Lisp of course, or Racket.

I bet it'll only take me a few days to write my own web framework. Brb...

Think of it this way: if they can fly the first stage 20 times, that along with some cost optimizations of the upper stage could cut the cost per pound by a factor of ten. Then it would become economical to launch mere multi-hundred million dollar payloads. That would dramatically reduce the economical risk of any single launch, as long as the rocket is not ten times as likely to blow up, but rather only maybe twice as likely.

Of course, anyone who launches a lot of rockets of the same type is likely to become really good at getting that type to orbit in one piece. Just look at the Russians and their now ancient Soyuz rocket.

Keep cutting costs and you might one day have a system where you could launch a ten million dollar payload, which you could easily insure at your local insurance company.

I'm not a native English speaker, but in my mind the concept of identifying does not necessarily include communicating it to the rest of the word. Then you would have to say "publicly identify", or something along those lines, to convey the concept of doxing.

Chinese could become malleable as well. Just get rid of everything that's weird and unique about it (and invent new words and grammar to cover for any ambiguity that emerges). Toss out the writing system and switch to pinyin.

In fact, according to TFA, this sort of thing is what happened to English back in the early middle ages when England was continuously invaded by Scandinavians and French people.

Sorry to nitpick, but there is no such thing as "clickbait fallacy". A fallacy is something that is logically or factually wrong.

You probably mean that someone is using a clickbait tactic or spiel.

Is there a shorter or more descriptive word / phrase that you can use to describe the practice of leaking personal information in order to attack or retaliate against someone you don't like?

Docsing or doxing sounds like a good way to express that concept.

Uh, yeah. Vinyl was hot among hipsters about a decade ago.

The thing is, if you like the album art then the vinyl version is objectively better than the CD version, since the art is bigger on vinyl. A lot of these records are bought primarily as home decor items.

Active sonar works fine as long as you're in deep water, far away from land, where you're suppose to be if you're an aircraft carrier.

Diesel subs are designed to wait in ambush near the bottom in shallow waters, where active sonar operator could easily mistake them for natural formations.

It does not seem likely that carriers and diesel subs would ever face one another, unless a sub managed to sneak across the Atlantic and into shallow US waters, near an aircraft carrier port... But then we're talking Hollywood/Clancy scenarios.

When the Singularity happens we will have such convincing VR gear at such low prices that an Afghan peasant will easily be able to afford it. So, when Talibans come around to his village to collect taxes and rape the women, they can all just put on VR gear and instantly be in London, or New York, or wherever they want.

It might be the xmas timing, but this gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I only wish they'd design the main.html page using tables for formatting.

FYI O(n^2) is called quadratic complexity/time, O(n^3) is cubic, O(n^1) is linear and O(n^0) = O(1) is constant.

Exponential complexity would be O(c^n), where c is a constant.

If you're worried about what'll happen to driving, look at what happened to horseback riding and sailing.

If self-driving cars become a reality, car driving enthusiasts will probably settle down in an area where there is at least one good racetrack that they can frequent and racetracks will probably have garage spaces for rent, much like marinas have dock spaces for rent. So you won't have to drive your race car to your regular race track.

Many towns will have a historic car day, say on a Saturday, when certain streets will be open to traffic with manually driven cars, with curious onlookers lining the streets to get a glimpse of the old machines.

But humans have a long history of having to work in order to get food, clothes, shelter and other essentials. We have at least a cultural instinct, possibly a genetic instinct, to think that people who work a lot deserve to have a lot of possessions and status, while people who work a little or don't work at all deserve nothing. It's not going to be easy to relearn that instinct.

Of course, there are already large swaths of people who do little to no useful work and have high social status...

Maybe the short-term solution to the problem is for more people to become politicians and lawyers, the former creating jobs for the latter by imposing more and more laws.

I had some programming background when I took CS101. I found that being good at writing spaghetti code (or even simple OO code) that works is not something that puts you ahead of other students in a computer science course, and that you actually have to learn the course material in order to pass. Who would have guessed!

If people like me don't have to take CS101 then we're slowly but surely going to end up with a community of programmers/engineers who don't have a firm enough grasp of basic concepts in computer science, and they'll be worse at their jobs for it.

A better solution is to have after-school workshops for high school kids where they can prepare for a degree in CS. They way it ought to work is that math teachers in poor neighborhoods should keep and eye out for kids who are talented at math and recommend them for the CS workshops.

Now, I imagine this sort of discrete sorting of students will probably get you sued in the US, but it would work in most other countries.

The Ariane 6 sounds like it would entail a lot of pointless duplication of work that SpaceX has already done. Skylon should be funded, but there is no guarantee that it'll work.

I think the best way to get the European space launch industry back on track might be to take a hint from how the Chinese go about things and buy something like 100 Falcon 9 launches at above the normal going rate, with a special requirement that the rockets must be built in Europe.

Then SpaceX could either turn down this giant deal that would give them financial security for years, or they could accept it and build a factory somewhere in Europe, which would then cause knowledge and technology to seep out into the European space industry.