Because despite recent bad press, they are interested in security.

Your post makes various other points that sound reasonable to me, but I have to call out the above line from a couple of angles:

1) using the phrase "bad press" implies a virtuous subject that has been distorted by a reporting industry with a non-virtuous agenda. NOTHING OF THE SORT has happened to poor lil' NSA here... they FUCKED us, straight up, and got caught red-handed.

2) Whatever the extent to which the NSA is "interested in security", it might as well be the extent to which a wolf is interested in "keeping chickens alive"... yes the wolf wants a food supply, but that doesn't make the wolf a proponent of livestock. The NSA is all about surveillance at this point; their putting on the badge of promoting security is a means to an end. I won't rehash the extensive list of public standards they secretly compromised to that end; it speaks for itself.

Again, I think much of what you wrote makes sense, but in this particular line you stray notably too far into something approaching neutrality about the NSA. They are bad people with a bad agenda, and they'll fuck YOU the first chance they get.

Does the semi-autonomous (or future, 100% autonomous) car pull over?

I *knew* I recognized that shade of pink!

That's great that you believe your own bullshit as well. Imagine you build two power plants, one nuclear and one that's a solar farm and they both cost $1bn. Which of those plants over its lifespan is going to have a higher cost? How much security is your solar farm going to need? The bigger question is... in 20 or 30 years when the nuclear power plant has reached it's effective lifespan, how much is it going to cost to decommission that plant? Vermont Yankee which Entergy said they'd be closing on 2014, they're talking about it costing more than a billion to decommission it. Even those costs don't include the long term storage costs of all the spent fuel that'll end up who knows where.

So great, you get your electricity for a couple cents cheaper per kwh now... at what cost later on? Both in environmental and in remediation.

Though ultimately, I see centralized power companies in the same light as I see newspapers. They will evolve or they will die. As the market economics for consumer power change and the TCO for solar combined with better storage options make going off grid more and more feasible, power companies are going to grasp harder and harder onto their dwindling customers, or come up a better model. Those companies who do, will end up eating those who don't.

are the laughing people getting paid?

Obligatory Uncle Ben quote here.. As someone who has access to everything, you need to exercise a certain level of discretion. However, at the same time you need to have some common sense.

It's a simile

Back during the agency model, some eBooks were more expensive than the associated *hardback*. This is obviously absurd. The thing was that if Amazon was paying the publisher the same amount for the eBook as the hardback and was required to mark up the eBook by 43% (so as to give 70% of the gross to the publisher), that was a natural result. Amazon doesn't get a 43% markup on their hardbacks (at least not in the best sellers section).

The problem that small book sellers have isn't that eBooks are priced lower than hardbacks. The problem is that Amazon's markup is so much lower than theirs. Amazon sells books close to the price that small book sellers *pay* (presumably because Amazon buys direct from publishers rather than through third parties like Ingram Micro). Now, for hardbacks and paperbacks, at least the book sellers can offer immediate gratification. But if they are competing with eBooks, they lose that advantage. That's why publishers are trying to make eBooks more expensive than the associated paper books.

This is especially egregious with modern books. The publisher receives a digital copy of the book. They have to do extra work to convert it into a printable form. Yet they act like it is harder to convert their digital copy into one readable by Kindle or an ePub device. And then the book is digitized forever, giving them a steady revenue stream for the ridiculously long copyright period.

The other thing that Scalzi ignores is that publishers can't have legitimate reasons for maintaining the relative prices of paper and digital books. That's illegal. They already lost that case.

Ideally, publishers will realize that they should charge slightly less for a digital copy than a paper copy of a book but pay authors the same either way. That will cover their lower costs on a digital copy (no printing, shipping, or returns costs). The net result should be eBooks that are slightly discounted relative to the paper books sold on the same site.

We don't know what's happening inside the Amazon/Hachette negotiations. There's some evidence that Amazon wasn't previously asking for a digital discount. Their launch price was to pay the same for digital copies as for paper copies. Are they still doing that? Or has Amazon been trying to insist on deeper discounts?

is those countries series of tubes, and install valves on them and charge for the flow.

In other words, they could put a toll on the internet superhighway, so that each time a big truck enters that country, there's a price to be paid.

If I had written the bill, I would have named it "USA #1 Freedom Bald Eagle Star Spangled Flag Waving Democracy Rah Rah Rah Act"

There is a huge difference between "limited by physical laws to the best of humankind's understanding of them" and "limited by policy". Your implication that Verizon has been portraying "unlimited" to mean "any amount of data in any arbitrarily small amount of time regardless of physics" is utter drivel... bullshit of the most asinine form.

I hope they eventually come out with a model they dub "Kwijibo", thereby validating Bart's scrabble gambit.

If wiki is to believed this system will be able to launch heavier payloads to LEO then the Falcon 9 Heavy. However, SpaceX is currently building a reliable track record with the Falcon9. If the Merlin 2 engine concepts were to come to fruition and the Falcon XX was to become a real launch vehicle, Space X would have a system that would completely eclipse the SLS. The original posters argument is incoherent. There's no "deep space." Once in orbit you either have the capacity to increase your velocity to raise your orbit or escape orbit or you don't.

following the convention for naming stars that are not dense enough to ignite "brown dwarfs", we could name these new, less dense, singularities... "brown holes".

when everyone is on the list.

The probable good news is that, given the incredible computing power at play, this should not take a very long time, since the reasonable suspicion criterion make it easy to add names.