If we're being fanciful, then we could just as easily say "it took humans 4 billion years and change to colonize the Western Hemisphere of planet Earth. The fact that they didn't for most of that is irrelevant." Or substitute 13 billion years instead and say "the fact that neither existed for most of that is irrelevant." The fact still remains that in cosmological terms, things have been around for a really, really, really long time in comparison to the minute instant that we as a species have existed, let alone been able to contemplate questions like how long we as a species have been around in comparison to the age of the universe!

You're off by a decimal place there in how long humans have existed on this planet.

Science is intended more to adapt an actual "theory" over time to better suit the evidence that it is presented with until it increasingly encompasses all edge cases that relate to the topic in question. That "adaption" can be considered disproving with an immediate re-creation of an alternate theory moments later to encompass the changing circumstances. In that narrow world view, than yes, disproving of a scientific theory can happen quite regularly, simply because there's a LOT of science going on.

On the flip side, actually "proving" something is exceptionally hard work. It is saying that at no point, ever, under any circumstances in this or any conceivable universe, with any natural or unnatural influence could this situation *EVER* take place for *ANY* reason. These are the rules, these are how things behave, and this is how things will always, and forever behave; EXACTLY like this and there's not a damn thing that anyone including the hand of God himself could do to change that.

Now think about that for a second and the level of difficulty involved in actually "proving" something and considering it "proved", solved forever and ever, and letting us as a species move on to bigger and better things. And that's ultimately the problem. Saying that something is "proved" means that there is nothing more that could ever be known about that topic, and that nothing could ever impact that field, be it further advances anywhere else, supernatural influence, extra dimensional characteristics, weird things that we haven't even considered possible... In most cases a theory remains "good enough". Gravity is one such theory. We know that it exists, we know how it works, we know how to calculate it, we know how to utilize it's traits for all kinds of things. But "proving" that water goes downhill ... It's something that we take for granted and require to base civilization as a whole on, through irrigation and plumbing. Something doesn't need to be "proved" to be immeasurably useful in the daily lives of incalculable people over countless generations. You may think that this is getting pedantic, and it is, but at the same point, it is the difference in Science between "Proving" a theory and not.

Referring to a simple and previously untested idea as what you've described in your swan scenario as a "theory" is what is ultimately damaging the credibility of the term in public perception.

What CenturyLink states in their complaint isn't with regards to "rich" and "poor" neighborhoods, it's about being able to build in one geographic area concurrently without needing to hire exponentially more staff. Building concurrently across a large geographic area requires a large amount of resources in terms of surveying, project management, construction, validation, installation, testing, engineering, laying pipe, road work, pole work (in many cases with cooperation with various other organizations and their respective labor), possible availability of heavy construction equipment, lead time on supplies (copper, fiber, ...) ... And when in certain regions of the country when you only have 6 months of the year to do such work due to frost concerns, it makes things much more difficult when considering very large projects spanning an entire market. Comcast's insistence of concurrency or nothing means "same season for everyone in a market or you don't do it."

In one case, it's a nice aspect of Universal Access to say that *everyone* must receive access from incumbent carriers for a reasonable cost, in a reasonable timeframe for the same price as other customers in that market. It is also nice that someone is pressing for things like that to take place, however the spirit was always intended for rural areas to receive connectivity that would normally be ignored due to the high costs of doing so relative to major metropolitan areas, not as a way of stifling competition between two incumbents.

The intent behind these rules has become lost. While electricity or phone lines have remained fungible, additional telecommunications services have been added to "phone lines" with one breath so that said lines could be subsidized by tax dollars, and yet declared "entertainment services" in another breath so that they could be unregulated.

Through updating the law to remove either of these loopholes, the first of many steps can be taken towards improving the situation. Ultimately, major telecommunications policy reforms must be adopted to reflect the way the world functions today.

And as a politician, it could safely go either way. She could either be adept at manipulating everyone for her own aspirations, or what you see could in fact be what you get... Without studying her particular voting record and speaking history, it is difficult to say for sure.

You know that, and I know that, and 95% of the general public know that, and that's an extremely admirable trait and should be a requirement in it's own right. But does Senator Caskill know that?

Her comment of "Everywhere I go people now have cameras. And police officers are now at a disadvantage, because someone can tape the last part of an encounter and not tape the first part of the encounter. And it gives the impression that the police officer has overreacted when they haven't." seems to indicate otherwise.

