Good point on the exoskeletons, and yet another example of easily-corrected laziness. If we saw a scene in which one of them was being used for work and an offhand comment by some grunt to the effect of "Now they're pressing these things into combat," then it would have been fine. All the...

Fucking ice! It hasn't been too bad for the last week or so, despite the layer of snow and ice everywhere. But today the entire city seemed to have turned into an ice-skating rink. My initial attempts to get down to the end of my road resulted in me sliding all over the damn place. Damnit, Earth, wh...

Happy Birthday, Tyyr!

To stop any agreement on halting climate-change from having any success. Copenhagen Climate Cables The US and China Joined Forces Against Europe Last year's climate summit in Copenhagen was a political disaster. Leaked US diplomatic cables now show why the summit failed so spectacularly. The dispatc...

Just.....wow. I didn't have a high opinion of mercenaries even before Afghanistan was invaded, but I didn't expect them to be getting involved in shit like this. WikiLeaks: Texas Company Helped Pimp Little Boys To Stoned Afghan Cops DynCorp: WikiLeaks is not kind ​Another international conflict, a...

And that's another thing. You're not even getting the actors themselves - just their looks. Sure, now you can make an Airplane sequel with Leslie Nielson in it. But will "he" have the talent or delivery that the real Nielson did? You'll still need actual living actors to play these dead ac...

Then Wikileaks lets everyone know the site was hacked, and whichever government orchestrated it gets a massive PR blow for being seen to take action against them. Instant backfire. Also, I'm pretty sure Wikileaks has been hit with shitloads of hacking attempts already. They're probably more than cap...

Oh, and another thing. Anything the plant can build is going to be limited by its size. While it could probably produce larger objects in bits and pieces, the Na'vi and friends aren't going to have the know-how to actually piece these bits together. And I doubt the plant can also make assembly manua...

Even if the plant can indeed build anything they want, it still runs into quite a few problems. Firstly, how are they even going to tell the machine what to make? I can't imagine it's a simple process to tell it to stop building power tools and start building surface to air missile launchers. Partic...

We'd all be screwed if something like that happened.

Oh, Christ, I just made a bad pun without even realising it.

Object removed. It was tiny screw.

Hmm, should I be at all worried about the fact that there was a tiny screw rattling around inside my laptop? Ah, screw it.

Not a problem. The original discussion still had some life left in it.