Two words: cloud city.

Sounds preposterous, I know, but it's almost certainly easier than colonizing the first completely habitable earth-like exoplanet (and the article actually makes it sound more plausible than the name implies). That's not to say we should stop looking for them, of course...far from it. Those are the best chance we have to find extraterrestrial life, intelligent or otherwise.

The important point, I believe, is that incarceration shouldn't be the first response for non-violent criminals. Which makes a whole goddamn lot of sense, the massive snark in the comments here notwithstanding. Yeah, we might end up having to incarcerate some, or maybe even a majority of them, but I guarantee you we end up with less overburdened prisons and more tax-paying, productive members of society.

As for the guy headed to prison for almost 3 years, he should've been hit with fines and/or wage garnishment the first time they caught him. If he kept it up after that, that's when you start hitting him with heavier fines, community service, confiscating tech, computer restrictions, etc. Wage garnishment need not be as draconian as some of the other commenters have said. They know they have to make it worthwhile for the person to work. Yeah, he might quit his job and refuse to get a new one and end up in jail anyway, but he might not, and that would be better for everybody.

Just so. In fact, these days it seems like libraries are more about being community centers than a place to borrow books. Where I live now it's not quite as noticeable, but in my previous city there was always a line to get on the computers, but hardly anybody browsing the stacks.

My library hosts story time for kids, book/movie/anime clubs, beginner PC classes (typing, office software), board game nights, arts and crafts for kids, arts and crafts for adults...all free. During tax time, they have all the forms and information you might need, and they provide information sessions and classes on free e-filing. They also host paid events; recently they had a LEGO exhibit with competitions for kids and open build time, and a Tor editor and author Q&A session where they critiqued the first couple pages of attendees' stories. Granted these things could be hosted elsewhere, but being at the library makes it more likely that I'll hear about it and far more likely that I'll go.

Also, my library also gives me access to subscription sites, including ebook and audiobook sites. I can pay $100 per year to subscribe to ancestry.com, or I could go to my library. I can pay $260 to get lifetime access to a single language on RocketLanguages, or I could go to my library and get access to every course on every language they have for free. While the interface isn't as slick as Duolingo, there are more languages available and it just feels like a better way for me to learn.

And of course there are the books themselves. My city has a pretty solid collection of sci-fi/fantasy, though it's not quite as exhaustive as my previous city. One nice thing they do here is try to have plenty of copies of the first books in a series, something that was a big annoyance before. I can't remember how many times I saw an interesting book while browsing, only to find out it is a sequel and I'd have to request the first one. I could also check out e-readers themselves, something that is relatively new both here and my last city.

TL;DR: you might replace one single aspect of libraries with something like Kindle Unlimited (and poorly at that), but that's not all libraries provide. Not by a long shot.

I'd like to see (and I think this is where things are going) displays that combine or simplify information from sensors.

My car should basically build a mini-map of vehicles around me, potential dangers, and so on. I don't need to see it on the HUD, but perhaps just arrows (color-coded and/or faded with distance) pointing to other cars in case I don't see them. Arrows toward nearby emergency vehicles would be helpful, too, since I can never tell what direction the siren comes from. It should estimate braking distance and monitor driving conditions, and warn me if I'm too close to the car in front or behind me, or if I'm getting too close to anything beside me. That's combining knowledge of the vehicle (weight and braking info), GPS, cameras/range sensors, and current weather information.

I would like performance displays as well. Checking the tach and speedometer is all well and good, but I like to keep an eye on efficiency gauges when the car I'm driving supports it. More to the point, I'd like my car to tell me how fuel efficiency might change if I sped up or slowed down, being mindful of course about the speed limit. I'm picturing a HUD showing a small slice of an estimated efficiency curve with a marker for the speed limit. Maybe a fancier version would take into account information about the terrain and surrounding vehicles to somehow suggest optimal speeds for efficiency and safety. I want my car to notice when efficiency doesn't meet expectations, too, and tell me if tire pressure is off nominal, the car weighs more than expected, and so on.

