Tool-making marks are quite distinctive. It's not a process that happens by accident, which is why you don't see naturally-created flint knives laying in riverbeds. If you look with a magnifying glass at a rock that has a sharp edge because it fell against another rock, and a rock that has a sharp edge because a human did it the difference is fairly obvious. Knowing which is which takes practice, of course.

It's unlikely that a "primitive" 60,000 years ago would put an edge on a rock and then bury it in a level deep enough to be mistaken for 3,300,000 years ago, and even less likely that the disturbance of the burial would not be noticed. Even less likely that your phantasmagorical "primitive" would know how to fake the patina of an extra three million years of aging on the worked surface.

You really have no idea how paleontologists and anthropologists work, do you?

There is an answer to this, I've done something similar with security devices. Ideally you would use a hub, if you can still find one, rather than a switch. You'll need the MAC addresses of each pump first, well use 00-12-34-56-78-9A and 00-12-34-56-78-9B. Set a fixed IP address on your laptop, for example 172.16.16.16, and turn off your wireless. Open a command prompt as an Administrator and enter:

arp -s 172.16.16.20 00-12-34-56-78-9A

arp -s 172.16.16.21 00-12-34-56-78-9B

Now your laptop thinks that you have pumps at address 172.16.16.20 and 172.16.16.21. Enjoy your extra time!

30 megabit Internet connection to the home? Give me that amount of terrible, please!

In the case of small bodies (such as spacecraft) the atmosphere can substitute for the third body. I would assume that if it is small enough a debris cloud like Saturn's rings could substitute over a long period of time, but the upper limit on that would have to be pretty low.

Glass hasn't "cratered hard", just the marketing people misjudged the market sector. It's very much alive and well, and being refocused towards market sectors that are actually interested in its utility, such as medicine, engineering, architecture and spelunking(?). Personally I loathe driving, the day of the self-driving car can't come soon enough for me (although it probably wouldn't let me grossly overload the suspension with landscaping blocks, so I will probably still be stuck driving my truck from time to time.) From "20 years away" in 2010 to 3 or 4 years away now, the advances have been astounding.

Didn't work with a lot of mainframes, but I know the VAX multi-CPU systems could do that and I would be surprised it IBM and Tandem didn't as well. Of course a "complex" network at that time was half a dozen nodes, but it's a matter of degree rather than a whole new paradigm.

I think you're giving the average citizen far too much credit. They see entire corporate IT systems taken over with dozen keystrokes on TV a dozen times a month, if you asked you might be surprised to find that an awful lot of people would immediately believe that an airplane could be taken over in flight the same way. The reason they don't worry about it is because they don't think about it, it never occurs to them. They never worried about box cutters being a hazard to everyone on a plane until after 911, not because they weren't but because it never occurred to them. A month later most of them were OK with being prohibited from carrying nail clippers.

The bottle opener on my key chain helped get me married. Back in the days before every bottle was a twist off I became really popular at some of the fiestas that I went to in Peru. By the time that the Fiesta de la Candelaria came around I was in good enough practice that I could almost keep up with my future in-laws' beer consumption, so was able to hang around long enough to be introduced to the stunning redhead I had seen hanging around.

Took the P-38 off my key chain years ago when the thing somehow managed to gouge me while I was climbing a tree.. It was very old and worn and wouldn't stay closed any more.

I have a "Drink Coca Cola" bottle opener that I found in my great-grandfathers basement after he died in 1975. I have a tendency to lose pretty much everything that isn't attached to me, but I have never lost that key chain. Even when I've lost other key chains that I was carrying for work, that's the one that I never lost. I'm getting almost superstitious about it.

I also have car keys and house keys, and a key that will open every access control cabinet and NVR server rack for a very large customer of my former employer. They let me keep the latter as a memento (after grinding all the teeth off it).

I don't think personal computers are the target for an OS like this, embedded hardware like access control panels, refinery crackers, antenna controllers and the like would be. A lot of that stuff still runs on TRON, this would probably be a replacement for that kind of stuff.

So you're not a US resident? Didn't realize that, but that's probably part of the reason you don't understand how SS is structured. It's not supported by taxes, it's a trust fund. Everyone pays in a certain percentage of their income and then withdraws after certain conditions have been met. It's currently stable for the next couple of decades, and could be made permanently funded if the utterly discriminatory income cap (people making over $118500/year don't pay anything into the fund beyond that amount) were removed. It actually works very well, better than any phantasmagorical free market system ever could. I'll never need it, but it's a wonderful thing that it exists for those who do.

What does Norquist or his ideas on taxes have to do with PNAC?

Apparently context and history is irrelevant, everything happens in a vacuum. No wonder its hard for you to make sense of this stuff.

You really need to go look at the original PNAC documents before you start talking about people like Norquist and his disciples. Apparently you're not aware of what truly vile human beings they are.

BTW, go talk to your (depending on how old you are) grandparents or great-grandparents, ask them what it was like before Social Security. It exists because it fills a definite need, one that cannot ever be supplied by the mystical magical free market.

Norquist was one of the main financial advisers during W's first administration, this was his advice since at least the mid-'80s. The position paper was from the early '90s. Fortunately Clinton never listened to him, but Norquist was probably one of the main reasons why the whole Iraq fiasco was charged to the country's credit card.

I certainly never expected Obama to be the second coming of FDR, but I certainly never expected Bush Lite, either.

After twice asking Bank of America to stop sending the stupid "convenience checks" linked to our credit card, someone stole some out of the mail box and wrote a $996 check. We got it canceled, and found out that they chose that amount because over $1000 was a felony and the police won't bother investigating misdemeanor fraud. BoA cancelled our card and reissued new ones immediately, but my wife was in Peru. I tried to stop or delay the cancellation but their customer service person said that it was required, she didn't have a choice. Fortunately Rosa had a debit card and was able to withdraw cash until I could overnight the new one down to her when it arrived a week later, but she would have had problems if she were in a smaller town.

BoA finally stopped sending the checks after that.