I've been the biggest proponent of Wikipedia for all my life, and avidly used it in school (citing it, and the sources it cited, to my teacher's ire) since 5th grade. But jesus, just hearing about this causes my heart to ache. Encyclopedia's are great endeavors, and are important as a long term collection of knowledge that could help restart civilization in case, I don't know, Israel and Iran start throwing nukes.

The original article called it "Apple's Plant" I changed the headline of the article to specify that it was a Foxconn facility, and the story is meant to imply that this plant in particular only produces iPads and iPhones, thus, it is an Apple plant, in a sense.
Though good distinction, and people should realize it. I bought an Intel SSD recently and saw that it had Foxconn emblazoned on it, to which I yelled "NOOOOOO!" quite loudly upon opening.

I think you are completely right when it comes to issues of personal freedoms, but completely wrong when it pertains to things companies care about.
Congressmen need money to be elected, corporations provide that. The "win" we saw for civil liberties was only because facebook, google, and wikipedia spoke out against it. If this issue just limited our rights for the benefit of all those corporations, I'm sure we'd see a different result.

Huh. That got me thinking quite a bit! Wikipedia shows it's a questions that's been pondered since the father of gradual change himself, Darwin:
He though that self replicating structures could happen, but that... "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."
And on that subject, "No new notable research or theory on the subject appeared until 1924, when Alexander Oparin reasoned that atmospheric oxygen prevents the synthesis of certain organic compounds that are necessary building blocks for the evolution of life."

It seems like there were some specific circumstances to get life going down a certain path. But now with changed initial conditions and FIERCE competition for resources EVERYWHERE new self reproducing structures don't get too far.

My bad, I thought it was a virus and posted it as RNA and virus, instead of DNA, bacterium. At least it's consistent!

Yeah, the problem is most people here about these things third hand. And the first few people who relay act like a megaphone with high distortation. NASA's original release just said that this discovery "will impact the search for extraterrestrial life." Which CANNOT be interpreted as 'ZOMG WE FOUND ET!' Yet the second sounds far more awesome, so it gets propagated more and faster then the original message... so you shouldn't be disappointed, NASA was honest about what this would be!


Also... we need to start filtering things, and relaying only backed up, reasonable messages, not just the catchy-ist ones, or we'll just fall into insane blathering about terrorists, communist fascists (ironic, huh?), and aliens who want to eat your babies

Yeah, that sounds like a good nitpick of the organization, who does have the right to choose what the public should and shouldn't know? What should be released and what held in? Why is Assange such an ass? I think for most of the non-government stuff that has been released the obvious answer is EVERYTHING. Corporate scandals, milk cut with plastic, evil banks, all these should be exposed if they can be.
Wikileaks may have a US bias, and possible holds back leaks that it doesn't want to show, but there is no other platform like wikileaks to release them. Wikileaks isn't just a chat board, or a newspaper, is a tightly run organization with layers of security and complexity. And you know what? It's information we'd probably never hear about any ways if not for them. So I'll take what I can get, and view any more disclosure of information as a good thing, because it's stuff we wouldn't have known any way. It'd probably be good if there was another platform like wikileaks, with it's own crazy leader (cause trust me, it takes a crazy half genius leader to run a sinking ship like that), then people could just leak to both of them. Go start it, it'd help the world.

So far I am finding the original article an interesting read. (it's in the original article NYT article)
It states that the bubble may be related to an ejection of the super massive black hole in the past 10 million years or so. You know those other galaxies that have giant lazer beams shooting out of them? Well, ours could have been like that at some point 10 million years ago. Kind makes sense that those SM black holes only occasionally and intermittently shoot stuff off, seems like just emissions like that would be hard to sustain for long periods of time. (and holy mother of Bohr, it was hard to not fall into sexual innuendo there)
Also, as far as it being a data anomaly (which I thought first due to it's symmetry and the fact that we apparently never knew about it), it apparently correlates with "hard-spectrum excess known as the WMAP haze (and) the edges of bubble also line up with features in the ROSAT X-ray maps at 1.5 - 2 KeV."

And I don't mean to come off as hating on chatbots, or suzette. What they do is very cool, and I found the bot interesting and funny to talk with. I am more just griping that these feel like they're offering canned responses, and are just databases that lock down what someone is saying, relate it to a similar store comment, and then spit out one of the given replies for that situation.

Which I guess is stupid of me... Cause I can't think of any other way to do it which wouldn't involve something that thought and wrote original replies... which would be quite hard.

Dreaming a bit... maybe just taking that same system that analyzes a comment and relates it to prior ones and add another that tracked the topic of a comment, and the conclusion of it, and then made sure that that related to future comments. Or that if that topic was brought up again, consider the prior comments of that topic, and spit out a reply based on the conjunction of them? That still be very complex and involve catagorizing conversations, finding topics, conclusions, and synthesizing stuff... mm...