The death penalty solely exists because people want a "just" excuse to kill people. And to tell themselves, that it is justified, they dehumanize the to-be-killed as much as possible.

I actually never listen to music in my car at all, except the radioprogramming is sending some. But I don't listen to music stations. So MP3s are a non-option for me. (In some way, I am a-music at all, as I don't listen to music in general). My preferred radio stations for long drives are news/information broadcasters, but when I was in the U.S., they seem to be missing in general, at least in the regions I was driving around.

If you plot the personal wealth curve of people who "made it big", it does not differ from the personal wealth curve of people who won the lottery. For nearly all of them, there is a big jump somewhere during their life, and before and after that, it's no different than for anyone else in the same wealth range.

The Mercury probes were never called Voyager before, so why start now?

The first space probe to pass Mercury was Mariner 10. Mariner 11 and Mariner 12 were supposed to fly to Jupiter and Saturn, but they were renamed to Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

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.