Presumably if the rest of the world gets a similar standard of living then they will have similar views on family size and birthrate will drop.

It would be good to see a chart similar to this one but showing the top few drivers of demand in each sector. For example, is the leading use of industrial sector energy to produce those infernal blister packs for retail goods ?

A Mr. Fusion, system would have been a better fit for the Garbage collection sector.

respect need not be earned, it cannot be lost, it is an aspect of me that I give to someone else. It has nothing to do with the person I give it to. It is the bare minimum I am willing to give to my worst enemy. It is a measure of me not them and it starts and ends at the maximum level I can muster.

Trust on the other hand can be created and destroyed, on an individual and collective basis based on past actions and for something truly new, it starts at none

Sadly, I measure it every day. I can only conclude that the earth is putting on weight.

unlike natural births, the exact timing of many C sections is planned. Why not plan the procedure for a Friday ?

Maybe it also suits the families (GPs can be in town for the weekend etc.)

So, in the space of an hour this person goes from being trusted enough to control the safety of 1000s of air passengers to not being trustworthy with a box of matches. Do we not monitor people in these positions better ?

So double the dole and tax it 50% that should cure the problem and the poor will be self financing, get them off the backs of the rich.

They do both, then when someone says "I did not register it yet, it was only built 2 days ago" you bring out the Google images.

It's nice to think, per the Zuckerberg cheerleading video, that I may be creating 2.6 local jobs (but I suspect I'm just creating 0.0001 extremely highly paid jobs). If microsoft wants to create high-end overseas I say encourage it. Indians can benefit from highly skilled jobs too, and in the end, we will all benefit if the world as a whole drags itself into a more middle class existence. To my mind it only breaks down when people earn so much money that they stop spending it.

Why does this have to depend on a magic string (â€) at all ? In this day and age are there not better ways to securely, out-of-band, tag information for special purposes ?

There may not be any data-only USB cables, I don't know. But it's perfectly reasonable to transmit data over just a differential pair. LVDS etc. do it just fine with no separate ground and I can't think of any reason why one could not detect device connection. I'm not saying that it does work, just that it could.

I'm sure I've installed minimal gentoo and Debian systems that fit that description.

I'd like to think that, among people of faith, you are in the majority in having sufficient faith to believe that you might have been "endowed" with the capability for critical thinking and that it's reasonable to use that faculty (if for no other reason than to uncover more to wonder at the mystery of).

I don't share your beliefs in a creator, but when I consider the position of people that do, I can't for the life of me see why anyone should consider critical thinking to be unholy. Unless they're just plain scared that it will unseat their "fixed beliefs", which seems to be rooted in insecurity rather than faith.

Hey, if you can come up with a good explanation of why 2+2=5 and it passes muster with the math community then go for it, it could be the next math breakthrough. But most kids working their way through school will stick with 2+2=4 and get full marks for it. Common core seems like a perfectly reasonable approach to education to me, if anything I wish it went further than it does in prompting kids to explore why they know what they know.