It seems to indicate that the poor, defenseless disenfranchised police officers are the victims in all of this, and won't someone please think of *their* rights to be safe from the vindictive John Q. Public who seeks nothing more than harass those underpaid and under appreciated public servants who put their lives on the line ever single day?

We completely agree on the subject that robotic exploration is extremely important and can be done in a far more effective fashion than human exploration at this time. However at a certain point we also need to accept that prior to reaching out to targets beyond our star system (let alone specifically for inhabitable worlds that we as a species could one day hope to colonize!) we should also consider looking at some of our celestial neighbors. Very comprehensive studies can be conducted on our own Solar System and places that can be exploited within our lifetimes in comparison to the ice age that it would take to travel the 40,680,272,100,000 km (4.3 light years) to get to the nearest star, which *may* house a planet 0.04 AU from it's star with a surface temperature of 1200 C, but more likely we'd need to venture the leap ice age or two to reach the 144,651,479,000,000 km (15.29 light years) bringing us to the closest known planet. Even if we could somehow find some way, somehow of accelerating to just 1% the speed of light and let robot probes explore and relay back the data, we're still talking about 153 years to reach there. And the level of effort to accomplish that engineering feet is frankly well beyond us as a species considering the "success rate" that we have at having probes successfully reach other planets in our Solar System. We need to take smaller steps. Goals are great, I love goals, I love lofty goals in fact, but there needs to be specific actionable steps to be able to execute upon those goals and at present there haven't been any. Just layers upon layers of political spin.

It's also worth noting that even ignoring the hard radiation concerns, we as a species have had a really hard time simply leaving our Solar System, let alone considering the undertaking that would be involved with reaching a planet in another System, with living, breathing humans! The emphasis on putting more Kepler class satellites in orbit before we're willing to as a species commit to designing a launch vehicle that would allow us to return a human to the surface of the Moon, let alone commit to long term habitation there, then there isn't much point considering the billions of dollars of effort required today on the intellectual jerk-off session of "are there 4,781 habitable exoplanets or 3,781,574 habitable exoplanets *AND* exomoons?" Getting us as a species back to the moon, let alone another planet in our Solar System is a requirement before we consider the several orders of magnitude differences in engineering effort, understanding, skill and expertise of getting a person to another star system. And once we start to tackle those sorts of problems, the problems like getting a more complete view of the night sky, or better satellites with more up-to-date satellites solves itself.

It's deceptive. At this point in time, the universe was quite small relatively speaking. As such, the density of those materials was still sufficiently high that the materials were in a persistent plasma state even though they weren't a "star", however fusion was still taking place converting Hydrogen to Helium. At this point, we're talking about all matter in the Universe occupying something not much larger than the Milky Way after all, maybe a little larger considering that we're talking about very, very fast expansion of the universe and the difference of a second amounts to a light year or so of growth. As the Universe continued to expand outwards and the material became less dense, it allowed for the material to actually split apart from one giant clump of hydrogen, helium and lithium and begin to actually get some empty space. As that empty space formed, then this plasmatic cloud could coalesce into the first stars. As long as there was these plasma clouds and not "empty space", then yes, there was "nothing" yet in which the material could *cool* into.

"My fellow Earthicans, we enjoy so much freedom it's almost sickening. We're free to choose which hand our sex-monitoring chip is implanted in. And if we don't want to pay our taxes, why, we're free to spend a weekend with the Pain Monster." ~Richard Nixon

Guns don't kill people, apes with guns kill people..

One signal can spawn a queue to form, and a queue need not contain multiple parties, simply a party queueing.

Example 1: A cop beats up an unarmed black man on a street corner in Harlem mid-day because he "looked at him wrong", one act leads to a larger action from multiple parties. (Signal -> Queue of Multiple Parties)
Example 2: Said cop comes back to the station, gets a warning and is told "don't do it again or you'll be suspended." (A queue of a single element relying on a conditional signal.)

cue = signal.
queue = line.

The average human head is 14.5cm x 23cm x 20cm, so you are quite correct that it would mean that the average human head would occupy less than 1 pixel regardless of which axis it was observed across.

The largest recorded human head was 15.9cm x 25.5cm x 23.9cm, meaning that said person could require a second pixel, if they were observed in the appropriate axis.

It is important to note that if a person was observed laying down on the ground, they would occupy *up to* 10 pixels in the case of the world's tallest person, but the average would only require 6.

Shhh... You aren't supposed to bring facts into a "ZOMFG SCARY HEADLINE!" debate!