Sure, but dolphins and whales live in family groups as well, it's not just our social abilities that made humans as successful as they are. Fire and agriculture were the two big paradigm shifts that made us what we are today.

I doubt Heinlein put an apostrophe in tractors.

In many places in the USA, it works exactly like that, which is why the price of power is going negative overnight. In fact, the exact same thing is happening in Germany, why doesn't your magic spot market fix that?

Transport excess capacity to where? If there isn't a demand, there is nowhere you can send your supply. In the middle of the night, demand is low everywhere. If the coal and nuclear plants that run at a constant output plus the power supplied by the wind is greater than the demand then spot prices will drop to negative. Shipping your power to another locality with negative prices or even slightly positive prices doesn't help economically. If the European model obviates the need for storage, why does this list have so many European projects on it?

Bender the Offender: Hmm, there's no point in working if they take all my earnings, I think I'll just go on the dole.

Taxes will end up paying for the crime no matter if it is jail or fines.

That's not necessarily true. When lithium batteries are charged at a low temperature, lithium metal plates the anode. This could certainly be a problem for electric cars, as they may not be in a warm garage as they are charging.

I say fuck beta all the time and have an anti-beta sig and I seem to get mod points at the same rate. You only get 15 if you are at max karma (which is +50 IIRC). You can't gain any points but you can lose points so if you get any downmods you will only get 5 points until you are at 50 again.

Of course an ADK requires that you trust the entity that holds the ADK. In the GP post, he lamented that when people left the company they took their keys with them. If it is company mail produced on company time I don't see the problem with the company holding a key to decrypt it. With PGP, you can also split the ADK into multiple parts so that you would need several people at the company agree to decrypt anything. That way a single employee cannot arbitrarily use the ADK. Of course, if they are using Symantec's key server they can just configure it to keep copies of a user's key or handle all the encryption/decryption on the server itself.

Which is why they are building a new canal in Panama that will handle the large container ships and supertankers. This project has been underway for some time.

He should be happy that he is getting that much, in my state the power company only pays $0.03/kwh

Have you ever considered using heat tape along the eaves rather than the roof rake? That's how many people deal with ice dams.

The Daily Fail readers will be annoyed with anything that the paper tells them is annoying. If they claim that aliens are lurking in alleyways and eating cats, that is what that demographic will be annoyed with. Their readership is so gullible and stupid that they will believe anything as long as the article has as many pictures as it has words.

Somehow it doesn't console me that future generations will be laughing at us,

You mean the observations Eddington took in 1919 confirming light bending in accordance with predictions by general relativity didn't take place? From the Wikipedia entry:

"Eddington's observations published the next year[5] confirmed Einstein's theory, and were hailed at the time as a conclusive proof of general relativity over the Newtonian model."

Also, relativity made a number of testable predictions. From the wiki page on the theory of relativity:

"The predictions of special relativity have been confirmed in numerous tests since Einstein published his paper in 1905, but three experiments conducted between 1881 and 1938 were critical to its validation. These are the Michelson–Morley experiment, the Kennedy–Thorndike experiment, and the Ives–Stilwell experiment. Einstein derived the Lorentz transformations from first principles in 1905, but these three experiments allow the transformations to be induced from experimental evidence."

Obviously the testing of the theory still continues as we gather more data from around the universe, but to say there wasn't firm experimental evidence until the 1970s isn't correct.

Until string theory makes some testable predictions it's just mathematical and philosophical wanking.

But if it is a US court, they will just rule that they have jurisdiction over servers in other countries.

Not necessarily adrenaline levels, but that may have been the way it worked out. All they bred for was aggression, the more aggressive foxes were not allowed to breed. This resulted in a tamer fox, but also a lot of other traits that we associate with dogs (juvenilization, coloration patterns, vocalization, etc). Just selecting for one thing can have a profound effect on the species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...