How about killing two birds with one stone? Stand the zombies in a circle, and fire the rounds at them. Count the number of dead zombies. Now you've got an approximation for Pi AND a bunch of dead zombies. Win-win.

Of course I meant ubiquitous global communications. I will spend time in the morning talking with a co-worker in India, during the day I may attend an on-line meeting being held in Arizona, then the evenings chatting with a friend in New Zealand, and not think twice about where any of them are, other than to make sure I'm not calling them at an inopportune time. This kind of communication (and at no incremental cost!) has been around only for the last decade or so.

There will still be plenty of room for more research; and some will be revolutionary. We are just seeing the tip of some really cool advancements in fields as diverse as biotech, farming, and AI. The patent office is a long way from closing their doors.

Singapore, or as William Gibson put it: Disneyland with the death penalty.

Yes, because the U.N. is known for shoddy science.

The data files include the source of the figures, generally reported by the WHO instead of the national police in those countries where the official figures may be suspect. If there are official complaints about the figures, they'll likely come from the ambassador of Bananazuela who will claim that the figures for his tourist-friendly country are too high.

What happened was the advent of computing, which made solutions to unattainably hard problems attainable. That was rapidly followed by the advent of global communications, allowing people to collaborate like never before. Cheap energy has turned the average person's daily tasks of searching for food and warmth into a side task, allowing more people than ever to get a high quality education, and enter a research field. All kinds of work has gone into discovery at an unprecedented rate.

We don't know for sure what the next advance will be, but it will be built on a lot of the new tools we've just created.

This flaw, plus heartbleed, makes it sound like all the conspiracy theorists got together for a secret cabal to convince the world that the NSA really is out to get everyone.

"Double 'no', got it!
</ZappBrannigan>

My windshield washer fluid tank ran dry, so I quickly learned to not drive in the rain. Oh, wait, no, I did something about it.

I clean my rear view lens every time I fill the tank, and every time I walk past the back of the car and notice it's dirty. It takes about three seconds to give it a swipe of the thumb; if you're planning ahead and are afraid of dirt, you could pocket a tissue before you head out to your car.

That's a concept that once went by the name "lebensraum". The "good old days" generally failed to deliver that which most of us would consider "good", except from the point of view of the select beneficiaries.

When we can easily get off this rock and start acquiring real estate elsewhere in the galaxy, it'll be a great solution. Until then, it's only a recipe for war.

Well, it's still murky waters if random-pilot-of-the-day does it wrong...

Your first sentence makes a certain amount of sense, but your second sentence indicates a lack of appreciation for dependencies.

Most people look at the cost of a system as the price of the servers, the price of the software, the cost of the project to implement them, and the ongoing maintenance contracts. What they often don't consider or fully understand is the impact to people and process. Changing a system means retraining the people who use the current process; changing paper forms, supplies, expectations, timings. There may be things like quality assurance steps built into the current process that the system builder is completely unaware of, such as "between filling out form 37-stroke-B and submitting form 52-mark-K, we have the testing team pull out a sample for evaluation."

If SAP is progress, that can only mean that the prior process was done by filling out forms in Klingon using wax crayons writing on saran wrap in an iron foundry.

Whatever it may have started, a love of neckties was not it.

I award you one Internets for that joke!

Are you afraid of the whole "shoot out a window and Hollywood makes it seem as if the plane will empty itself via the hole" scenario? Mythbusters tested it. No, the plane doesn't explosively decompress, the passengers don't get sucked out the window. Basically, the results are "it's loud". Much more of a problem is that everyone's panicking and screaming because someone is shooting a gun.

Acupuncture can cause harm. It can make you go blind. If you put the needles in your retinas...