@optical_allusion: "..photoshopped right into the Uncanny Valley."
That description should become part of universal Internet terminology.

He needs a Predator roommate and a date with a Barbie.
[www.alienlovespredator.com]

You swim around in complex and confining environment while shit you cant clean up, builds up. Thankfully your life is short and you don't remember most of it.

I hope they do a passing the torch type of thing with RDA retiring from Phoenix and mentoring a replacement. BTW, new Mac could just as well be a woman. That worked well in DarkAngel, Xena and TombRaider, whereas new male macgyver like character John Doe already failed.

Basically you have a moron who you can understand but who doesn't shut up, and then you have a smart trans can who understands you but can only communicate in a language that only the moron understands.
If you take only the trash can, you can work with it by giving orders, but it can communicate back with only onomonopoetic whistling.
If you take only the moron, it can work as a translator, but is otherwise useless and annoying.
Finally, if you take both you can communicate and work with the smart trash can, but you have to put up with both constant onomonopoetic whistling and constant blathering of a moron.

What a marvelous image of the whole IT industry. If you combine two crappy technologies you can get something that works, but you also get worst features of both in the same time.

They actually ship movies on disks to space? I can understand books in paper form, but physical movie disks? Cant blame them though, I bet MPAA would love to sue NASA if they dared to rip movies.

We've had so much movie violence already that nothing really matters. And that is a bad sign considering that our brains do not make too much difference between what we see done and what we do (so called mirror neurons fire identically in both cases). Every beating you see in TV trains your muscle memory to do those same hits and kicks. The effect is minimal but it is there, and whether you ever use those subconsciously learned moves in real life depends on how much self control you have. In this perspective seeing torture will make you a little more likely to torture. Monkey see Bauer do, monkey do.

What we are not used to seeing is the effects of violence. I might remember wrong but didn't BSG show XO after he lost the eye and cylon Six just after her rape not during. I believe the XO's eye patch and behavior of Six function as continual reminders of what has happened to them. That should make us think of consequences and and connect with the victims. Since we didn't see the acts of torture our brains did not simulate being the torturer. However, we can imagine what happened and create memories for the tortured characters so that we can understand them.

There already was that US cult that essentially farmed babies for pedophiles claiming they were married. I would not be surprised if someone was selling and/or storing humans for people who want them as pets.

With this theory you can interpret doing anything that remains after you are dead as sign of not accepting death. So any species with more complex life than a fish fails to qualify.

From Startrek universe the Borg come close to qualifying as death accepting. If an individual borg dies everything it has ever known is preserved and the physical individuals are all interchangeable. Since the collective is functionally a single biological and technological entity and functionally immortal it never leaves anything behind. It just discards unfunctional parts of itself.

I doubt there is any way a group of intelligent individuals can be totally death accepting. Even if they had no nothing comparable to feelings, they would have to adapt to the absence of a dead group member. Duties would be shuffled, body disposed and all knowledge the dead member had would be lost. As group of intelligent individuals they would be aware of possibility of losing members and they would plan ahead accordingly. Of course this is assuming they have some instinct or other preference for the continuing existence of creatures like them.

Ethnicity specific repellent may not actually be that far fetched. DARPA already actively develops pain rays and ethnicity specific biological weapons are probably much closer to reality than we would like to think.

Attention teenagers: Prepare to laugh at the Twenty/thirty somethings and their goofy childhood.

Twenty/thirty somethings: Prepare your cyanide capsules to avoid molestation of your childhood.

That is all.

Why cant they just sell a tiny air compressor with the ball. It wouldn't cost much more than a long pressure proof hose and connectors. With a compressor you could also check and correct tire pressures while you are at it.

The reason why lemurs are not super intelligent is that they have had a stable environment for a long time and no hard competition for food or much predators. They have had no push factors to develop intelligence.

Just about the only reason to have intelligence is to be able to adapt in rapidly chancing environment. It doesn't matter what planet you are on, if there are push factors for rapid adaptation, you may end up with intelligent species.

Increase in human ancestor intelligence may have been a fluke early on, but it has proven to be extremely beneficial trait for surviving ice ages and spreading the species allover the planet. As for the question of why there are no equally intelligent species on earth, the answer is that there was one (Neardentals), but they didn't survive competing with humans.

If humans were wiped out, other species would not automatically develop intelligence. But if they then had an additional push factor, e.g. fast chances in environment conditions, then some of then would start to get smarter.

Anyway, choosing between two buttons in a laboratory is way too far from any actual situation to base much faith on this result.

The story goes like this:

Pravda published an add where a scientific research facility looked for volunteers to have sex with monkeys for 1000 roubles. A man answered the add, but he told the scientists he has three conditions.
His wife and relatives must never know about this, and if a child is born, it must get a Marxist education.
The scientists ensured him that these conditions would be met and asked him what was his final condition.
The man said: "I can only pay the 1000 roubles in four installments."