They have a column with fatal accidents per billion miles driven. German is still better off than the USA: 4.9 vs 7.6. Italy's value is not available. Not many countries are providing that value. The PDF you linked is about 1994, Wipedia is about 2012 but I confess I didn't opened the sources.

Anyway, most accidents are within cities in Italy (but there is where most people live and work almost in every country). They are almost 3 times the ones on highways and other roads but casualties in cities are 3 times less than the ones for crashes outside cities. So yes, speed kills. You can get a report about 2012 here http://www.istat.it/en/files/2... It's in Italian but you can look at the diagram at the end of the first page. Red line: injured. Gray line: casualties. Blue line: accidents. The scale on the left is for injuries and accidents, the one on the right for casualties. They are official figures. From a table in the next page you can see we had -45% casualties in 11 years. The innovations I can remember are: more stict limits with cameras on the highways (an average speed of 140 is usually safe now, you could do anything if nobody was watching years ago), more alcohol tests on Saturday night (the most dangerous time of the week), a penalty points system for driver licenses.

I live in Italy not exactly what you would think about as a model of driving culture (especially if seen from far away) but anyway... According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... these are the values for Road fatalities per 100 000 inhabitants per year and Road fatalities per 100 000 motor vehicles:

Germany, no limit on highways: 4.3, 6.9
Italy, 130 km/h (81.25 mph): 6.2, 7.6
USA: 11.6, 13.6

So yes, there seem to be something wrong in the American approach to driving. Maybe it's time to fix it so you can eventually raise the limit and save a lot of time. I had to crawl at 55 on the South West interstates many years ago and it's not the fondest memory I have of that vacation.

Point 1 was explained in TFA. They calculated that if the black hole was spinning fast enough and the planet was tidal locked to it, it could survive. They also explain how those huge waves work and why the sea was so shallow there. Furthermore, they say that the light comes from the accretion disk, which is cooling down and not falling in to the black hole at the moment. If it did it would produce X rays and zap the astronauts to death.

Points 2 and 3. I agree with you. Let's say that the pentadimensional aliens/humans found a way to get out of there. Anyway you can look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... and there was an article about that subject on Scientific American in February 2009. Gargantua's singularity wasn't naked but I remember a paper about how to remove an event horizon (adding more spin to the black hole) and another paper with a rebuttal of the technique. I can't find them again now.

Point 4. I don't understand that too. After all the light gets out. Why not radio waves?

Point 5. Agreed, it's a theory without a proof. Let's say it's an intuition. There might also be a casuality/time paradox there (Norad's coordinates being known because they've been sent after being known) but who knows how time really works.

Finally, to be pedantic, the main vessel didn't escape from Gargantua (it didn't have to). It just changed orbit to an higher aphelion with a slingshot manoeuvre to reach Edmunds' planet. Not different than getting from Earth to Jupiter with a sligshot around the sun. It takes less fuel than having to reach escape velocity.

*Warming: (mild) spoilers follow*

They leave Earth with a Saturn V like rocket and they take 2 years to go to Saturn. That contrasts Cassini's and Pioneer 11's 6.5 years to get there and the 3 years for the two Voyager probes. Let's say that 2 years is within the bounds of what we could achieve with our technology if we really have to hurry up.

On the other side of the wormhole they do all sort of manouvres landing on (easy) and leaving planets (difficult) with only a small craft (the Ranger). One would expect you need at least a large rocket to lift off from a planet with 80% of Earth's gravity (the ice world).

It seems they burnt normal fuel in the Solar system and used some very energetic fuel later on. Anyway, who cares, it's only fiction :-)

By the way, does anybody know what kind of rocket would be required to leave Mars and fly back to Earth?

Right :-)
Let me see... the smallest sextuplet is from 3 to 17 but this is not a sextuplet because max - min != 16. I don't want to prove already proved theorems (nor google them) but probably the extremes of a sextuplet made of large numbers must be separated by 16 because of the multiples of 2 3 5 and 7. Maybe there are occasionally more packed sequences of 6 primes but maybe there aren't past some not too large number. Again, it's either a theorem proved by somebody else or some already made conjecture :-)

From TFA

A prime sextuplet consists of six prime numbers packed together as tightly as possible. For sextuplets, "as tightly as possible" means that the largest is 16 plus the smallest of the numbers.

