We don't currently possess the technology to extract that much energy from tectonics. By the time we do have the ability, if we live that long, we should have easier ways to make energy.

So we should be OK. Well, not US. But 20 or 30 generations from now.

Nice handle btw.

eBay slipped on this one because they detected the compromised account as merely a misuse of employee web privileges, a minor sort of issue perhaps to be mentioned by said employee's manager at their next review. Nobody noticed the scope of the issue until much later.

Anyway, remote employees are the rule everywhere these days. They're either the boss working from home or minions unworthy to have a company desk, or all the jobs that have been outsourced.

The plenty of projects going on these days where not a single person involved is actually in a physical office owned or operated by the actual companies involved.

I recently worked on a large IT project with one the huge IT companies you've heard of. While their main project manager was based domestically where the work was taking place, the ENTIRE remaining participation from huge IT was offshored. Most of the other third-party contractors (and there were a LOT of them on this, all touching extremely sensitive data) were also offshore. The contractor I worked for, ironically, is a foreign-owned company but all of our people on this one were domestic.

TANSTAASU

Robots almost universally expect and assume they will operate in a static universe where fixed obstacles don't move and random things don't happen.

Robot cars attempt to convert driving into a static arena by rapidly scanning, by having good maps, by knowing what is coming.

The problem for robots is that the universe likes to drop things into the middle of roads, that people like to step out between cars, that potholes will suddenly exist where they didn't before, that some doofus pushing a bicycle up a hill in the middle of a lane will happen.

And sometimes suddenly. And all at once. So what IS a robot car to do when the choice is hit two pedestrians or take the car off road over a cliff? Forget Asimov. His laws of robotics are irrelevant and always have been. This car has a choice: hurt two or hurt one? What will it do?

The answer is, hit the pedestrians. The car will do its best to cope with a sudden situation but it can't do any better here than a human driver. People drivers, I often see, are MUCH happier about crossing into opposing lanes of traffic thus risking a head-on collision than they are staying in their lane and coping with a pothole or even just a bump. The FIRST thing they do is violate that double yellow line rather than be even slightly inconvenienced by a jolt.

Crossing that line has no immediate consequence, as the car they are about to hit is several meters away. While the bump they knew was coming is avoided. Success! No bump. Now about that 4,000LB vehicle approaching at 45MPh. We takes our chances.

Even orbit is no big deal, really. If you lived in a house with a fenced in yard, orbit is like running around just inside the fence* all the way around the house. So you are at no point more than a few meters away from the house. Orbit is the same, just scaled up.

What we need to be doing is running down to the corner or across the street or through the woods to grandmother's house. Running around inside a fence is what dogs do, mindlessly making a path in the grass.

*why inside the fence and not outside? Because orbit means you are still in the grasp of gravity, you are just falling as fast as it's pulling. So things in orbit will eventually decay and fall down, just as the kid or dog running in the yard will eventually have to come inside. Things outside the fence could be equated to escape velocity and well, if it got that far, it's not coming back. Your kid has left for college and his/her own family. In Montana.

But in my mind, it's still not space or deep space as it is sometimes called. These terms should have been reserved for some place that is not still basically here, closer than the next biggest city on the ground.

"Space" should be at least further away than the moon, and "deep space" should be out beyond the orbit of Mars. You know, actually far away from here.

Arbitrary? No worse than Karman. And it's going to look damn ridiculous when we start claiming deep space is low Earth orbit when we all know from scifi deep space is really way way out there, where nobody can hear you scream. Deep Space Transport Craft Nixon of course will go no such place. It will taxi to the moon and back. Some kinda deep space. It's just going to sound silly.

Are you at ALL familiar with the Hilux they're speaking about? There is a very good reason to want THAT specific pickup over any other. It's immortal.

See for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Parts 2 and 3 also available.

Don't forget the Hilux options for "Able to float out to sea and still run afterward" and "building demolition device"

GM would charge a LOT for those features and they wouldn't actually work.

Has GM seen a modern mobile device? Oh they are magical things indeed! Maps, GPS, instant messaging, email, music streaming, podcasts, MP3s, even streaming live TV and video, almost anywhere.

And with bluetooth, all of that can be streamed right into the car audio system. Or you can use an aux cable, truly the tail of the magic fairy.

The best part, all of that is included with my phone plan. As much as a I want. Oh sure there's a cap, but exceeding it by a huge margin still wouldn't hit this $150 a month rate, and that cost there would be for something only usable in the car. My magic mobile? Goes with me where I go, and if you will excuse me, I am going to go now, if you get my meaning. But I'll be online the whole time.

Magic times these are!

30Km/s? That's 67,000 miles an hour. Good luck with that if you're not using some anti-friction/anti-inertia techniques.

My job has mutated over the years such that that I am now tasked with doing work on I don't actually know how to do, on custom systems I don't understand. As a result, I suck at it. I have told management this many times but they blink and look at me like I am speaking Martian and basically think I don't WANT to work.

