I'm sort of surprised at the amount of vitriol toward Eric that comes up unprompted (at least by me) just because I'm interviewed on Slashdot. I'm going to take the high road and not participate in it.

Actually, we would have had a much less expensive plan, but we couldn't get it by the conservatives. It's called single-payer, and I've used it in Canada. It has also been available to me in a dozen other countries that I've worked in, but fortunately I never needed it there. It works pretty well. So well indeed that most civilized countries have it.

I'm sorry that you didn't understand my presentation. Or that you understood it and can't accept it. I've thought about it for a very long time and I'm pretty sure of it.

I think you have to look at where the funding comes from for Republican and conservative causes. Don't just look at candidate funding, even election advertising has a lot of funding that isn't straight to the candidate.

Although there might be no shortage of self-employed Republicans, they don't really call the shots for the party. It's the very deep pockets who do.

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

This "Star within a star" thing has been a phenomenon commonly known in Hollywood since the days Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

Certainly not. These are very small satellites, probably will be launched something like 20 at a time. Maybe 9 orbital planes with 20 satellites each?

Kind of like a social network of satellites :)

Seriously, this makes a lot of sense. At the low altitudes that these will fly, the power necessary to reach the satellites will be much lower than geosynchronous or even Iridium satellites. Mass producing small satellites probably is cheaper than building a few big ones, as well.

By not getting vaccinated, you're choosing to allow harmful microbes into your body. You choose to become a factory that create billions more of them and then spread them into to to the bodies of your unwilling victims.

It can be. If people like you were around when they started vaccinating for smallpox, you would have been responsible for countless millions of deaths by now. It would have made all of the drunk driving deaths in history look like a drop in the bucket.

This is the same as: Sober driver kills someone in an auto wreck: Liability limited to an increase in future insurance rates. Drunk driver kills someone: locck em up and throw away the key.

Do you advocate legalization of all irresponsible behaviors, including drunk driving?

Because CO2 is present in parts per million, whereas oxygen is around 20%. If amount of CO2 increases by a few hundred percent, the amount of oxygen drops by a small fraction of 1%. It is much easier and more accurate to measure the difference in CO2 concentrations than that of O2.

Perhaps you shouldn't be throwing barbs about global warming if this middle-school-level science wasn't already obvious to you.

You do realize that they're talking about indoor CO2 levels that are far in excess of the overall atmospheric levels related to global warming?

Moreover, they do not imply that the CO2 itself causes poor performance. It's clear that they're using it as a *measure* of poor ventilation, which is correlated with bad grades.

Maybe it was a little stuffy in the school where you were learning analytic reading skills.

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