Even more than the inevitable cash grab, I'd be worried that this kind of payment scheme would lead to a lack of investment in upgraded infrastructure. If people get charged per bit, they will use less. Less demand leads to less upgrading of lines, and the people who do actually need massive data throughput, for stuff like, for example, off-site redundant systems, can't actually get what they need at all. People will always get charged for what they want compared to what the average is, no matter how much it would cost to upgrade everyone to that level. As an example of that: about 5 years ago a customer was paying â1k a month for a fast (for here) no contention line. Now you can get the same speed with 5:1 contention for about â30 a month.

Related to the above and regarding the title of the article, why would big Silicon Valley heads care if Washington DID implode? They are all sitting on massive warchests of "foreign" money sitting in US dollar accounts in American banks beloning to their foreign subsidiaries for tax avoidance purposes. This money will NEVER be brought home (in terms of paying tax: it is actually back in America), it just sits there piling up, acting as a bank account, and when someone cashes in his shares he pays longterm capital gains on the value of his shares, which includes a bit of that massive pile of cash. Now, if the debt ceiling is breached.... US treasury bond interest rates will go up, and bank interest rates will rise as a result. Good result if you have several tens of billions of dollars to put into a long term deposit account.

Which one? Taxation to support an oversized army, not having a big enough army, climate change, or having the Greeks in charge?

This article from a few weeks back could provide a possible entry point for beginning to decipher texts like that. Since it relies not on dictionaries, but rather the relationships between words, it may be possible to narrow down the meanings of words in unknown languages into smaller groups of possible translations, or at least I imagine so from reading it.

One of the best things about automated cars will be the ability to get home after drinking. Not much of an issue in built up areas with public transport, but being able to get home from the pub will be great for the social lives of people in rural areas.

I am going to assume then that you are one of those assholes who are so absolutely arrogant you feel you can do whatever you like and fuck the consequences for everyone else? Those people are usually labeled as criminals.

If you are talking about a major impact that does not cause human extinction, we could still be talking about loss of a significant proprtion of the species through a very very long winter. If we had a 20 year long global winter, we'd probably still be able to grow food in equatorial and tropical regions. Guess its a good thing we have invested in making sure the best infrastructure and the brightest minds are in places like central Africa, Equador, and south Asia. We'll only lose all the hangers on and lazy people in noerthern Eurasia and north America. Also a good thing that all the textbooks are in Swahili and Mara.

"Furthermore, we identify ve additional historical mass extinction events that might be explained by the motion of the Sun around our Galaxy."
Where is the claim to have explained everything? I think there is an inherent suggestion in the above that further investigation is warranted. The paper does propose more than one possible mechanism, and I would guess that it could be that there have been more than one respnsible for historical events. I see this paper as merely saying that interesting stuff can happen when you're in a more interesting part of the galaxy.

Did you get to vote on that then?

The amount of light from the sun is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the sun. For Earth, that would mean we receive at aphelion 93.533% of we get at perihelion. On Uranus due to its more eccentric orbit, that figure is 83.716%. Those figures are based on orbital data on wikipedia so may not be entirely accurate, but it does show that Uranus is more susceptible to change based on what part of its orbital cycle it is in than Earth is.