And how exactly do you propose to lock a dish onto a single satellite when they're moving around like that? Or is the idea to have enough of them out there that you don't need to lock onto a single bird, just have one in range?

Either way, it sounds expensive. Launching 7000 satellites isn't cheap, plus you have to have them reboosted constantly (500 mi is not a very high orbit, though it's better than the ISS) somehow. Unless they think they're going to get a ton of subscribers (and their system will actually be able to handle them all), it's not going to be economically feasible. Remember, they tried almost exactly this not that long ago with the Iridium satellite-phone system. It was a complete failure, and while it's still in use, the company that built and launched the satellites went out of business and it all had to be sold to another company for pennies on the dollar; they kept it going because their start-up costs were so low and they didn't have much of an investment to recoup. That doesn't sound like a good business plan to me. The only commercial satellite services that have been successful have been ones using GEO satellites, like DirecTV, since you can just launch one or two satellites and get coverage of the whole USA and not have to worry about boosting or replacing it frequently. GPS has been successful, but it wasn't commercial at all (the government does it for military purposes; we're just all benefiting from it), and even it only has a few dozen satellites.

We already have satellite internet. Go to hughesnet.com and check it out for yourself.

The problem with it is that the ping times are terrible. There's nothing that can be done about that unless you figure out how to communicate faster-than-light, because radio waves take a certain amount of time to travel to a geosynchronous satellite and back. You could stick satellites in lower orbits, but then they won't stay there long without boosting, and more importantly, you can't fix a satellite dish on them because they're constantly moving across the sky, just like the ISS does. Only GEO orbits allow you to fix a dish on a satellite and not need to move it.

How did he violate his oath? He was supposed to uphold the US Constitution, is he not? His state's anti-gay law was unconstitutional, so he had every right to refuse to enforce it.

If his state passed a law banning Catholicism, do you think he should be bound to enforce that one too, even though it's obviously and clearly in violation of the First Amendment?

Yeah, but aren't the search engine ads also less obtrusive, like usually on the side where they're obvious that they're ads? That makes them easy to ignore (and doubly so, since they aren't graphical with flashing colors and shit like that which draws your eye to it).

I'm not saying they're perfect by any means, but compared to most advertising these days, it's a giant step up IMO.

Cities will go completely bankrupt before they even think of reining in their police.

I seem to remember that plane literally leaking fuel when it was on the ground.

Probably not much, however, who wants to live someplace where they have to hear the boom of a massive lightning storm day in and day out? Thunderstorms are noisy, it's true, but for most people they're a fairly rare event.

Hahaha, that's like the opposite of that patent office guy circa 1900 who said that everything that could be invented had already been invented.

Some of the hysteria is probably because a very low-altitude plane flying supersonic can probably break windows, so people are worried about that. Of course, we're talking about higher-altitude planes here, so that isn't really justified.

The other worry is probably the frequency of the booms. One boom a month isn't a big deal, but what if they decide to make a frequent flight path over your house in the suburbs or in the country? Now you've got sonic booms every day, throughout the day. No one wants that.

They don't occur often over the continental USA because they're illegal (except for military planes), and these days because there's no supersonic passenger planes left. The Concorde was the only one, and it was limited to trans-Atlantic routes over water because of the restriction on sonic booms. I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be worried about something that isn't a problem now because of legality and current technological state; these things can and do change. Texting-and-driving 20 years ago wasn't a problem either, but now it is; it would have been helpful if someone had worried about it a little more. Drunken driving wasn't a problem 120 years ago, but again maybe someone should have worried about it and done something before it turned into a big societal problem.

Personally, I don't even see why supersonic travel should exist for passengers. It uses insane amounts of fuel, and even if that problem is fixed, it's unlikely it'll ever be as fuel-efficient as subsonic flight. No one really needs to get around that fast. If you don't like 14-hour flights over the Pacific, then don't do them; stay at home instead, or choose a closer vacation destination. Maybe eventually we'll avoid this problem altogether with some kind of sub-orbital vehicle which is both fast and fuel-efficient, but I'm not holding my breath.

It's probably muscle memory. I do something similar: many times when I try to type "ratio" I'll add an extra 'n' for "ration", which I of course then need to backspace over. And of course, auto spell checkers think it's just fine since it's still a valid word.

This is why I actually don't have a problem with Google's text ads. You do a search on some terms, and alongside your search results you also get some ads based on those terms. This can be really helpful if you're looking for a product to solve a problem you have, and the ad shows you something which is exactly what you're looking for. I guess this is called "targeted advertisement".

The mass-spam advertisement is the stuff that sucks, because I have to see it even when I'm not looking to buy something, and it can be for anything, not something that I specifically need.

No thanks to Adblock Plus. That thing is a giant resource hog.

I've switched to uBlock now; it's much better than ABP ever was.

You'll get lousy performance since the translated code isn't written specifically for the new CPU. The whole reason for writing in assembly is to optimize the code for the CPU hardware.

No, with assembly you have to rewrite everything for the new architecture, because it's so different. x86 assembly does not resemble ARM assembly at all.

When the OS is written in C, you don't have this problem. Just look at the Linux kernel. Only small bits of it are in assembly, which of course are CPU- and arch-specific, but the rest is fully portable. Obviously, this means not making any assumptions along the way, like that your CPU is only 32 bits, but this isn't that hard to do. Recompiling the Linux kernel for an all-new CPU is not hard, you just have to change the arch-specific low-level things and you're done; all the scheduler, device driver, etc. code stays the same.

there haven't been major advances in OS X or Windows for over a decade.

That's because the field has become mature, and there's little improvement to be made. For kernel-level and system-level stuff, all these concepts were mostly invented ages ago. Even the UI stuff was pretty stable by the early 2000s. So now some groups are trying to reinvent the wheel with all-new UI paradigms, as seen with Gnome3 and Windows' Metro UI, usually by trying to tie mobile and desktop UIs together, and the results have been horrifically bad.

Maturity is something we see in most technological fields: there's a whole lot of innovation early on, then people settle on one or two standard ways of doing things, then they stick with that for a long time, only making very small incremental improvements. Just look at aviation: they invented all kinds of weird-looking aircraft in the first few decades there, but what changes have there been to aircraft in the last 40 years or so? It's all been in the electronics, navigation, etc., not in the aerodynamics. Airplanes look almost exactly like they did 50 years ago, but with some relatively minor optimizations. Same goes for, say, laundry machines. A modern washing machine isn't much different from one 40 years ago, but now it has electronics which allow it to be more efficient with water and power and do a better job washing, but the overall design is pretty much the same, with two basic designs: a vertical-axis tub with an agitator, or a horizontal-axis tub (originally much more popular in Europe, but has gained popularity in the US in the past 15 years).