Lastly, I want to be able to bring up lots of information on startup that disappears when I'm moving or in gear. I want to know how approximately how many miles I have until empty, how my car's fluids are doing (including things like oil purity, not just level), how my car's my battery, tires, brake pads, air filter and so on are doing, safety information (everybody is buckled up, emergency break is off, lights are on if not automatic), and so on.

Or, for the less altruistic out there, write tutorials, put them on your own blog and youtube, link them from the project's wiki in a reasonable, completely non-spammy way (e.g. copy the content, attribute it to your blog with a clearly marked external link), and make a dollar or two from advertising.

Or, if you have the money to spend, offer a bounty.

That's good to know for future reference, though every company I've worked for has offered those things to its employees and contractors.

I posted this above, but in my experience, when Southwest announces boarding procedures, they almost always include a special perk for families traveling together that they can board with the family member that has the lowest ticket. This might not be fair, but it is something they have always done in the past both in my experience and the guy in the article's experience. Now the guy was probably upset and embarrassed, so it's entirely possible he wasn't entirely honest about how rude the attendant really was, but I want to be sure the part about family boarding is clear.

I don't quite follow your logic there. To sit together, families should...wait until more people get on the plane? Young children aren't allowed to sit alone, so if the aisles and windows filled up, someone would have to move so they can sit together. And that's not to mention a higher chance of small children getting angry and loud in the jetway because it takes a long time to board the plane, etc. I know Slashdot can be fairly hostile to people with kids, but giving families the ability to cut ahead of others is really in everybody's best interests. Give me generally annoyed Slashdot posts well after the fact over kids whining or crying in a stuffy aircraft cabin any day.

Regardless, it was a perk that Southwest offered to families that we and the guy in TFA expected to receive but, apparently, certain employees do not offer. I'm fairly certain they used to announce that families could board with the member who had the lowest ticket. In fact, it's been a year or so since it happened, but I'm pretty sure we asked the gate attendant on our return trip what the policy is, and they were surprised that we were told that we couldn't do so.

Agreed. I had the exact same experience as the guy in the article. I had a pretty low A group ticket - one of the first numbers you can get without paying extra - but my wife and kids had B group tickets. We'd flown Southwest four to six times a year for the past six years, and they always let us all board in A group when this happened (which was fairly often, since using points and free flights usually means making separate orders), except for the last time we flew with them. They tried to claim that it has always been against their policy, which was obviously BS even before I saw this story.

I know, it isn't really a huge deal since we still got seats together, but it is embarrassing and frustrating to be called out and forced to switch lines like that, so I understand the guy's lashing out on Twitter. But of course, hardly anybody would have seen the tweet until the gate attendant went way overboard in response. Now, instead of one person looking bad to a few people, the whole company looks bad to the readership of major news sites. Way to go, Kimberly.

Dimpling and pebbling is there to disrupt laminar flow; to introduce a small, turbulent boundary layer in order to reduce wake drag. If you compare the streamlines of a ping pong ball to a golf ball, the flow is laminar longer around the ping pong ball, but the flow separates sooner, creating a larger wake. Here is a more thorough explanation.

That also raises the question: do the dimples really help everywhere on a car? I'd love to see some wind tunnel testing and CFD analysis of the Mythbusters' dimpled car. An 11% improvement is pretty significant, but there are lots of uncertainties: weight differences, center of mass differences, how aerodynamic the car was in the first place... I strongly suspect that, in general, it would be more helpful to only introduce dimples at strategic locations: i.e. the bumpers, undercarriage, and other body panels where the flow eventually separates.

Also, aren't dolphins pretty darn smooth?

Pessimist. I plan to live forever as a brain in a small vat of artificial cerebrospinal fluid connected by electrodes to the controls of a tiny interstellar space ship.

I also had one as a kid, and I agree: it was next to impossible to get the things to go straight with those claws sticking out. However, I also had an RC truck in which the wheels were telescoping cylinders with relatively thick rubber-ish strips attached at both ends. Fully extended the strips were flat, but you could flip a switch (or something) and it would retract, making the strips bow outward, significantly increasing (maybe doubling) the effective diameter. Parentheticals because it was a long time ago.

So I agree with OP that we could already do something like this, but when we're talking about space exploration, it's always worth looking at alternatives that may have different power requirements, mechanical complexity, etc. than the current options.