Anyway, I end up with a pile of work I can't do and a few things I can do and it is often a struggle to stay awake. I mean a serious battle between me and gravity pulling my head down to the desk. Snacks doesn't help. Three cups of coffee does not help. Even walks don't help: I am very good at falling asleep in motion.

Yeah it scares me too. Terrifies me.

The combination of boredom, lack of mental stimulation, and lack of ability to do the work leaves me physically devastated.

I am told I am the least productive employee in the whole company so I am waiting around now to see if they will fire me, at which point I will go home and take a nap.

That's it exactly: Google needs fibre so it can say to Comcast and ATT, we won't pay for users on your networks who want Google services. Instead, we''ll service them ourselves with a better product at same/better pricing.

It puts the ball back in Comcast's court to say they'll match the service or pricing and dares them to keep the network open. It would look awful for Comcast to start blocking services. Customers with a choice might just flee.

Eventually Google will need their own wireless coverage. Mobile is where they will make most of their money, if not already, and that means all the carriers will want a cut

Greed about what? What would we, either as a race of creatures, or as a populated biosphere, or even as the raw planet itself, what would we have that an advanced race could not find somewhere else for less hassle?

This assumes advanced races couldn't just do "magic" with materials sciences and simply make whatever they needed. If they still need raw material, why come here?

Water? We know there's a LOT of it out there. Our own Oort cloud could be mined for water for close to forever and we wouldn't know about it or be able to do anything. They won't need our oceans.

Gold? Metals? Asteroids. Free. Nobody with spears guarding them. They don't need your dental fillings.

Food? Oh come on, advanced races surely have sorted out getting rid of biological needs like food and waste processing. So they won't need to eat us.

Reproduction? Laughable. Our reproductive process is ridiculous. And probably not compatible. We don't have horse-humans running around and our DNA is already close to the horse DNA. Alien DNA won't be that similar. It would have to be modified, tested, modified more, tested more, to get to a viable hybrid. Hmmm....

Toys? Now this is really the only reason for them to come here. A set of living toys. If all we are to aliens is a set of toys, then we have no hope. This is worse than if they wanted to come here to eat us and take our water. Being a toy means we're only here until somebody decides they want new toys.

We do have plenty of evidence. Something is definitely going on.

The real truth is that humanity is merely a curiosity at this point. We think very highly indeed of ourselves but we're barely better than zoo animals and we go out of our way to ensure we stay that way.

Those who have come here to see what's up haven't felt any need to establish an open, formal relationship. It brings no benefit to them. We have nothing to offer they can't get now while they continue to operate as they have, and there's nothing we can do about it. Zero. So why bother talking to us?

That's the really sad thing: it's not that we can't find ET or if there is or is not an ET at all; it's that ET is around and just doesn't care about us.

The real problem is the ( and ). It would have been possible to construct that sentence as a whole thought and finish it rather than put the last bit in ( ), It's one thought, one statement; there is no need do it the way it was done. You're not interjecting something. It's all one sentence.

I think in nearly every case, whatever is being said can be structured in a way to eliminate the need to ever use those damn things. If you have to use them, you need to redo whatever you are trying to day, because you should not need them. And yet I know plenty of people find it impossible to write anything without using them.

It just pushes me to find ways to avoid them (the parenthesis, I mean; not the people).

Jokes like that about Canadians not getting into fights are funny but also sad. The country has experienced huge growth recently driven by immigration from all parts of the world. Those people bring with them whatever cultural tendencies that had in their places of origin. And that includes violence, quick tempers, fighting, etc. Things normally not what you'd expect from Canadians.

There are already enclaves of people who moved en masse from home country to Canada where they live just as they did before, complete with their own codes of justice and morality which mean more to them than provincial law.

Some of it is muted by exposure and blending to the overall culture, it is true. But It's also safe to say Canada will continue to slowly be less and less "Canada" and more just a melting pot more like the US. There is no way to stop this short of ceasing the immigration options.

So enjoy making jokes while you can. Assuredly somewhere in Canada somebody will soon enough cut off their child's head for something on religious grounds, and others will obtain guns under hunting laws and instead use them on people.

Noting: I am USAmerican. But I work for Canadian company, which has nearly all immigrant employees in our Toronto headquarters. These are people who have nothing to do with Canada in any way, except that they happen to live there now instead of some place you see on the "tragedy today in..." news stories from some country overseas. They do not share any of the laid-back traits Canada is famous for. At all.

I also completely get that modern Canada was created in the first place by immigrants who displaced the "first peoples" much as the Indians were displaced in the US. I get that Canada wouldn't be Canada without ships full of people moving in. However, in the old days, you moved to a new country and eventually blended in for the good of all and because you had no choice. Your shared DNA made all strong. Nowadays you can move in and watch the same TV you had at home, and never integrate into anything new. Instead of making all stronger, this makes pockets of infection increasingly at odds with the body.

This same thing is happening in the US, of course. We're just used to it here. We happily kill each other and think nothing of it. I fear for Canada. This hasn't been their norm, but it will be.