Unbundling the various entertainment packages is not what I want. I want the internet connection and to hell with the entertainment. There are only a very few programs I watch and the rest is just crap and profit redistribution.

If the cable monopoly is broken (Comcast and TWM in my area) there is sufficient competition to deliver entertainment to picky people for a reasonable price.

Every capable passenger should have an airline-approved gun with airline-approved ammo, and be forced to fire anything they brought with them into a test cabinet at the airport to make sure it is the right stuff. It should be small caliber, FMJ, subsonic. It should be carried openly where it can be accessible.

This will cause would-be terrorists to stick to external methods, like missiles.

Think of the money and hassle we would save over the TSA.

Hmmm. there is a lot more noise in the global temperature data than there is the atmospheric concentration of CO2.

I did not find them communistic, fluffy or lovely. More like porcupines with adamantine quills.. The Culture is innately competitive and meddlesome. Wage-slave rituals are no longer applicable because resources are almost unlimited. the former is a plausible outcome of the latter, which is also plausible given the Culture's technology.

Well..they are in space. So is Earth.

A good writer invents interesting characters and lets them interact. A good SF writer invents whole worlds and plants the characters in it. All the excuses about character-driven stories are just that - excuses, often by authors who don't understand enough about science to carry a good SF world line, and who can't do the research to find a good SF "hook" and make it work. Look up SF or go into a book store and you will see Star Trek, Star Wars and other space operas.
Clarke's "Childhood's End", or Niven's "Ringworld" are real SF. "Blood Music", "Neutron Star" are about worlds that are scientifically plausible but far from human. There are too few like that.

I write SF, and I know, first hand, how hard it is match that standard.

Look at Kay Kenyon, "Bright of Sky" and sequels, look at Iaian Banks "culture" series. I won't tout my stuff here, but you can reply and get references.

Population statistics show that a culture where there is a somewhat inflexible elite class with a great deal more resources than the commoner class does not survive when the fitness landscape gets rugged and the carrying capacity of the environment gets tight. This type of culture has a population implosion and a pretty good possibility of extinction. (ref, the "HANDY" model).

I seems to me that a selfish model leads to just such a state and it will eventually collapse. The article does not deal with such issues as the environment or the establishment of elites.

I was drafted into becoming a coder when the IT department at a huge company failed to come up with a working payroll system in time to pay 500 people. I wrote it in a week.

I've had to learn over 20 languages, from Cobol to Lisp to GPSS to ADA to C. I've worked on operating systems, compilers, real-time systems and IT. Now I'm learning Python, Django and writing an IOS app.

Oh, yeah, I'm 72 years old. No certs - they didn't exist and I never got any. Anyone want to challenge my credentials?

I spent years working on AI. It was the wrong problem. Elon may be right that AI could be a hazard, but artificial intelligence is not nearly as big a problem as natural stupidity.

The GEICO gecko evolved speech with a strange pseudo-Brit accent in just about that length of time. I hear he is mated to a female, Elizardbreath. But he has a reptile disfunction...

Putin will then be the first President to join the orbit of the space station with a ten second lag. Will Medvedev then ascend?

You can always get the "correct" number by adding a fudge factor in to the actual data. TFA is a good example.

First, the "externals" are larger than the real costs of several sources. By far the largest factor in external costs is "climate change" which is itself a fudge factor on the real data. Finally, TFA shows an error bar in the externals which is about the same size as the externals. In other words, the external cost COULD be close to zero.

TFA says the snowflake is a good model for networks that are inexpensive to repair, not necessarily robust. Considering that most repairs will happen at level 2 or level 3, that may be true ON AVERAGE. As the number of total nodes grows, I bet there is a point where the central node, which supports the most connections, becomes the expected common failure mode of this kind of network. Not only is the central node, by necessity, the most complex and by far the most expensive to repair (every level 1 function is down at this point), because of its complexity it may also have the shortest mean time between failures.

As soon as you see this and try to go back to a redundant central node, the next level nodes become vulnerable. And so on. Vulnerability propagates down the levels. The snowflake, er, melts down.

Maybe there needs to be a limit to the number of branches per node....but then you will have more than 3 levels.

I think it;s a great idea. Context is essential to history. The parched, knothole view I got in high school was worthless. This big view is right on. Let's hope some revisionist scum do not try to make this into political ideology.

Except for the money, Gates seems to be staying out of the lesson planning.

I've never used a marine GPS that could not correct for magnetic variation and display the magnetic course. If you have one that can only display true north, it is an el cheapo.

Your compass probably needs to be swung.

With all those errors, you probably shouldn't be going 14.4 knots. Or, if you are, I should be aboard to calibrate your instruments correctly. I'm a USCG Master with thousands of hours of blue water sailing and race experience.

Respondent who says you must publish your raw data and the methods you use to smooth or adjust that data is correct. You need to give others
  scientists the full facts to reproduce your experiment or it goes into the Journal of Unreproducible Results.

SO THAT's the way life got seeded on Earth! Mis-directed panspermia!