http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/kepler-22b/ At 1% of the speed of light (which is still probably technically impossible) it would take 6000 years. People would have to "sleep" (cryogenics?) to reach it. The craft would be massive, containing thousands of individuals. It would accelerate constantly to the halfway point then decelerate constantly from there; that would be a challenge in and of itself. Lots of interesting stuff that you could just make up from there. :)

Cheers! =) My students are lots of fun also, so it's win-win.

I don't think that you need to go out and hire experts in all fields in order to fill out your staff pool. But putting an education student in the motivation and health section was stupid. I didn't mention it above, but it was similarly stupid putting a nursing student into the biographies section (she didn't read those books either, but spent her break times going through the relationships shelf in my section, which apparently escaped the notice of my PHB's). Their HR approach was to put people into areas according to moment to moment need, and then leave them there. When I was hired, there were two spots open in health & motivation, so that was where I was allocated and where I stayed. It's an approach to HR that's better suited to places like Walmart and McDonald's, and it's lazy.

This is one of the reasons why chain bookstores are dying.

Doesn't surprise me. I worked for a chain bookstore (not Borders) when I was at uni, and they put me in the Motivation and Health section. By the way, let me introduce myself, I'm a teacher who specialises in working with gifted kids, and one of the things that I'm really good at is picking good, relatively advanced books for young kids who are beyond the books that their librarians and teachers use for other children. I read a lot of kids and YA fiction, and textbooks and educational texts, of course, but also scifi, fantasy and historical fiction, as well as non-fiction books in a number of areas. Notice something missing? I don't fucking read Motivation or Health! I can't even take those fucking books seriously, let alone sell them!

This wouldn't have been a problem, if it weren't for the rigidity of the PHB's that ran the place. My role was to stand by a shelf, and only help people who needed help with that section. One of my colleagues' spot was to stand by the self-service information computer behind a shelf, and almost literally jump out at people if they were having trouble with the search functionality (which only googled the bookstore's public website). As much as possible, I wasn't to move, and I had to do things as quickly as possible. One day, I spent 20 minutes upselling ~$150 worth of photo books and Australian kids' books to a tourist and I got a formal warning for walking away from my section and leaving it in the hands of two of my colleagues.

Let's talk about my colleagues, though. There was a guy hired at the same time as me who I was speaking to one day... Me: "So, what books do you read?"; Him: "Oh, I don't."; Me: "You don't... Read books?"; Him: "Yeah, they're boring." Awesome. He was Employee of the Month at some point after I left. I haven't been back there in a while, but I think he's probably still working there.

Their buying policy was brilliant, also. They bought hundreds of copies of things that they thought fit with the Australian psyche, i.e., obsessed with sport. So we were always left with hundreds of copies of the latest ghost written biography of some cricketer that we could literally not give away in the end. These books were always such an albatross around our necks that our PHB's were insisting that we keep them on the shelves, and sending newer, more popular books to storage or to the warehouse. If you wanted one of those newer more interesting books? You have to wait for it to be retrieved (a couple of days, usually), but please take a heavily discounted the 3rd volume of Warwick Smythe's test cricket antics that he paid someone from South Africa to write.

I shouldn't complain too much though. The 50% employee discount was awesome. Most of the long term employees were great people. Some of the supervisors were genuinely cool people. I laugh as I remember back to thinking back over having to help people "find a book, it has like a blue cover and words, I think", or "choose a motivation book for me, I don't know which one to choose."

These book chains are dying because they're trying to do business as if nothing has changed. They're hiring the cheapest, dumbest possible labour when people are only willing to go to a bookstore and pay a bit more than they would at Amazon because they want to talk to someone knowledgeable and well-read about books.

The guy next door has Rick Astly blasting "on 11" 24/7, thus providing both sleep deprivation and loud music. Can I really prosecute him for TORTURE?

Can you escape the noise by walking away? Or are you confined to your house in some way? Do you have the protection of local planning laws or do you live in some sort of anarchic community?

Pffft.

One of the root causes of the GFC was the short-term-profit-at-all-costs mentality of Banks, particularly US Banks. The toppling of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae et al. were what precipitated the round of guarantees given to banks worldwide to ensure that their banking systems didn't collapse. Governments reasoned that the interconnectedness of the modern worldwide banking systems meant that their banks were exposed. Hence Ireland's guarantee to its banks (and my country, Australia, did the same).

The subprime mortgage collapse was a situation that should not have been allowed to happen in a well regulated economy. Market regulations shuld have been in place to prevent banking institutions from operating with so many problematic debtors on their books. That they were allowed to do so (in amongst the rest of the problems with a deregulated financial system) was the object of the free market movement which puts profit in the short term ahead of long term viability and well ahead of societal benefit.

The public taking on the risks in this regard was a windfall for the financial system and the investors that back it and was still something that the free market movement had been wanting. Was the full costs of the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill borne by BP or by the public? Who profited more out of the Iraq War, Halliburton et al or the public? Who profits from the increased privatisation of every aspect of Western-style national governance, private investors or the public? When infrastructure has to be built in a "Public-Private Partnership" for Electricity generation/transmission or transport who bears the greater risk if it all just doesn't work, the "Private", or the "Public"? On and on, what we see is that free market means being able to excise oneself from responsibility . This is what free market advocates have been calling for since time immemorial; this is what "deregulation" means.