I can also think of a few phenomena that this new sensing capability will really help to clear up. For example: when gamma ray bursts were first announced, we only knew that they were exceedingly powerful, and there were multiple possible explanations, including merging black holes.

With advanced LIGO, we might have been able to rule in or out that latter possibility (there are still unknowns that aLIGO could help us clear up).

There's more here than confirming what was already strongly suspected. This is the one space telescope that can see black holes and back to the Big Bang--things that no electromagnetic sensing system can allow us to observe.

Perhaps, but I suspect that's a significant oversimplification. Gender interests in various topics are generally "dialed in" by mid-high-school age or before -- college major gender preferences reflect high school preferences. I strongly suspect high schoolers aren't choosing topics of interests based upon expectations of future harassment in related careers.

A much more viable theory revolves around "caste effects" -- we tend to internalize the perceived characteristics of groups with which we identify. This effect has been posited as an explanation for disparities in IQ scores that break down along socially-identified racial groups (even when the underlying genetics and socio-economics are much more complicated). In the context of this topic, males or females see what they think men or women are "like" and what they "do", and tend to develop interests accordingly.

As for harassment and the sciences: Obviously, it's a problem for those already in fields where (most likely) one gender or the other is significantly under-represented, and it could tend to reinforce such under-representation. But I think it's more a symptom than a cause.

The problem isn't the use of weapons with less collateral damage. The problem is the response from those who have nukes, but not the precision-guided, limited collateral damage variety.

It's a psychological issue--once nukes have been used, it's more feasible to respond by using nukes. And lest we think the psychology of the situation doesn't matter, remember that mutually assured destruction (MAD), which kept the world fron nuking itself back to the stone age for more than a half century, was and is based entirely on the psychology of nuclear weapon use.

If, by "sensible", you mean "it makes economic sense that companies will provide crappy, less expensive service when they can get away with it", then I agree with you.

I would word this differently.

I would say that ISP's should allocate enough bandwidth for the service they provide. But, of course, if they can avoid doing this (and many times, thanks to monopolies, they can) and save money, they will.

It's rather like medical insurance: companies have no more incentive to provide better service than to save money through simply risk selection by cutting out customers more likely to get sick.

Hence the need for legislation.

There are multiple possible ways to prepare. Broadly speaking, they are: disconnections (if warning is received), protective devices to stop unbalanced current in the grid, and replacement transformers (right now, the thousands of house-sized, custom-made extremely high voltage transformers upon which the grid depends, and which take many months to make with a years-long backlog, have few if any spares lying around).

Exactly.

The main reason for aligning clocks with the sun is for navigational methods that aren't really used anymore.

At this point, it makes much more sense to have a fundamental time reference that provides 60 seconds to a minute, period, and if you really want to translate to your local sun-referenced time, make use of translation tables.

Right now, we muck with the fundamental reference. That's the basic issue that needs solving.

Can you make this mandatory for the people running for office first?

Stopped reading right there :P

Hell, I used to do that with Infocom games back in the DOS days, because every command would hit the floppy to return the appropriate response.

Solution: RAM disk the same size as the floppy (320K), copy the whole disk to RAM to play, save games to the B: floppy. Game actions were stupidly fast for the most part.

When I grew up in Western Canada, we had like an hour to eat lunch at school. So we took our time and then ran around outside for 20-30 minutes.

A year I moved to the Eastern US and we had 20 minutes to eat lunch, and then we had to go immediately back to class, with no chance of leaving the school.

Either way I had a packed lunch from home, but I hated having to wolf it all down with no time to relax.

https://www.youtube.com/result...

In all seriousness, there are Youtube videos of hobbyists using this technique to make graphene.

The DVD-burner graphene etching technique to produce supercaps is several years old -- but it looks like they're continuing to work on it. Good to see the technique hasn't been abandoned.