So it's not 6 consecutive odd numbers that happen to be prime. That's impossible because of the multiples of 3 and 5. This is the lowest sextuplet: 3 5 7 11 13 17 19.

Some companies over there figured out they can make money by selling voting machines abd started lobbying for them. We have less electronics companies in Europe so we've been spared with that until now. Paper and pencil are just right for the task.

Due to a well known law of headlines I'd reply No, but if you copy Europe the answer will be Yes. In this case Europe has the advantage of a fragmented market. Different countries, different languages, different operators and different regulations led to competition. No pan-European monopolist.

I don't know if this is widespread (I think it is) but where I live (Italy) unbundling is mandatory and we have new operators using the cables of the former monopolist. In some areas the former monopolist is using the cables of newer companies. There are at least three different fiber networks, unfortunately not particularly fast. 100 Mb/s download and 10 Mb/s upload is the norm for fiber (ADSL goes up to 20 or 30 Mbps with the usual caveats of that technology). I got the feeling that the operators agreed to settle on that and save some money. Fiber was at 10/10 Mb/s 14 years ago. Competiion is never enough.

So, I don't recommend breaking up the US and switching to lots of different languages :-) but maybe you might break down your monopolists, create operators at state level and force unbundling. I read what happened to the Baby Bells and it seems that it worked well for a while. Do it again and by 2020 you'll evaluate what happened and adapt the legislation.

Maybe not too little, but yes, it's too late. They should have embraced and estinguished the other platforms when they had a virtual monopoly on both the desktop and the server. In the late 90s it was common to write Java web applications and make them run on Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0. Enterprises were comfortable with Windows and were wary of Linux (unproven technology). It took over in the 2000s.

About being it too little: are they going to port Visual Studio to OS X and Linux?

I read the Dune books when I was a kid and loved them. I watched the Dune movie and regretted it. Damage being done, I watched the Dune 3 episode serial years later and that was bearable but I learnt not to watch movies based on books I loved. Their images will prevail on my imagined faces and worlds and this is not good. Furthermore they can hardly improve on something that I already considered very good.

That's why I didn't watch the Lord of the Rings, or The Hobbit, or Ender's Game and probably many other movies.

However I watched Bladerunner way before knowing it was taken from a book. I was too young to know about Philip Dick yet. Years later I read the book and was positively amazed about the duality between the book and the movie. Still don't know which one is better but they can coexist because of the differences. For sure the movie's images are stronger the the book's ones in my mind.

There are only a few ten of thousand cars in the world that have to solve a win-the-race problem. Most of cars must solve the problem go-buying-something-at-the-shopping-center. An Honda Civic wins that race easily against an Indy Car especially if you buy a week's worth of stuff.

Computer analogy: programs written in not so efficient languages can win races to delivery and keep their business alive. An example: GitHub.

To put this in perspective, Facebook states to be generating 4 PB per day, so 3.6 times more than the LHC. Does anybody know about anything generating more data than that?

I'm not familiar with OSX but won't it be possible to circumvent those calls home by routing them to a local app that takes those data and throws them away?

(Waiting for Apple to tell us why they knowing those information is good for us.)

I feel your pain. I don't use any language that uses spaces to define the structure of code. They made me lose too much time.

Obviously that data center would be virtual. My point was: why should we jail data in a country if any agency from around the world can still crack into it over the Internet? To make that measure effective we must prevent people from connecting to a data center in another county, service owners included. They must fly there or hire somebody living there. The service will be partitioned by country with no exchange of data whatsoever. Feasible but costly for Google, impossible for any small startup. A consequence: want to send email from the USA to somebody in Germany. Sorry, no route to host. Want to post to /. from Germany? Sorry, no route to host unless /. has a German site which you won't be able to reach from the USA. That's what I call to "break the Internet". Disclaimer: I don't like that future and I'm not advocating it.

Actually Google and the other big companies might even like it because it will destroy competition from below. They won't mind creating branch offices around the world with local data centers (and code distribution by planes) if it's the only way to keep doing business.