Naah, the 1%-libertarians would just whine that the regulation that doesn't allow you to poison others without sanction constitutes prior restraint.

Comcast will suddenly get religion and actually start providing the speeds they advertise.... .....(or not)

Even if Boeing stopped building 747 variants tomorrow, they'd be around for ages. They're the mainstay for long-haul travel, and dwindling sales probably are more related to market saturation - as in, there are enough in the air now to meet current demand - than any inherent shortcoming in the design.

I suspect that there are more refinements to come - it's just too useful an airframe to discard. It may take Boeing a bit to roll in some of the working dreamliner tech but it seems reasonable that they'd try to do that when time and demand permit.

SharkNebula, now on SyFy!

I'd like to see it happen - it really would make a difference in the world bc it changes cost structures and allows more people to get in the game, esp in poor countries.

I've been running Linux on portable systems since it was released, and it's good. Unfortunately, it doesn't do the same sort of vertical hardware integration as, for example, Apple, so people don't see immediate refresh from hibernation right out of the box, and so think it is deficient or not as advanced. That's unfortunate, and a lot of it is the result of people building optional functionality but a lack of consensus regarding which packages and functionality should be included right out of the gate for a consumer system. With a variety of packages for what users now expect enabled on a commodity PC, it'll do just fine...... .....I hope.

Yeah, mostly it works but on the off chance it doesn't....well, I'd lose the ability to work for certain (SA who lives at terminals).

> You may have heard of the concept of volunteering, people spending many hours every week doing unpaid work. In those cases, money is obviously not a motivation because they are possessed of sufficient income provided by their own work, a pension fund, investment account, or other means of income to cover their basic needs .

FTFY...

If working full-time pays so little that a person cannot meet essential basic needs, I respectfully suggest that there's a disconnect. All the human dignity in the world doesn't make a person full when they're hungry, and to implicitly state that the dignity of full-time employ should cancel out deprivation from income inequality fails to take into account the costs associated with being poor - like not being able to buy items in bulk at low unit costs due to lack of liquid cash, or time losses from using the US' grossly inadequate public transport infrastructure to travel to/from work and appointments, to name two.

Sisyphus.

Syphilis is between shit and sympathy in the dictionary....

Also not an evolutionary biologist, but I think you're on the right track. I don't know whether a given environment will favor a specific set of mutations (e.g., the exact same path each time), but assuming a constant environment, the organisms that result will probably be similarly adapted to the environment. It's kind of a cool idea because at a molecular-genetic level, there are probably something like functions (vs individual lines of code) which interact and can be documented at some sort of macro level, which combine in more or less predictable ways ('predictable' being a gross oversimplification of the molecular complexity involved).

Ah, I need to go read some genetics textbooks. The evolutionary biologists have a lot of this stuff mapped already - look at what they know about HOX genes. So.cool.

Hmm. I'd suggest that when you say 'inconsistency,' what you're referring to is the range of timbres available throughout the instrument's entire compass. Part of the richness associated with the old master instruments is a sweetening of the high end, caused by a variety of factors but mostly by the instrument being in tune with itself. The idea of building the instrument to be consonant with itself - that is, in tune with itself - is quite old. Builders who do this (tuning the top and back to specific pitches when rapped, working the bass bar and neck to work with the body, et cetera) tend to build instruments where the harmonics pile up on each other in the upper register and sound sweet - there's not a lot of phase cancellation. Builders who don't tend to have 'wolf' notes, which are odd resonances caused by any number of things, mostly mass either existing or lacking in a particular location in the body.

Many modern builders do tune the instrument such that it gets sweeter as the pitch increases, which can lead to a deceptive increase in perceived volume.

A number of modern guitarmakers have adopted the build-without-stress and consonance philosophy as well, most notably students of the late Arthur Overholzer, including Richard Hoover of Santa Cruz Guitars and a number of the people he's taught. It definitely makes for a more pleasant players' experience - they move all of a piece and feel very alive.

You're too kind. Thank you:-)