The Atacama Desert is definitely at least partly tropical, starting at 18 degrees south. So is the Sahara, whose southern boundary is around 15 degrees north. The Namib extends to the 18 th degree south, it is also at least partly tropical. The only desert that is not in the Tropcis is the Chihuahua desert, but it is at least close to a tropical sea, the Gulf of Mexico.

Actually, yes. At least here the salt for deicing roads is mainly sodium chloride.

This probably explains, why some driest places on Earth are close to tropical oceans, right? The Atacama Desert, the Chihuahua Desert, the Namib Desert or the Sahara.

No, Darwin and Wallace called something else artificial selection: If you set a goal of what you expect from the offspring and then choose the parents accordingly, you are doing selective breeding.

Natural selection is what happens if there is no special breeding goal.

Running away from a cop carries the death penalty?

Please, please show me the law that says so.

We see the reverse in Europe. Here, POTS is a shared resource too, but competition started only when the sole access of the single provider was lifted, and each cable operator has to allow competitors at equal conditions on his cables.

I live in a rural village of about 2,000 inhabitants, and I have 30/6 mbit/sec DSL at around 30 €/month. In fact I guess that most "cable companies" are running DSL to your home and then send the TV signals within the DSL. I know that most phone companies do. If you order a T1 or E1 with them, you get a DSL modem with a T1/E1 port.

Where I lived as a child you could tell from the shape of the cover what it was for. Access to electrical installations for instance was rectangular.

If I knew that the hiring manager knew that the question applies only to round manhole covers, I would ask him, why he asks a question that contains its answer. There are rectangular and quadratic, there are triangulic and round manhole covers. And the round ones are round, because otherwise they wouldn't be round manhole covers.

I would rather disagree. I remember an interview with one of the leading physicists of CERN before the LHC was started, and he said that in some way he hopes that the Standard Model would prove to be incomplete and the Hiiggs Boson either doesn't exists or has different properties than the Standard Model predicts, because it would open a lot of new research into alternative hypotheses around a potential Grand Unified Theory.

So the results are disappointing in a way, as the most boring of all alternative explanations seems to be true.

Don't mess up nuclear fusion (Hydrogenium into Helium) with nuclear fission (Uranium or Plutonium into smaller cores).

Human drivers have even more bugs, so you were saying?

Yes, the autonomous cars will have bugs, and there will be situations where they just crash in a literal sense. But so do humans, and they do it fairly often. An autonomous car will not be drunk driving, and it will be not getting an heart attack at 65 mph, and it will not be distracted by that phone call or the children on the backseat getting into an infight.

You can still buy a car if you want to own one. Just most of the advantages disappear, while the disadvantages stay. And if your commute counts to your work time, then you leave your house at 9 and return at 5 instead of leaving 7:30 and returning at 6:30, because you could do that phone conference and your email stack in the car, and you write your reports on your way home.

And yes, owning a car will become some hobby. It's not quaint not to have a car even now. A friend of mine made a point of not owning one because he always rented one if the need arised. Thus he always had a clean, well maintained car, better than most of us car owners. If autonomous cars become the norm, renting a car if you need one will be even more convenient, because you don't need to go to the rental car park anymore, you just wait until it arrives at your front door.

I am not quite sure about that. There have been spoofs of ST:TNG, where the makers dubbed the episodes with new lines, and some of them actually changed the character of a role completely. In German, there is the "Sinnlos im Weltraum" (Meaningless/Clueless in Space) series of spoofs, where the same scenes in which Patrick Stewards appears as a sincere, deep thinker with the original lines becomes an aggressive alcoholic - just by changing the lines. (For reference: Schwarzer Kaffee, only suitable for people with a profound knowledge of the German language.)

If you had any education in the humanities you would have known that there never was a "mathematics before engineering".

Instead, Mathematics and Engineering were the same until about the end of the 18th century, and then began to split because of the huge body of knowledge which made specialisation a necessity. But the greatest mathematicians of the 18th century were engineers and mechanics at the same time. Most of the french mathematicians of the time were soldiers studying such topics like artillery trajectories and the construction of fortifications. Isaac Newton build most of his instruments himself, including the lenses for his optical experiments. And it was the observation of the polishing of lenses that got him to the theory of the corpuscular nature of Light.

Actually no. Money is only worth what you can buy for. The work, the good or the service Grandpa wants to pay for has to be done right now for today's prices. And while people working today also get today's payment, Grandpa has no negotation lever on today's pricing. He earned his money in former times at former prices, and now he is retired. If the older generation which doesn't work anymore has too much money, we the working generation will (free market to the win!) just increase prices until the purchasing power of the older generation fits again the amount of work we want to spend on them. If there is too much money on the market, we always can have an inflation until purchasing power and goods creation are in balance again. Working people can deal with it thanks to increasing wages in an inflation. Retired people can't. Their retirement funds compete against the retirement funds of all the other retired people, but the share of goods and services they compete on is defined by the people still working.

Interests, payouts for 401k, house prices and all those money sources non-working people may have access to are only possible because people today are creating the surplus value which can be paid out as interests, as profits on shares or be spend on ever increasing house prices. Every retirement scheme where one stops working and still has access to goods and services is in a way a Ponzi scheme because someone else is creating the actual value the retired one is using up.