Perhaps he is colour-blind, or suffering from the Faraday effects of his aluminium hat.

I recently moved from a house on a one-way street that adjoined a very busy intersection, to a different house a couple of blocks away on the same one-way street.

Before, it was maddening: There was a constant roar of revving engines, worse in the summer with barely-mobile Harley riders gunning the engine just to keep it running, but also year-round coverage from loud ricers, heavy trucks, and straight-piped diesel pickups.

Now that I'm a couple of blocks away from that intersection, and not particularly near a stop sign or a traffic light, it's much, much quieter...not so much because there is less traffic (there is plenty), but because that traffic is not actively accelerating.

So, you're right. But you're also wrong.

The noise I hear, now, is almost always just tire noise. The speed limit is 25MPH (which people tend to think of as 30MPH in this locality) and folks tend to be actively decelerating for the railroad crossing just past my house, and yet I can plainly hear the cars approaching from hundreds of feet away.

Even a Tesla, of which there is one in the neighborhood that I see out and about semi-regularly.

So yes, drivetrain noise can be significant, but even in residential areas where people aren't accelerating, tire noise alone can be very substantial...and certainly substantial enough for a middle-aged person of average or below-average hearing to hear what's coming.

Parking lots? I've been damn near run down by a distracted, low-speed Prius driver before. I might be OK with some form of artificial noise -outside- the vehicle, as I understand (but have not witnessed) is done with the Nissan Leaf.

(I've also lived next to a busy Interstate, which was also very noisy place dominated by rubber tires on asphalt, and also on a goes-nowhere country road whereupon most drivers had a destination on that road and that was also largely tire noise. I realize these extra data points add nothing to this particular discussion of residential speeds, but perhaps lends some credence to my perceptive experience.)

Solar sail can achieve 25% light speed, according to NASA, and Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away.

You want a manned mission (with robots doing all the actual work) to determine if the conventional wisdom that a manned mission to the outer planets is physically impossible is correct. Even if the pilot dies, you learn the furthest a manned mission can reach. There's seven billion people, you can afford to expend one or two. Ideally, they'd be volunteers and there'll be no shortage of them, but if you're concerned about valuable life, send members of the Tea Party.

And yet somehow we survived with these 10,000 people with connections to subversive organizations roaming freely in our midst. Amazing.

Dear ALL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES: *THIS* is why we don't want you to have infinite surveillance. Because those 10,000 people you had files on did EXACTLY NOTHING. You want to wiretap someone, go get some ACTUAL FUCKING EVIDENCE. Not just "he read this book and knows this guy and likes to encrypt his files."

More importantly, Microsoft seems hell bent on discarding the years of research IBM put into the Common User Access guide on which Windows was originally based. A lot of the "new" metaphors *were* tried out during that research, and users hated it as much back then as they do now.

No big surprise. The military are willing to invest what it takes for what they need. Military entities are, by necessity, pitifully naive when it comes to anything useful, but once they specify what they think they want, they don't shirk at the cost, they get the job done. A pointless job, perhaps, but nonetheless a completed job.

The corporate sector wants money. Things don't ever have to get done, the interest on monies paid is good enough and there hasn't been meaningful competition in living memory. Because one size never fits all, it's not clear competition is even what you want. Economic theory says it isn't.

The only other sector, as I have said many times before, that is remotely in the space race is the hobbyist/open source community. In other words, the background behind virtually all the X-Prize contestants, the background behind the modern waverider era, the background that the next generation of space enthusiasts will come from (Kerbel Space Program and Elite: Dangerous will have a similar effect on the next generation of scientists and engineers as Star Trek the old series and Doctor Who did in the 1960s, except this time it's hands-on).

I never thought the private sector would do bugger all, it's not in their blood. They're incapable of innovation on this kind of scale. It's not clear they're capable of innovation at all, all the major progress is bought or stolen from researchers and inventors.

No, with civilian government essentially walking away, there's only two players in the field and whilst the hobbyists might be able to crowdsource a launch technology, it'll be a long time before they get to space themselves. The military won't get there at all, nobody to fight, so the hobbyists will still be first with manned space missions, but it's going to take 40-50 years at best.

We have the technology today to get a manned mission to Alpha Centauri and back. It would take 15-20 years for the journey and the probability of survival is poor, but we could do it. By my calculations, it would take 12 years to build the components and assemble them in space. Only a little longer than it took for America to get the means to go to the moon and back. We could actually have hand-held camera photos taken in another solar system and chunks of rocky debris from the asteroid belt there back on Earth before Mars One launches its first rocket AND before crowdfunded space missions break the atmosphere.

All it takes is putting personal egos and right wing politics on the shelf, locking the cupboard and then lowering it into an abandoned mineshaft, which should then be sealed with concrete.

Everywhere I worked in those days, there was Win98 on desktops throughout the corporations. Only the engineers and developers ran NT anywhere I worked.

Of course we're talking a period where "networking" meant file and printer sharing and nothing more.

Stop setting up cash-cow speed traps. :P

OTOH, air pressure at sea level is a variable which can change significantly in even a short period of time. Still, dramatic changes don't happen, but it's better to measure it in .... sorry, I should be metric, but I only think in PSI (pounds / square inch).

Well....sort of. The CMB is modified by galaxies that are too faint to see, though I don't know by how much. It's filtered by intervening dust clouds moving WRT both us and the "origin of the signals". Etc. I normally assume that this is taken account of as best we can, but it's not unmodified signal. If you look at the raw (uncorrected) observations, I don't know how much noise is present, but clearly that are signals too weak to be recognized even though detected.

OTOH, I am not a cosmologist. But I do recognize that error bars are important, and that they tend to get left out of popular articles.

Nonsense. The cat does not hate the mouse, the cat LOVES the mouse. It's delicious.

Yes. There are numerous reasons to "not fight city hall". But that doesn't mean you can't do it for a good enough reason. E.g., I use tab spacing at the start of Python lines. This causes formatting problems if I use idle, but to me its worth the cost. And I've occasionally had reasons to use a length terminated string in C...though I usually also zero terminate it. (IIRC the reason was that I needed to include 0 valued bytes in the string.)

Similarly you can use zero delimited strings in Pascal, but you need to write the support routines that you would need, and since current Pascal has a string type that isn't limited to 255 chars it they would appear to be rarely needed.

No.
Python is an open source project. Ruby is an open source project. Squeak is an open source project. D is an open source project. Racket (scheme) is an open source project. ALL have decent language documentation. And that was just a list off the top of my head. Being an open source project is not an excuse for lousy documentation.

But... but... but... open!