and implementing various algorithms. I am presently one of those jerks who attempt to optimize ad delivery and that people try to block (we know this). Take anything I say with a gra...

Perfect forward secrecy is fairly uncommon in TLS configurations, unfortunately. Let's just say that most e-commerce, online banking, brokerages, government, and many other such "secure" sites which you'd think would use PFS, don't. DHE is computationally expensive and ECDHE is patent enc...

Perfect forward secrecy is fairly uncommon in TLS configurations, unfortunately.

Some of you guys are confusing the encryption methods. Lavabit has multiple systems. One system is used to secure the actual contents of the emails residing on their systems. Each account presumably has a unique key; the FBI initially requested this. Compromise of this key would not subvert the othe...

I blame the two-party system. If there were three or four parties then we might see clearer positions and more dialogue between the candidates. We'd need a fairly major overhaul of government (like, amendment-level) to make a multiparty system viable; the present system's natural outcome is two par...

The only thing better than this is how there's a whole bunch of Americans who think this insanity is exactly how it should be. The House's original design would deadlock if any strong parties formed, which they promptly did (some consider this a feature, most consider it a bug). Pork became the wor...

But as I understand it, the primaries are like a pre-election to determine who will stand for a certain position for a certain party, right? So these so-called moderates are vying in their own electorates with Tea Party candidates who presumably are considerably farther to the right of them. But th...

Manties as varying degrees of british with some (ex. houseman) having the really posh nasally voice Received pronunciation! So I'm up to book ten and here's a question you lot might have discussed already. Does anyone read characters in an accent? For instance, I tend to read most Manticorans in a ...

To be fair, how hard can it be for a first-world nation to develop this technology now, more than 30 years after it's inception? I know that the knowledge and materials aren't universally available, but it seems like if the united states could have made one almost 50 years ago, the knowledge would ...