Even so, you'd expect the proportion by any random factor X to be the same as in the general population.

This includes all immigration. I was specifically talking about skilled immigration.

You can't be sure, but you can give them a significant head start in form of a good education and a solid starting capital, which helps a great deal. Ultimately, it's a lot like stock market investments... you can go for low-risk and low-yield, or you can go for high-risk and high-yield. Both are viable strategies.

(And, of course, you can always go high-risk for yourself, cash in on that if your bet pays, then move to some other place to spend that money. And getting a citizenship in a first-world country makes it much easier - it's easy for an American citizen to move to e.g. Canada.)

In any case, yes, there are many choices, and people do choose differently. I and many of my friends picked US for all the reasons that I've described; I lived in Canada, as well. I have friends who have settled in Canada, and other friends who had Canadian permanent residence, but moved to US when they won the green card lottery. I also have some in Australia.

Bottom line is, to answer your original question: US is still a very popular destination for skilled immigration, enough so that it can certainly get more people coming in if it makes the process easier to avoid being out-competed by Canada and others.

That's an interesting take on the idea. There may be, almost certainly is an "optimal" point of view where the balance of future carrying cost, productive potential, experience and future work expectancy.

If you value experience the highest, then older people are the most valuable. Children have highest carrying cost, least experience, but the highest adaptability and future earning potential.

Now you could take a *market* approach to valuing lives by holding an auction to see how much people will contribute to save a life. In that case I have no doubt that children would win hands down. In a sense we do this already; charities which rescue children have a distinct advantage over those that target adults or the elderly.

Something I wonder: what's the real role of the Air Force? It has a valid strategic role, but its other roles on the battlefield look like they should be subordinate to the Army. The Navy has its own air forces, and that seems to work well.

Why do people think FTL allows for backwards time travel? It's called Special Relativity, and is much more convincing than people's general ideas. p> Suppose you're in a spaceship traveling at a speed relative to another spaceship such that time dilation is 2, meaning that for each of you time appears to pass at half speed for the other one. When you meet, you exchange ansible (instantaneous communicator) settings. An hour after, you put your coffee cup on the edge of the console, and it falls and breaks. You send a message to the other guy. You observe him getting it when, from his point of view, it's half an hour after meeting. He relays the message back, and observes you getting it when you are fifteen minutes from the meeting, and the message has therefore returned forty-five minutes before you sent it.

In order to argue with this, you need to at least understand it. You need to understand that "forward" and "back" are not determinate with any FTL phenomenon. (There is an objective forward and back as long as things stay under the speed of light. FTL is "sideways", using this classification, and has no "forward" or "back".)

Dark matter, as observed, seems to hang around galaxies. This suggests that it travels fairly slowly, and can't normally easily escape a galactic gravitational well, suggesting that it isn't tachyons.

That's one idea, sure, but whenever we start talking about modern physics I really distrust "it makes more sense". There's plenty in modern physics that doesn't actually make sense that I can see.

Got any evidence for monotonic time? There are legitimate scientific theories that mean some forms of time travel are consistent with the laws of physics as we understand them.

Special relativity (a very well-tested theory) also shows that faster-than-light travel or information transfer allows travel or information transfer back in time. (The converse is obviously true: if you take five years to go to Alpha Centauri, and then go back four years, you've traveled FTL.)

Lots of people are rather attached to the idea of one-way time and having non-paradoxical causality, which means they don't want it to be possible to send information faster than light.

The wording in TFS implies that adults don't matter at all. If it had said something like "5 crew and 116 passengers, including sixteen children and a baby", that'd be cool. It would acknowledge all lives lost, with some additional description for human interest.

I haven't looked at news reports, so I don't know if TFS is unusually egregious here (not unusual for /., really).

Mourning? I think the situation works out that as M approaches N, the amount of partying increases, and if M happens to equal N then a national holiday is created.

Not really. Ever since flat LiPo packs became the norm, I haven't seen a huge decline in performance over time. Long gone are the days when a two-year-old battery got half the life of a new one.

However, with current hardware, battery life varies wildly, depending on whether you're actually doing something of consequence with your laptop or merely using its screen to show a picture. The people who sit there running basic apps like Word, PowerPoint, Safari/Firefox/Chrome (with Flash disabled), etc. are likely to get very close to the rated battery life, because for all intents and purposes, their laptops are just sitting there idling with the screen lit for 99% of that time, with all but one CPU core powered down completely. By contrast, people who are actually using the CPU—compiling, running Photoshop, running Lightroom, using audio, etc.—burn through the battery in a fraction of the rated time.

I actually dug out my old Model M last year. Aside from the fact that the rubber.insulation had flaked off the keyboard cord, it still worked perfectly. And it was every bit as good as I remembered it being for typing, and if I replace the cord it will last forever.

There's only one problem with the thing: it's so damn loud. Every damn keypress is accompanied by a loud "POK!" Forget about annoying other people, *I* was annoyed. Years of typing on pretty good Thinkpad "scissor switch" keyboards had accustomed me to a low, pleasant sussuration.

Cherry makes a "brown" switch that is not quite as loud as the classic buckling spring. I have a cheap nixeus keyboard that uses "brown" knock-offs. They're pretty good and not so loud as to be annoying. I wouldn't use this keyboard in public, at a Starbucks or in the library, but it's fine in my home office.

Apple got a lot of bad press a few years ago for massively overestimating their battery life and is now quite a bit more conservative. They've gone from claiming 6 hours to claiming 8, but at the same time they've shipped lower power CPUs and doubled the size of the battery. There was a Kickstarter for an open source compatible laptop with very similar specs to the MBP floating around last week: they were also claiming 8 hours on battery, but they were shipping a battery half the size of the MBP. I guess they think Linux users keep the screen turned off.

Yes, all of those things can help. Of course, if you're running builds in Xcode or similar, you'll still be lucky to get three hours from that eight-hour battery. And if you're using musical notation software like Finale (which keeps the audio hardware "hot" continuously), you'll be lucky to get four. Lightroom? Photoshop? Same deal.

The problem is, what I want in a laptop is to be able to use it all day without running out of battery, and by "use", I actually mean use, not sit around and browse the web.

IMO, Apple still needs to get serious about battery life, which can only be achieved by putting in a much higher-capacity battery. If they offered one model of MacBook Pro 15" Retina in the old (pre-retina) case (but sans optical drive), they could stick in a battery that would truly last an entire day under actual use.

Unless you're complaining that gasoline stations are a commercial infrastructure, in which case I interpreted that bit to mean electrical infrastructure.